A Plane and a Peak in Nowheresville

By Isaiah Winters

For my 80th iteration of “Lost,” I’ve returned to an old haunt that’s been on my radar for a decade. It’s an abandoned Boeing 727 linked to a failed university somewhere deep in South Jeolla, and the twist this time is that I also finally scaled the oddly shaped mountain peak framing it in the distance. So, here it is – a loner’s tale of a plane and a peak in nowheresville.

The tale begins where it always does on account of there being nothing else of note nearby: at an abandoned university sporting a nearly complete Boeing 727 sans its turbines. The university had programs germane to aviation and used to have three planes on campus; however, two were removed a few years after the university failed in 2012, leaving the 727 all by its lonesome.

As a self-appointed curator of Honam haunts, the plane has long been one of the gems in my portfolio of regional oddities, where I bring only trusted friends for a freak flight exhibit. The plane comes replete with emergency medical kits, life jackets, plastic meals, a service trolley, and even a practice target showing a gun-wielding hijacker manhandling a victim. The cockpit’s endless gauges and knobs are the pièce de résistance, with the antiquated flight engineer’s seat giving the helm an additional veneer of analogue complexity.

Since 2012, the plane and campus have been increasingly blighted by bad weather and vandalism. The plane has had one of its emergency doors pulled open, allowing access to the left wing, while the main door to the fuselage has been partly bashed in. These openings have advanced the wear and tear on the old aircraft. The buildings aren’t faring much better, especially since a typhoon caused the brick cladding to collapse down the side of the main hall.

While embezzled tuition and corrupt hiring practices are thought to have brought the university down, if you’d have asked the late owner, who by some accounts was a deeply superstitious man, it was the campus’ north-facing buildings that brought about its downfall. The north brought bad winds to campus – not good for feng shui. This was according to the monk he’d appointed to the university’s board of directors. I wish I were making this up.

On my most recent visit to the campus, I suffered bad luck, so maybe the monk was on to something. At the exact moment I arrived, two men were doing some sort of work on the 727’s main door, which is so typical of my experiences even in nowheresville. As I like to say, there’s always someone everywhere in Korea, especially when you least expect it. Fortunately, I already had plenty of photos of the plane taken in multiple seasons, so rather than try to scurry past the workmen, I decided to check out the odd mountain peak I’d always seen beyond the plane in the distance.

Located at the exact nexus of Gangjin, Yeongam, and Haenam Counties, Byeolmoe-san (별뫼산) sports a unique rocky peak that just begs to be scaled. Hiking infrastructure is almost entirely lacking on the mountain, though a few sketchy rope lines and metal rungs bolted into the rockface provide enough DIY support to assuage climbers’ acrophobia. The view from the top of the 350-meter outcrop pays off quickly, especially if you have a long lens camera. For this article, I wanted to shoot photos of the 727 from the peak, but they didn’t come out great. The shots of Wolchul-san (월출산), however, came out just fine.

Apart from the vertiginous scramble up Byeolmoe-san’s steep rockface, the only challenge was finding the best trail to approach it from. I first tried to hit it from the steepest northern slope, hoping to hike hard and reach the top fast; however, recent storm-induced landslides have wrecked the trails. I still tried this way until I realized I was hiking up an unstable ridge between two collapsed ravines. Not smart. The other option was to park at the reservoir to the south and go from there, but that way was more circuitous and would burn all my daylight. In the end, I found a tiny bus stop directly east of the ridgeline and got the exact hiking experience I wanted from there.

So, there you have it. Though the experience wasn’t as good as it could have been (I blame bad feng shui), at least it wasn’t as bad as last month’s death march. Let’s see what kind of fortune the 81st edition of “Lost” brings.