For those brave enough to reach the summit, there rests a foggy crater lake with exotic birds, curling ferns, and that sense of jaw-dropping wonder that only travel can bring.
So why not take the whole family?
Fifteen minutes into our climb up Hallasana hike my wife, Michelle, and I had been planning for a yearour four-year-old son, Finn, and his two-year-old sister, Jean, went feral.
Finn would not release his koala-like clutch on my chest and poked me in the eye, an organ I kind of needed. Jean wailed and writhed in the pack on my back. And my wife and I shared a glance of parental knowing: We once could have done this, but no longer.
Michelle and I used to be optimistic travelers. Everything I traveled with fit in one backpack. I was light. I was nimble. I was a cheetah darting among oxen.
We were eager to see the next thing, go over the hill, push through the forest, and . . . oh, now were lost, but who cares because we have each other.
This type of lets-see-what-we-find travel has also been my job for the past decade. I cofounded the company Atlas Obscura, which is a guide to the worlds hidden wonders.
When Michelle and I had kids, we vowed to share with them the awe of travel. And when we felt that our children were old enough, we decided to take our first big family vacation. To South Korea. To climb a volcano. On an island.
But we did something different: We planned. What would the kids want to do? Where would they have fun? Which experiences would bond us all as a family?
Beyond the volcano unclimbed, there were plenty of other broken plans, sleepless nights, and dining disasters. (It turns out that customers at a hangover-stew restaurant dont exactly welcome the piercing screams of shrill children.)
The moments of real joy came not from the stops on our itinerary but from somewhere in between. I watched my son, unprompted, construct his own little tower of stones at the base of a series of rock pagodas built by a hermit monk.
My daughter witnessed a raccoon (in a raccoon caf outside Seoul, no less) scamper around on my back while I panickedfor her a moment of truly great comedy.
Not only were these scenarios we didnt plan, but we couldnt have planned them.
When I asked my son what his favorite part of South Korea had been, he told me, The movies on the plane. It wouldve disappointed me to hear that while we were on the trip, but I later took it to mean something else.
Its not that my kids arent travelers; its that they have no expectations for travel. This was how Michelle and I used to travel, which was to let the trip take us instead of us taking the trip.
Good parenting, all the books tell us, requires a set plan, with agreed-upon terms, and swift execution. Good traveling, even with (and particularly with) kids, Im now convinced, only requires a destination, with a list of fun things to do and a willingness to cancel anything on it in favor of something not on the list thats suddenly more joyful.
We actually did end up climbing a volcano on that trip to South Korea: Seongsan Ilchulbong, or Sunrise Peak.
Okay, so the name wasnt as formidable as Hallasan and it was only a 45-minute round trip, but my family completed the climb, with everyones corneas intact, and we even enjoyed ourselves.
Make no mistake, howeverwe will be back to climb Hallasan someday, when the kids are older and I am surely wiser. Well see the foggy crater lake, exotic birds, and curling ferns, and we will bond.
My son can even watch more movies on the plane.
Dylan Thuras is a coauthor of the quirky and wonderful Atlas Obscura, 2nd Edition (out October 15, 2019)