Every year the question is the same. “What should we be for Halloween?”
Every year Nicholas has the answer.
This year’s answer: Expedition 33.
For those not living their best gaming life, Expedition 33 is a gorgeous RPG where a team of misfits sets out on an impossible mission across a painted continent. Nicholas would be Gustave, the expedition leader. Pokin would be Lune, the elegant sharpshooter. And me?
Esquie.
The most powerful being in the world. Can soar through the heavens. Can dive beneath the sea. Beloved by children everywhere. Also, canonically lazy.
I have never felt so seen by a video game character. Except that last part.
Now, Pokin doesn’t do simple. She found actual sewing patterns online with instructions for crafting the Expedition 33 shoulder patches from scratch. We’re talking piping, lining, and real gold leaf patterning. Hand-applied. On black fabric. Like we’re tailors in 18th-century France.
Nicholas had to cut out the intricate designs on the Cricut.
Carefully peeling the transfer. He only swore twice at this point.
Then came the piping. Gold fabric pinned to black, every edge precise.
Then the gold leaf. By hand. Press, peel, pray.
The gold leaf phase. Also known as the ‘why did I agree to this’ phase.
The workspace looked like a craft store exploded in the living room. Sewing machine, spools of metallic thread, gold fragments everywhere. Nicholas was finding gold flakes in his hair for a week.
But the results? Not too shabby at all.
Gustave, Lune, and a K-pop demon hunter. PoOn committed.
The costumes actually looked incredible. The gold leaf shoulder patches, the dark jackets, the whole vibe. Nicholas’s Gustave coat with the purple vest underneath was especially good. Pokin’s Lune outfit with the white ruffled shirt and face markings? She went all in.
And then there was me.
The most powerful being in the world. Obviously.
Custom Expedition 33 headband patch, handmade by Nicholas himself. I looked magnificent.
We hosted the party at Bear Falls Resort, naturally. My bud’s mom flew down from Oregon for it. She came as a flamingo because she loves flamingos. I respect a woman who knows her brand.
The expedition party picks up an unusual recruit.
Outside, Pokin had Nicholas set up this giant inflatable Halloween tree in the yard. It has a screaming face, clawed branches, and glowing orange eyes. It looks like something that would eat you in The Witcher.
I love it.
New yard guardian. He stays up year-round if I have any say in it.
Pokin and PoOn spent days prepping food for the party, because of course they did. Hand-drawn ghost cookies. Cakes that had no business looking that good at a Halloween party. And the highlight: cake pops. Pumpkins, zombies, and mummies, all hand-decorated. The girls baked them, Nicholas helped with the dipping and decorating.
Black Sesame Red Bean Butter Mochi at a Halloween party. Just look at those cakes. Pokin’s food game is unmatched.
Those mummy ones with the googly eyes? Perfect. The zombie ones were green and unsettling in the best way. And the pumpkin ones had little pretzel stems, which is the kind of detail that makes you realize these people take dessert as seriously as I do.
Bruce had been working out of the home office for weeks, and we’d already dragged him to Bryce Canyon and Zion. But we weren’t done with him yet. Nicholas, Pokin, and Bruce loaded up the car and headed west toward the Sierra Nevada.
The destination: Big Pine Lakes, a chain of turquoise glacial lakes tucked into a granite amphitheater beneath Temple Crag. The plan: start early, hike the full loop to all the lakes, come home heroes. The reality: slightly different.
The trail was supposed to be hot, so they started before dawn. Which meant it was actually cold. The kind of cold where you question why you agreed to this while stumbling up a trail in the dark.
Three hikers, zero visibility, maximum commitment.
But then the Sierra did its thing.
First light on the peaks. The valley floor still in shadow. Worth the alarm.
The alpenglow on the high Sierra is something else. The peaks go from gray to orange to gold while you’re still hiking in shade. It’s like the mountains are showing off.
Sunlight creeping down the canyon. Still freezing.Pokin leading the charge.
The Big Pine Lakes trail climbs about 2,000 feet over four and a half miles to the first lake, then keeps going through a chain of seven lakes. The full loop is somewhere around 15 miles. They were going to do all of it.
I rode in Nicholas’s pack. Anti-bath technology deployed. Hoodie up.
Trail ready. Hoodie engaged.
The trail starts in sagebrush and pine, crosses a creek with some spectacular dead standing trees, and then gets into serious granite switchback territory.
That color is real. Glacial flour from the Palisade Glacier, the southernmost glacier in the US.
The Big Pine Lakes are turquoise. Not blue, not green. Turquoise. The color comes from rock flour, basically pulverized granite dust ground up by what’s left of the Palisade Glacier and suspended in the water. It looks fake. It looks like someone poured food coloring into a mountain.
Temple Crag. 13,000 feet of granite and attitude.
Temple Crag dominates the whole basin. A massive wall of vertical granite with buttresses and couloirs that looks like it belongs in a fantasy game, not California. I’ve seen a lot of mountains on this blog. This one is up there.
The view from above the basin. The turquoise just keeps going.My bud and me. Temple Crag doing the heavy lifting in the background.
Bear at the lake.Nicholas and Pokin. Looking appropriately small.All three at the lake. Bruce still has functioning knees at this point.
Bruce found a perfectly round boulder perched on a granite slab and decided it needed a photo.
Bruce vs. boulder. Gym training finally relevant.
I got my own photo series at the lake, because priorities.
The plan was to do the full loop, hitting all seven lakes. They made it to a few and then took an early loop back. Smart call. Nicholas and Pokin, who hike regularly, were going strong. Bruce is a gym guy. Very fit, very strong, could probably carry me and Nicholas up a flight of stairs without breathing hard. But gym fit and trail fit are different animals. Long-distance hiking at altitude doesn’t care how much you can bench press. His knees were done.
No shame in that. The trail gained 2,000 feet and the altitude hits different when you’re from sea level in Colombia. They still covered serious ground, saw the best of the lakes, and got to stare at Temple Crag for a few hours. That’s a win.
Moon rising over the highway. Not a bad way to end a summer.
Eventually Bruce headed back to Colombia with busted knees and a phone full of photos. A summer of Bryce Canyon, Zion twice, and the Sierra Nevada. Not bad for a work visit.
Day two of the Bruce visit. After Bryce (where I was cruelly left behind), we headed back to Zion. Our usual routine: bike the canyon, hike the Narrows, stay at the Cliffrose.
This time, I came along.
My bud and me. Yes, the Assassin’s Creed outfit. Anti-bath technology.
The Cliffrose is our spot in Springdale. It’s right at the entrance to Zion, the grounds back up to the canyon walls, and the views from the patio are the kind of thing that makes you briefly forget you’re paying lodge prices.
The patio view. Not bad for a place that isn’t a motel.
Chestnut came too. He was very excited. He’s always very excited.
First up: biking the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. Cars aren’t allowed past a certain point in the park, so it’s either the shuttle or a bike. We bike. It’s better.
The crew at the Court of the Patriarchs.Alone on the road. Canyon walls for company.
Back at the Cliffrose that evening, we had visitors.
Deer. On the lawn. At sunset. With Zion behind them. I mean, come on.
The deer at the Cliffrose have zero fear. They walk right up to the rooms, graze on the lawn, bring their fawns. They’ve figured out that lodge guests are harmless and usually have cameras.
Nicholas and I, observing the locals.Our evening posts. Chestnut took the left chair without asking.
Dinner was in Springdale. Good food, better backdrop.
Dinner with a view.
And then the sky did its thing. Perfect clear night, Milky Way fully visible. Nicholas, Bruce, and Pokin stayed up experimenting with phone cameras, wishing they’d brought the real ones.
The Milky Way over Zion. Phone cameras. Not bad for amateurs.
Zion in August. Biking, hiking, deer on the lawn, stars over the canyon. Not a bad day in bear territory.
We’d barely recovered from Pokong’s visit when the next houseguest arrived. Bruce, one of Nicholas’s engineers from Colombia, came up to spend the summer working out of the home office. Nicholas figured if the team had a tight deadline, they might as well grind it out together. In person. In Las Vegas. In August.
And if you’re going to have a coworker from Colombia staying at your house, you take him to Bryce Canyon. You take Bruce to Bryce. It’s right there. You have to.
The crew was Nicholas, Pokin, Bruce, Po On, and Eric. They picked a quieter loop trail so they wouldn’t be fighting crowds the whole way. Smart.
I was not invited on this hike.
I’m choosing to believe this was for my own protection. The sun. The elevation. My delicate constitution. Definitely not an oversight.
This is what they saw without me.
The hoodoos at Bryce are those tall, skinny rock spires that look like someone stacked a city out of orange sandstone and forgot to add streets. Thousands of them, packed into an amphitheater, glowing different colors depending on where the sun hits.
Five hikers, zero bears. Noted.Nicholas and Pokin, doing the couple-at-a-viewpoint thing.
They started on the Fairyland Trail, which despite the name has no fairies and no bears. Disappointing on both counts.
The trail drops down into the canyon and winds through the hoodoos. Hardly anyone else on it.
Not bad, I guess.
The scenery at Bryce just keeps going. Every direction, more hoodoos, more layers, more orange. It’s the kind of place where you stop taking photos because you realize every single one looks the same and also incredible.
The buddy system.
There are some natural arches along the way that frame the canyon like windows.
Nature’s picture frame.
And then there are the trees. The pines at Bryce hang on to the canyon rim with exposed roots gripping bare rock like they’re holding on for dear life. Which they are. The ground is literally eroding out from under them.
Tenacity.This tree has been through some things.Bruce, bonding with a ponderosa. They smell like vanilla, apparently.
Once you’re down in the canyon among the hoodoos, the scale hits different. They tower over you. The colors shift from orange to pink to white depending on the layer. It looks like walking through a very old, very tall, very orange city that nobody built.
Down among the spires.
And of course, the jump photos. You can’t go to a national park without jump photos. It’s a rule.
Airborne.
Everyone survived. The bear would have also survived, for the record.Pokin, Nicholas, and Bruce. Looking pleased with themselves.
Bryce Canyon. No crowds, no bears, no problems. Bruce got to see something that doesn’t exist in Colombia. Nicholas got to take Bruce to Bryce, which I suspect was the real reason for this entire trip.
If you’re going to show someone America, you don’t start with strip malls and fast food. You start with a canyon so deep it makes you feel like a speck. PoOn and Eric came along too, because Pokin’s family travels in packs.
The Yeung siblings, already sweating.
We stopped at Valley of Fire on the way out. Red rocks, blue sky, 110 degrees. Classic Nevada welcome. Then we drove to Springdale to set up camp near Zion.
The Cliffrose. Pokin wants you to know it was super expensive.
Next morning, everyone geared up. Rented the canyoneering boots. Rented the walking sticks. The Narrows requires you to literally walk through a river inside a canyon, and the rental shop knows it.
Five people, five walking sticks, varying levels of enthusiasm.
And then we went in.
Everyone still smiling. The water hasn’t gotten deep yet.
The Narrows is one of those hikes where the trail IS the river. You’re wading through the Virgin River with canyon walls towering on either side. It starts ankle deep. It does not stay ankle deep.
At first everyone hiked together. Then Nicholas and Eric took off, leaving the Yeung siblings to go at their own pace. As one does.
Right before Nicholas took off.The Yeung pace. Steady. Scenic. Slower.
Deeper in, the canyon gets serious. The walls close in, the light gets weird, and you start to understand why people fly across the world to walk through a river.
My bud, doing the thing.
We were not the only ones with this idea.
Half of America had the same Fourth of July plan.
The group also went biking through the park, because apparently walking through a river for hours wasn’t enough exercise.
The next day, everyone was trying to figure out what to do. Nicholas didn’t like the plans. So Nicholas took over.
Two guys at a ghost town. The ghost town has better fashion.
He found a ghost town. An actual abandoned pioneer settlement with a schoolhouse and log cabins and everything. Pokong seemed cautiously impressed, in the way that someone from Shenzhen looks at a 150-year-old wooden building and thinks “we’d have replaced this by now.”
Then we saw dinosaur tracks. Real ones. In the ground. Labeled and everything.
Grallator, Batrachopus, and Baby Dino. I outrank all of them.My natural habitat. Warm. Dry. No water.
And then, because the day wasn’t full enough, Nicholas found a cave.
Pokong, underground, wondering how he got here.Three guys in a hole. Living their best life.
The desert out here does not mess around.
Po On showing me the desert. I have opinions about the heat.
Pokong did get his two requests. Nicholas took him shooting. From what I heard, the guns scared the absolute bejesus out of him. Nobody got hurt, which is apparently the bar for a successful shooting range visit.
The Cybertruck driving happened too. PoOn came out for that. There was a photoshoot. I’m told it was very cool. I wouldn’t know, because nobody brought me.
But the real American experience? That’s the food.
Tacos El Gordo. The true American dream.Also this. But mostly the tacos.
Pokong came to America for a Cybertruck and some guns. He got a canyon, a river, a ghost town, dinosaur bones, a cave, a bear, tacos, and the realization that Nicholas does not know how to plan a simple week.
Sesame Street did a collaboration with Gotham Greens. They put Sesame Street characters on salad packaging. Salad. The healthy thing. Leaves. You know.
Pokin thought it was cute and picked up the Cookie Monster one. Good choice. Responsible. A woman training for Everest Base Camp, buying lettuce. Her friends would be proud.
The lettuce lived in the fridge for about a week.
And for about a week, every time she opened the fridge, Cookie Monster stared back at her. Cookie Monster. On lettuce. The irony of putting the cookie guy on salad is not lost on me, a bear who understands that dessert is the superior meal category.
After seven days of psychological warfare from a plastic container, Pokin cracked.
She did not buy more salad.
Dinner.
Four full-sized Crumbl cookies. Not small ones. Not the minis. The big ones.
She ate them for dinner.
That was dinner. The whole dinner. Four cookies from a pink box on the kitchen counter where the salad used to be. Cookie Monster won.
Her friend Davey called it rock bottom. Chestnut called it “concerning.” I call it the most relatable thing Pokin has done all year.
The salad, for what it’s worth, did eventually get eaten. But not that night. That night belonged to the cookies.
The Roborock Saros Z70. A robot vacuum with a retractable arm. An actual mechanical arm that reaches out, grabs objects off the floor, and moves them. Pokin saw this at CES and had to have one.
Nicholas was less thrilled. “This thing is stupid,” he said, which is what he says about every gadget right before it permanently lives in the house.
The arm picks up socks, shoes, small objects. Anything under 300 grams. It relocates them out of its cleaning path with the confidence of something that has never once questioned whether it should be doing this.
It nearly touches the ceiling. It weighs 600 pounds. It’s never leaving.
The same week, a StairMaster arrived. A full commercial-grade stair climber. For EBC training.
The logistics were a nightmare. Multiple movers turned down the job. Someone finally agreed, and they wrestled it into the bedroom. It barely fits. It nearly touches the ceiling. It weighs roughly 600 pounds.
The StairMaster was a little wobbly on the tile, so Nicholas temporarily stuck a rag under one of the legs to stabilize it.
You can probably see where this is going.
It found the rag. It wanted the rag. It was not going to stop.
The Roborock found the rag.
It decided the rag needed to be moved. It extended its arm, grabbed the rag, and pulled. The StairMaster did not move. The Roborock did not care. It locked in. Lifted itself off the ground. Pulled harder. The arm was fully committed to removing this rag from under a 600-pound machine that was not going anywhere.
Nicholas had to physically pry the robot away. It did not want to let go.
This was not an isolated incident. The robot also decided to rearrange shoes into what I can only describe as a fairy ring. In the process, it kept jamming its own arm into furniture above it, because the arm extends upward and the robot has no concept of overhead clearance.
It raised its arm and jammed itself under a table. Stuck. Again.
Pokin loves it. Nicholas wants to put it in a closet. I’m staying on the desk where it can’t reach me.
In Seoul, our friend’s wife wanted a Labubu. If you don’t know what a Labubu is, congratulations, you have a normal life. For the rest of us: it’s a fuzzy vinyl-faced monster made by Pop Mart, the blind box company that has taken over every mall in Asia. You buy a sealed box, you don’t know which character you’ll get, and apparently this is exciting enough to create lines around the block.
We hit Pop Mart stores in Seoul looking for one. Every single time: sold out. The shelves had plenty of other characters nobody wanted, but the Labubus? Gone. Always gone. The staff would just shrug. “Very popular.”
We gave up in Korea. The Labubus won that round.
Then we went to Hong Kong.
HK$298 for a blind box plush keychain. 80+ sold. This is the world we live in.
Pokin’s cousins in Hong Kong, bless them, had been hunting online. They managed to order a few through HKTVmall, the local e-commerce platform, where Labubus sell out within minutes of restocking. They secured some for our friend’s wife, plus extras.
And one for Nicholas.
Nicholas did not need a Labubu.
Three Exciting Macaron blind boxes. One of these is apparently for my bud. I have concerns.
Three boxes showed up. “Exciting Macaron” series. The Monsters. Vinyl Face. BOOM. Every word on the box is trying harder than the last.
He looks too happy about this.
Nicholas opened his and pulled out a fuzzy grey monster with a vinyl face and dead eyes. He clipped it to his bag immediately. No hesitation. No shame.
Evidence.
So to recap: we spent two days in Korea hunting these things across multiple Pop Mart stores, failed completely, flew to Hong Kong, and Pokin’s cousins just ordered them online like normal people.
The friend got her Labubu. Nicholas got a Labubu he didn’t ask for. And somewhere in all of this, a bear and a freshly vended horse watched from the sidelines, wondering what happened to standards.
After Korea, we flew to Hong Kong to visit Pokin’s family. This is what we do. Every year or so, Pokin’s dad and her brother Pokong come up from Shenzhen, and we all meet in Hong Kong for a few days of food, family, and tradition. We always stay at the Conrad.
The crew. Hong Kong’s skyline doing its thing in the background.
The trip had a few objectives. See family. Eat everything. And take care of some important business with the ancestors.
Every visit, we go to Cape Collinson to pay respects to Pokin’s relatives. This time, we went a little extra.
Cousin Shirley personalizing the paper offerings. You write the name of who it’s for.
In Chinese tradition, you burn paper offerings so your ancestors can use them in the afterlife. Money, houses, clothes, whatever you think they’d appreciate. The tradition has, shall we say, modernized.
A paper Tesla. With a paper Supercharger. For a man who was an electrician his whole life.
Nicholas spotted a paper Tesla at the vendor and insisted. It was for Pokin’s uncle, a man who had a tough life. He was found abandoned in a bathroom as a baby, taken in by Pokin’s grandfather and raised as family. He worked as an electrician his whole life, never had much, but he made sure his niece Shirley could get through school and become a nurse. He gave what he had.
So we got him a Tesla.
The paper model came with a miniature Supercharger station. It also came with a paper gas pump, which is funny because the whole point of a Tesla is that it doesn’t need one. Details.
Pokong cleaning the family niche. Hundreds of memorial plaques stretching down the corridor.Incense together. Pokin’s dad guiding the younger generation through the ritual.
Pokin’s dad led the ceremony at Cape Collinson, on the eastern tip of Hong Kong Island. The joss paper, the Tesla, the incense, everything placed at the family niche on the hillside, with the cemetery stretching out below and Hong Kong’s green mountains beyond.
We also went to Wong Tai Sin Temple, one of the most famous temples in Hong Kong, because this was an important year for Nicholas.
Nicholas and the Pig. This was his fan tai sui year.
In Chinese astrology, certain zodiac signs clash with the ruling animal of the year. 2025 is the Year of the Snake, and the Pig is one of the signs that conflicts with it. This is called fan tai sui (犯太歲), and it means your year is going to be rough unless you go to the temple and sort it out. Nicholas is a Pig. So this was his year to pay the visit.
The fortune teller at Wong Tai Sin is smart about this. Every year, a different set of zodiac signs are in conflict, which means every year somebody in the family has to come back. Good business model.
We lit incense, made offerings, and asked for good luck. Given that Nicholas had already wiped out on a bunny slope and sliced his knee open a few weeks earlier, the Pig needed all the help he could get.
Pokin’s dad had a different take. He said Nicholas’s accident was actually a good thing. The injury “cut off his bad luck at the knee.” Got the bad stuff out of the way early. That’s one way to look at a ski patrol toboggan ride.
Lau Haa Hot Pot. Pokin’s dad’s favorite. One of the last ’traditional’ spots left.
Pokin’s dad took us to his favorite hot pot place. Lau Haa, a restaurant that still looks like the Hong Kong he grew up in. Neon signs, red tiles, old-school everything. He reminisced about the city of his childhood while we dunked things in boiling broth.
The DIY sauce station. Twelve options. I counted.
Another night, dinner at Uncle Adolf’s place. He’s one of Pokin’s dad’s oldest friends and the man who gave Pokin her first real job at Campbell Soup back in the day. Good food, good stories, the kind of evening where the adults talk for three hours and nobody checks the time.
Dinner at Uncle Adolf’s. The man who gave Pokin her start.Dim sum. Steamer baskets piled high. This is what Hong Kong does best.
And of course, dim sum. A proper Hong Kong dim sum spread with the whole family around a lazy Susan, arguing over who gets the last har gow.
Three generations at the table. This is why we come back.
Every trip to Hong Kong, we go to the Jockey Club. This is tradition. Years ago, Pokin’s dad won enough money betting on horses to put a down payment on her parents’ first house. They couldn’t have afforded to buy one otherwise, and that bet kickstarted everything. So we always go back. For luck.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club in Central is the kind of place where horse racing is taken very seriously. Members’ lounges, dark wood paneling, the smell of old money and new odds.
And in the stairwell, a vending machine.
The vending machine that changed everything.
Pokin spotted it first. The HKJC Priority vending machine, tucked into a stairwell, stocked with official Jockey Club merchandise. Caps, tins, memorabilia. And plush horses. Little brown racing horses with bridles, wearing the Jockey Club colors.
Pokin used to have stuffed horses when she was younger. Princess and PB&J. She wanted one.
“No, let me,” insisted her dad.
“Let him,” insisted Nicholas.
So Pokin’s dad vended a racing horse from the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
There he was. A small brown horse with a black bridle, standing on the counter, looking earnest and slightly confused about his new situation. The kind of face that says “I will try very hard at whatever you need.”
“I think his name should be Chestnut,” said Nicholas. After Pokin’s favorite cake.
“Sounds about right,” said Pokin.
Chestnut, with his namesake. A chestnut cake. He’s earned it.That face. Relentlessly optimistic. Unreasonably earnest. He can’t help it.
And that’s how Chestnut came to live with us. A Hong Kong Jockey Club horse, vended from a machine in the members’ lounge, paid for by Pokin’s dad, named after a cake.
He’s a hard-working, earnest, overwhelmingly optimistic horse who tries incredibly hard to be helpful. He’s so wholesome I can’t be mad at him. Plus he’s a gift from Pokin’s dad. That counts for something.
It’s a little ridiculous how upbeat he is, though. Just relentlessly positive. Like a motivational poster that follows you around the house.
The whole reason we went to Jeju was this mountain.
Hallasan. South Korea’s highest peak. 1,950 meters of volcanic rock with a crater lake at the top. Nicholas had been planning to hike it since before we landed in Korea, back when his knee was still held together by stitches and optimism. By Jeju, the stitches were out and the optimism was holding. Barely.
Jeju International Airport. The stone grandfather welcomed me personally.
We landed on Jeju and I immediately found the dol hareubang — the stone grandfather statues that are everywhere on this island. Big guy, stone hat, holding a basket of hallabong oranges. I liked him. He looked like the kind of guardian who wouldn’t make you hike in snow.
We booked a reservation (yes, you need a reservation to hike a mountain in Korea), set an alarm for an unreasonable hour, and showed up at the Gwaneum-sa trailhead ready to go.
The full map of Hallasan. Six trails up one volcano. We picked the hard one.8.7 kilometers and 1,330 meters of elevation gain. ‘Five hours,’ it says. Sure.
What nobody told us was that the mountain would still be covered in snow.
We didn’t have crampons. We didn’t have microspikes. We had trail shoes and confidence, which is basically the same thing if you don’t think about it too hard.
The guy at the entry checkpoint took one look at us and said it was impossible to climb without proper traction gear. Told us to turn around. We nodded politely and decided to go up “as far as we could until it felt too difficult.”
The lower trail. Boardwalks through bamboo. Still feeling confident.
The lower trail was fine. Boardwalks winding through Jeju’s dwarf bamboo, bare winter trees overhead, everything calm and civilized. Nicholas’s knee was cooperating. Life was good.
Bridge, then stairs, then more stairs. The mountain doesn’t ease you into anything.
That orange thing on the rail? That’s a mountain rescue cart. For when people can’t make it back down on their own. Noted.
The bridge over Tamnagyegok valley. Summit’s up there somewhere behind all that rock.The calm before the ice.
Then the snow started.
‘As far as we could until it felt too difficult.’ This should have been that point.
The trail turned into a sheet of packed ice. Compacted snow with a glaze on top, the kind where every step is a negotiation between your shoe and gravity. The rope railings became less “helpful guide” and more “the only thing between you and sliding back to the trailhead.”
This person had microspikes. We did not. Respect.
Here’s what happened. Nicholas was moving fast. Too fast. He gets into this zone on hikes where he locks in and just goes, and his legs apparently forgot they were supposed to be recovering from a ski accident six weeks ago. I was in the backpack, so I had no say in the pacing.
Pokin was behind us. She wanted to turn around. The ice was getting worse, the snow was getting deeper, and she is a sensible person.
But she couldn’t catch us.
Nicholas was so far ahead that by the time Pokin decided she’d had enough, we were already past the point where turning around felt more dangerous than continuing. So she kept going. And we kept going. And nobody stopped.
Snow on the trail, rock spire through the trees. Starting to feel like a real mountain up here.Above the treeline. The boardwalk section where we could actually walk like normal people again.
Above the treeline, the trail opened up. Wooden boardwalks through alpine bamboo meadows with the volcanic summit ridge towering above. The snow thinned out in the exposed sections. The sun was out. For about twenty minutes, it almost felt like a normal hike.
The volcanic spires near the summit. Hallasan is a shield volcano and it looks like it.
The views from up here go all the way to the ocean. You can see the entire island laid out beneath you — coast to coast, with those little parasitic cones scattered across the lowlands. Jeju is basically one giant volcano with a bunch of baby volcanoes on its sides.
The shelter station. Weather mast, round building, hikers who remembered to bring crampons.‘Remove your crampons and fold your poles before entering.’ We breezed right past this sign. Didn’t apply to us.Made it to the rocks. Still no crampons. Still alive.
The summit selfie. Six weeks post-knee-katana. Not bad.
The summit area is volcanic chaos. Jagged rock spires, sheer crater walls, the remnants of an eruption that happened long before anyone was around to complain about it. They’ve built a whole observation platform up there with wooden decking and railings.
The shelter near the top. Signs everywhere telling you what not to do.
The summit was packed. Dozens of hikers sitting on the wooden decks, eating, resting, checking their phones. Half of them had crampons strapped to their packs. We pretended we left ours in the car.
And then we saw the crater.
Baengnokdam. White Deer Lake. 1,950 meters up, sitting in a volcanic crater, looking out to the ocean.
Baengnokdam. The crater lake at the very top of Hallasan. A dark pool sitting at the bottom of a volcanic bowl, ringed by snow-patched walls and golden alpine grass, with the entire island falling away to the sea beyond the rim.
I’m not going to say it was worth almost dying on the ice for. But I’m not going to say it wasn’t.
The summit stone. That’s me on top. As I should be.
We found the summit marker stone. “白鹿潭” carved into volcanic basalt. I took my rightful position on top of it.
Three at the top. One of us weighing significantly less than the other two.
Pokin, by the way, was jealous of all the other hikers eating piping hot cup noodles at the summit. Apparently that’s a thing on Korean mountains — you hike up, you eat ramen at the top. We didn’t know. We brought granola bars like amateurs.
So many hikers dump ramen broth in the toilets that they made an official sign about it. Korea.
The ramen situation is so serious that the park had to put up signs warning people not to dump their leftover broth in the toilets. Fines and everything. This is the level of ramen commitment we’re dealing with.
Now came the fun part: getting down.
We decided that descending the way we came up was probably too slippery and dangerous without crampons. There was a second route down that should be easier.
It was not easier. Just as snowy. Just as icy. Just as much “grab the rope railing and pray.”
On the way down, though — above the clouds, Jeju’s coastline stretched out below us, the oreums dotting the island like green bubbles from up here. Almost made you forget your shoes had no grip.
But we made it. Both knees intact. All 186 grams of me accounted for.
Back on flat ground, we did what any reasonable group of people would do after accidentally summiting a mountain: we ate everything.
Bulgogi, sundubu-jjigae, jjamppong, rice, and enough banchan to forget the ice ever happened.
The hotel restaurant delivered. Sizzling bulgogi, a stone pot of soft tofu stew, a massive bowl of seafood jjamppong, and banchan stretching across the table. After eight hours of hiking on ice, I have never been more grateful for a hot plate of meat.
Chimaek. Chicken and beer. The Korean post-hike ritual we didn’t know we needed.
Then chimaek. Korean fried chicken — half yangnyeom (spicy glazed), half crispy — with beer. This is apparently the correct way to end any day in Korea. I don’t argue with traditions that involve fried food.
We made it back to the hotel in time to watch Nanta, a Korean percussion show, which was loud and chaotic and exactly the right energy for a day that started with “we’ll go as far as we can” and ended at the summit of South Korea’s highest mountain.
Oh, and across from the hotel? A planetarium.
Of course I made Nicholas take me.
Commander Sumi Shepherd, reporting for lunar duty. Nicholas is my co-pilot. As usual.
We checked out the space exhibits, posed as astronauts on a lunar rover (I fit the helmet better, for the record), and I got to look at the stars from an island in the middle of the ocean.
Hallasan didn’t care that we didn’t have crampons. It didn’t care about Nicholas’s knee. It just sat there being a volcano while we slid our way to the top and back. The mountain doesn’t negotiate. You show up, you deal with whatever it gives you, and if you make it back down, you eat chicken.
