holy crap—I may have just solved the riddle

Why do I hike with a backpack?  This question has dogged me since I first walked from Seoul to Busan in 2017.  And yet, the answer is simple:  I have a backpack because, at some point along the route, I have to camp.  The pack contains the essentials for camping:  my bivy sack, my sleeping bag, and warm clothing to keep me from shivering at night.  I've said before that, if I could find a way to hike across the country without camping, I'd ditch the backpack (as much as I love my Gregory, which is still performing well, thanks).

People have asked me why I don't just mail the backpack to myself for the one day when I'll need it to camp, then simply mail it back to my apartment in Seoul once the camping is done.  To that, I reply:  are you listening to yourself?  Simple?  It's expensive to ship a large backpack back and forth like that, and I'd have to alter my walking route to be able to pass by a post office.  If I were to ship the pack to a location that's right before I hit a campsite, it's very unlikely that I'd ship the pack back to Seoul afterwards.  Not only is that expensive, it's also time-consuming, and probably not possible unless I'm doing it on a scheduled rest day, when I'd have the free time to go visit a local post office.  More likely, I'd keep the pack with me and walk with it the rest of the way to Busan.  And that brings up the other issue:  if I'm walking with the pack for, say, two weeks, how is that so different from walking encumbered for four weeks?  I may as well walk the whole route with my pack.  So to me, the whole mail-the-pack thing is silly.

Anyway, the above discussion is moot.  I've got my pack, and I'm committed to walking to Busan with it on my back.  Also:  I think I just solved the riddle of how to walk across the country without having to camp at all.  This solution will, however, involve a cheat that's similar to the cheat I used to get to downtown Choongju:  instead of following the official bike route, I can follow an unofficial walking route.  I just ran the numbers.

Right now, the segment from San Gwa Gang Pension to the Havana Motel (October 11 and 12) is divided into two parts:  (1) San Gwa Gang to the Sangju campground, then (2) Sangju campground to the Havana Motel.  Respectively, those parts are 31.6 and 29 kilometers.  That's a total of 60.6 km.  Doing that in a single day is possible, but not advisable.  I've walked 60 km within a 16.5-hour period twice before, but never while wearing an 11-kilo backpack.  So what I just did was to re-run the numbers on Naver Map, this time selecting "walking route" instead of "bike route."

Here's the result (click to enlarge):

See?  Amazing.  I'm not sure I can walk 61 km encumbered, but I can certainly walk 44 km, then take an extra rest break.  This wouldn't change my overall schedule at all:  I'd have a seventh rest day, sure, but I'd have covered the total distance from San Gwa Gang to Havana in a single day, i.e., I'd still be using two calendar days once I include my extra rest day.  But that's fine:  this isn't about saving time; it's about obviating the need to camp.

So I think I'm going to do this, and in so doing, I'll be walking through some very different terrain (some of it probably quite hilly since the Saejae route goes through the Baekdu Daegan mountain range), but in the end, I think the change of route will be worth it.  And the next time I walk to Busan along the Four Rivers path, I'll know to hop off the path during this segment so as to avoid camping.

I've wondered, on occasion, about how much my daily range could be extended if I didn't have to hike with a backpack.  I normally think of 35 km as my usual upper limit, but as I said, I've done 60K hikes before, which makes me think that 40-some kilometers wouldn't be that harsh.  When unencumbered, I mean.

There we have it:  that's the new plan.  I'll hike directly from San Gwa Gang Pension to the Havana Motel (at the bottom of Sangju City), which isn't far from the Nakdan Dam.  The route is about 44 km long, so it'll be in the same spirit as a 42K hike I've scheduled for October 18.  (That segment was also the result of stitching together two segments into a single, shorter segment.)  And you thought nothing new was going to happen during this walk.  Thtop it, thilly!

Off tomorrow morning.  Early start.  Wish me luck.