Why do Koreans wear full hiking gear for small mountains?

Partly because the mountains are less gentle than they look, with granite scrambles and roughly 9,172 hiking accidents a year, and partly because a two-decade outdoor boom made technical clothing a normal wardrobe item rather than specialist equipment.

Where can tourists rent hiking clothes in Seoul?

Seoul runs Urban Hiking Tourism Centres near Bukhansan Ui Station and in Samcheong-dong that lend boots and hiking clothing free to foreign visitors, by prior booking, with lockers, changing rooms and showers also free.

How many people in Korea hike regularly?

A 2022 Korea Forest Service survey found 78 percent of adults, about 32.29 million people, go hiking or walk forest trails at least once a month. For over-60s the figure was 91 percent.

How hard is Bukhansan really?

Harder than its 836.5m summit suggests. Of its 205km of trails, 31km are rated difficult, and the final approach to Baegundae is granite with fixed ropes and railings. It drew 7.53 million visitors in 2025, which also makes weekend congestion a real factor.

Why Koreans Wear Full Expedition Gear Up a Small Mountain

The short answer

About 78% of Korean adults hike at least monthly. For people over 60 it is 91%. This is not a niche hobby, it is the national one.
Bukhansan drew 7.53 million visitors in 2025 and has real granite sections. Around 9,172 hiking accidents a year cause 2,509 casualties.
You do not need to buy any of it. Seoul lends hiking boots and clothing to foreign visitors for free.

You take the subway forty minutes to the edge of Seoul, walk to a trailhead, and find yourself in a crowd wearing softshell jackets, technical trousers, gaiters, trekking poles and packs with hip belts, for what your map says is a hill inside the city limits. You are in jeans. Everybody looks at the jeans.

There are three separate reasons for that scene, and only one of them is fashion.

Reason one: everybody hikes

78%

Adults hiking or walking forest trails at least monthly, 2022 — about 32.29 million people

91%

Monthly hiking rate among over-60s. Fifties 85%, forties 71%, thirties 70%, twenties 59%

43.31m

National park visits in 2025, up 6.5% year on year

7.53m

Visitors to Bukhansan alone in 2025 — 17.4% of all national park visits

Hiking in Korea is not an activity people schedule holidays around. It is what a large share of the country does on a Saturday morning, every week, for decades, which changes the calculation on gear. Clothing you wear fifty times a year is clothing worth buying properly.

The infrastructure matches the habit. Korea has 23 national parks, 18 of them mountain parks, covering 6,888 square kilometres or about 6.8% of the country, a system that began with Jirisan on 29 December 1967 and most recently added Palgongsan on 31 December 2023.

🏞️ National park visitor numbers

Year	Visitors
2019	43.18 million
2020	35.27 million
2022	38.79 million
2023	39.45 million
2024	40.66 million
2025	43.31 million

Reason two: the mountains are not gentle

Bukhansan looks like a city park on a map and is not one. It was designated Korea’s fifteenth national park on 2 April 1983. Its summit, Baegundae, is 836.5m; the neighbouring spire of Insubong, a rock climbing venue in its own right, stands at about 810m. Of 205km of marked trails, 42km are rated easy, 132km moderate and 31km difficult, and the final approach to the summit involves granite slabs with fixed ropes and railings.

⛰️ Mountains within reach of Seoul

Mountain	Summit	Height	Getting there	Note
Bukhansan	Baegundae	836.5m	Multiple trailheads on the city’s northern edge	Busiest national park in Korea
Dobongsan	Jaunbong	about 740m	Dobongsan Station, Lines 1 and 7	3–4 hours typical round trip; Y-valley is the hard route
Gwanaksan	Yeonjudae	632m	Seoul National University, Sadang, Nakseongdae, Gwacheon, Gwanaksan Station	Often described as comparable to Bukhansan in difficulty
Inwangsan	—	338.2m	Dongnimmun Station, Line 3	Easy until the rock section near the top

Nationally, hiking accidents run at around 9,172 incidents a year causing 2,509 casualties, with the leading causes recorded as slips and falls at 29%, becoming lost at 21% and medical episodes at 14%. Mountain rescue activity over 2022 to 2024 totalled 31,330 call-outs with 6,673 casualties, of which 325 were fatal. Between 49% and 54% of incidents fall on weekends, and October is consistently the worst month, with a sharp secondary spike in April.

  Read that against the crowd. The person in full gear on a Saturday in October is hiking on the single most accident-heavy day of the single most accident-heavy month, on granite, among thousands of others. Proper boots with ankle support and a jacket that handles a temperature drop are not costume.

Reason three: an industry got very large, then embarrassing, then fashionable

Korea’s outdoor clothing market went from roughly 1 trillion won in the late 2000s to about 7 trillion won by 2012. The drivers were a shift to a five-day working week, a boom in camping and trail walking, and mass middle-aged participation. Then it crashed, for a reason that had nothing to do with hiking.

등골브레이커: the jacket that broke the market

From around 2006, and peaking in early 2013, a particular brand's padded jackets became near-compulsory among Korean secondary school students. The slang term for the phenomenon was 등골브레이커 (deunggol-breaker), "spine-breaker", the spine in question belonging to the parent. Students could read each other's household income off a price ladder that ran from about 250,000 won for the entry model to 790,000 won for the top expedition parka, and the jackets were extorted from younger students often enough to acquire their own slang.

The backlash was public. In February 2012 a group filmed themselves smashing the jackets with baseball bats in Myeongdong as a protest. In April 2012 the Fair Trade Commission fined the brand 5.24 billion won for resale price maintenance. Schools began banning the jackets. Student demand collapsed from late 2014, and by late 2017 the long padded coat had replaced it entirely.

The commercial hangover lasted years. What came back was different: technical outerwear as everyday clothing rather than as a status marker for teenagers.

🧥 Korean outdoor brand revenue, 2024

Brand	2024 revenue	Change
The North Face (Youngone Outdoor)	₩1.0991 trillion	+4.4%
Discovery Expedition	₩469.6 billion	−7.2%
K2	₩388.5 billion	−8.8%
Kolon Sport	₩368.8 billion	−6.0%
Nepa	₩321.2 billion	−3.5%
Black Yak	₩291.9 billion	−11.5%
Eider	₩254.5 billion	−4.1%
Columbia Korea	₩123.0 billion	−6.9%
Millet	₩79.6 billion	−12.3%

The whole market was about 5.3 trillion won in 2024, down around 2%, with these nine brands totalling 3.3962 trillion won, down 3.7%. Almost everyone shrank except the leader: The North Face held about 34.5% share in 2025, up from 29.8% in 2023.

The brands themselves are a mixed bag of Korean originals and licensed imports, which is not obvious from the shopfronts.

🏷️ Who actually owns the names on the mountain

Brand	Founded	Background
Kolon Sport	1973	Korea’s first outdoor brand, official brand of the 1988 Seoul Olympics
K2 Korea	1968	Founded by Jeong Dong-nam; developed Korea’s first domestically made hiking boot
Black Yak	1995	Founded by Kang Tae-seon; the brand name was suggested by mountaineer Um Hong-gil
The North Face Korea	1997	Operated by Youngone Outdoor under an Asian licence structure, with design, production and sales run domestically
Nepa	2005 acquisition, 2012 in current form	Marketed for years on a claimed Italian origin later shown to be fabricated
Discovery Expedition	2012	A Korean apparel company’s licence of the television brand, built into an outdoor label from scratch

What is gorpcore, and is this the same thing?

Not quite, but related. Gorpcore blends GORP, the American trail-mix acronym, with normcore, and was first used by New York magazine’s The Cut in May 2017. It describes wearing technical outdoor clothing as ordinary streetwear rather than for its function, and in Korea it has pulled in Salomon, Arc’teryx, Patagonia, Nike ACG and Adidas Terrex alongside the domestic outdoor brands.

Korean commentary tends to note, with some irony, that Korea got there first: the black windbreaker worn over a school uniform in 2011 was gorpcore before anyone had the word for it. The difference is who is wearing it and why. The 2010s version was a hierarchy. The 2020s version is a look, and it arrived alongside a genuine return of younger hikers, who gave themselves the label 산린이 (san-rini), roughly “mountain rookie”, with the sibling term 등린이 running to around 770,000 Instagram posts by May 2023.

What else comes with Korean hiking?

Summit verification, for one. Black Yak launched its Myeongsan 100 programme on 5 January 2013, a challenge to climb a hundred designated Korean mountains with app-based check-in at each summit, and a version of that completionist impulse now runs through a good deal of Korean hiking culture.

Clubs, for another. Hiking societies exist in almost every university and most large companies, and the form has political history: the Democratic Mountaineering Club, founded in 1981 by Kim Young-sam after his house arrest ended, used weekend climbs as cover for organising, and later became a formal opposition body.

Practical notes for visitors

Borrow rather than buy. Seoul's Urban Hiking Tourism Centre at 52 Samyang-ro 173-gil, Gangbuk-gu, near exit 2 of Bukhansan Ui Station, lends hiking boots and clothing free to foreign visitors, with free lockers, changing rooms and showers. Tuesday to Sunday 09:00–18:00, closed Mondays, booking required. Enquiries 1533-2608.
There is a second branch in Samcheong-dong, opened 18 April 2024, about fifteen minutes on foot from Anguk Station on Line 3, which also lends picnic and camping equipment. Korean nationals may use it only when accompanying a foreign visitor.
If you would rather buy, a jacket or trousers from an established brand typically runs ₩200,000–400,000 at retail; online fashion platforms carry cheaper gorpcore-styled alternatives.
Go on a weekday, or early. Bukhansan takes over 7.5 million visits a year and weekend mornings at the main trailheads are genuinely congested.
Crampons in winter. Korean hikers treat 아이젠 (aijen), strap-on crampons, as essential winter kit on any granite route, alongside trekking poles.
Eat afterwards. Trailheads are lined with restaurants selling 파전 (pajeon), savoury pancake, and 막걸리 (makgeolli), cloudy rice wine. The post-hike meal is as fixed a part of the ritual as the walk, and groups will also carry a bottle to the summit for what is called 정상주 (jeongsangju), the summit drink.

So why does everyone dress like that?

Because four fifths of adults walk up a mountain every month, on terrain that sends thousands of them to hospital a year, in a country with an industry two decades deep in serving exactly that, which spent a strange decade turning its most technical jacket into a school uniform and has spent the decade since recovering.

None of that is visible from the trailhead. What is visible is a crowd of people in gaiters heading up a hill you could see from your hotel window.

Wear the boots. You can borrow them.