Korea is a hiking country, but not because it has a lot of mountains

There is a sentence that shows up almost every time somebody explains why Korea is a hiking country — because most of the land is mountains.

Measure it and the explanation does not hold. Korea's forest cover is 62.6%, which ranks fourth in the OECD. Finland (73.7%), Sweden (68.7%) and Japan (68.4%) are all above it. Three countries have more forest, and none of them is known for hiking.

That leaves one explanation: distance, not area. And a second correction — the month with the most mountain accidents in Korea is not in winter.

At a glance

The last row tells you most about this show. Seoraksan in winter, sunrise on Taebaeksan and Baengnokdam on Hallasan are near the hard end of Korean hiking, and four people who had never hiked at all took that as their first course. They did not start at the beginning; they started at the end.

Korea is not first in the mountains-per-country ranking

By the Korea Forest Service's basic forest statistics, Korea's forest area is 6.29 million hectares, or 62.6% of the country. The often-quoted "70% of the land is mountains" rounds up far past the number.

And that figure is not unusual globally. Three OECD members have more forest cover than Korea.

The row to look at is Japan. More forest than Korea, culturally close, plenty of famous peaks. Yet the country known for the image of subway carriages full of people in hiking gear every weekend is Korea.

So the cause is not the quantity of mountains. If quantity were the cause, the ranking would run the other way.

The reason is distance, not area

What is unusual about Korea's mountains is not that there are many. It is that they are inside the cities.

Bukhansan, at the northern edge of Seoul, entered the Guinness Book in 1995 as the national park with the most visitors per unit area in the world. In 2024 alone seven million people went up it — 17.2% of the 43.31 million who visited all of Korea's national parks that year. One in six national park visits in the country happened on a single mountain you can reach by Seoul subway.

That condition changes what hiking is. It stops being an expedition you gear up and plan for days and becomes something you leave for in the morning and finish by lunch. Low preparation cost raises frequency, and once frequency is high enough it is not a hobby but a routine.

Survey data matches. 66.9% of respondents had hiked within the past year, and the most-cited reason for hiking's growth was that "you can enjoy it easily on your own" (46.1%) — meaning it is exercise that requires making no plans with anyone.

Along the river in the same city, the opposite is happening — running alone on the Han River needs nothing at all, but the moment you are five people, rules appear. Running acquired rules once crowds arrived. Hiking had rules from the start, and those rules are the next section.

The month with the most mountain accidents is October, not January

Everybody says winter mountains are dangerous. The National Fire Agency's numbers do not straightforwardly support that.

Counted by month across three years, mountain accidents average 10,736 a year, and October is the heaviest month at 4,416 over the three years. The reason the agency gives is that hikers pile in for autumn foliage.

But the picture gets clearer when you look at what kind of accidents these are.

The smallest cell in that table is hypothermia. The thing most often named as the danger of winter mountains accounts for 145 cases over three years, and the top two — getting lost and falling — add up to more than a hundred times that.

So the advice that spring and autumn are the safe seasons and winter is the one to watch runs backwards. The weather in which most people get hurt is the weather that is pleasant to walk in, and the way they get hurt is not freezing but losing the trail or misplacing a foot. Neither has much to do with the season.

There is a denominator behind October's count, of course: the most people are on the mountains that month, so the raw count is highest. That does not change the guidance, though — the fact that the busiest month is also the most injurious means crowdedness is not evidence of safety.

The real threshold in a Korean winter is not the cold. It is the clock

None of which means winter is like any other season. The threshold simply is not where people put it.

Korean national parks operate an entry-time designation system. Taking the destination, distance and expected duration into account, each trail has a time by which you may enter and a time by which you must be out. It has applied to every national park except Taeanhaean since 16 May 2015, and breaching it draws a fine under Article 86 of the Natural Parks Act and Article 46 of its Enforcement Decree.

Why this matters in winter is simple. When the days get shorter, those times move earlier. A course you could enter at 3 p.m. in summer closes at noon in winter. And when a weather warning is issued, or conditions equivalent to one arrive, entry is closed outright.

So the first thing to check for a winter hike is not the temperature but the entry cut-off for that specific trail, which the Korea National Park Service publishes course by course. Cold-weather gear comes after that.

One more practical point. Difficulty in Korean mountains does not scale with height. Plenty of 500-metre peaks have steep pitches and long rock sections, while some peaks over 1,000 metres run as long gentle ridges. Choosing by the elevation number will mislead you — the park service grades each trail for difficulty and duration separately, and that is the figure to read.

This show refuses to be moved at the summit

That is the mountain. Now for what the show did on top of it.

The four cast members did not volunteer. Na Young-seok recruited them without mentioning that this was winter mountaineering, and at the press event Car, the garden joked that he had considered quitting and that "this show had better not do well." The name of the club they form inside the programme says it too: the descent club, a hiking club that climbs in order to come back down.

But the striking thing about this show is not the size of the suffering. It is the place the suffering fails to arrive.

Na put it this way: "In variety shows you usually get the scene where they struggle to the summit and cry watching the sunrise. But these guys were so wrecked they said they didn't want to look at the sunrise or anything else."

That tear is the conventional ending of the hardship genre. It attaches the conclusion that the difficulty meant something, and that conclusion pays the viewer back for the difficulty. This show does not pay.

Which leaves nothing at the end — and that is the title. Why on Earth Are We Hiking? is not a question the show answers but a question the show puts down and walks away from. Na did not claim to answer it either. What he said was that he hoped the show could "go and find the answer on behalf of people who have wondered why on earth anybody climbs mountains," and what actually happens on screen is not finding an answer but four people saying the question out loud over and over.

This is where it splits from the other two variety shows of the same summer. On ENA's The Prince and the Pauper the person sitting next to you decides the hardship, and on tvN's Fresh off the Sea 3 the calendar and the fishing co-operative decide it. The first leaves a ranking; the second leaves a meal. Here nobody decided, so nothing is left.

What this means where you are

It is a Netflix title, so it lands the same day everywhere the service runs. Take the Korean midnight release and apply the time difference.

By season, it splits like this.

One thing before you head for the exact mountains you saw on screen. How many people one broadcast sends to one place has been measured — visitors to Cheongnyeongpo in Yeongwol rose 640% after one film passed through. Seoraksan and Hallasan are already crowded, and when a broadcast effect lands on top, the number allowed in can itself be capped.

The question that stays

The people who sent these four up a mountain were, in the end, the production team. Inside the frame, though, nobody tells them what to do. There is no forfeit, no net to haul, and nothing waiting at the summit.

And yet nearly seven in ten people in Korea went up a mountain of their own accord in the past year. Nobody made them, nothing is left over, and the injuries cluster in the month that is best for walking.

So the question the show put down and left there stays open. If the summit gives you nothing, why do you keep going up?

Read next

• Running alone on the Han River needs nothing at all — the side where rules arrived only once the crowd did
• Visitors to Cheongnyeongpo rose 640% — how many people one broadcast sends to one place
• A Korean show rating 0.3% at home hit No. 1 in Egypt — when the person beside you sets the hardship
• Same ingredients, same season, and the ratings doubled — when the calendar sets it

Sources

• Newsis — Na Young-seok launches a hiking variety show; Netflix release on the 18th (Korean)
• Sports Khan — Na Young-seok cast them without mentioning the snow climb (Korean)
• Netflix — Why on Earth Are We Hiking?
• Korea Forest Service — Basic Forest Statistics (Korean)
• Eco Journal — Korea's forest area is 6.29 million ha, 62.6% of the country (Korean)
• Korea.kr policy briefing (National Fire Agency) — mountain accidents peak in October (Korean)
• Korea National Park Service — entry-time designation system (Korean)
• Korea National Park Service — fines under the Natural Parks Act Article 86 and Enforcement Decree Article 46 (Korean)