Odaesan is a mountain range rather than a single peak, five high summits ringed round a green bowl in the Taebaek mountains, and the name means five terraces. The highest, Birobong, reaches about fifteen hundred and sixty metres, and the whole massif is protected as a national park, with dense forest of oak, hornbeam, maple and, lower down, Korean fir. The air is clean and cool, the streams run clear and the sound of water is never far away.
For more than a thousand years the mountain has been a centre of Korean Buddhism. Woljeongsa, a temple at the foot of the range, was founded in the seventh century by the monk Jajang, who brought relics from China, and its nine-storey octagonal stone pagoda is one of the finest in the country. Up the valley, Sangwonsa holds a bronze bell cast in the early eighth century, the oldest surviving bell in Korea. The walk from the temple gate along the river is lined by a long avenue of old fir trees, so tall and straight that the light comes down in shafts, and in autumn it is one of the places Koreans go to find the colour.
The roads back down toward Gangneung and the coast are some of the finest in the region. They drop through the forest in long, flowing bends, following river gorges and crossing ridges, with good surfaces and little traffic outside the weekend and the autumn weeks. The corners are not extreme, but they are constant, and the road moves from deep shade to open sunlight and back again. Be alert for wet leaves and fog, which gathers in the valleys in the mornings, and for the slow farm vehicles and buses on narrower stretches. In winter, ice and snow can close the higher sections.
The temple areas have small restaurants serving mountain vegetables, buckwheat noodles and the rice-and-herb dishes of Buddhist cooking, and the tea is excellent. Weekends in the second half of October are packed, so go on a weekday if you can, and bring warm clothes, because the mountain is much cooler than the coast.