Along the Edge of the DMZ: A Drive Through Northern Gangwon

Soisan (a modest 362-meter peak in Cheorwon) does not look like much from the road. Then you start walking the green path that winds up through its eco-forest, the air thick with the resin smell of pine, and the trees suddenly fall away.

From the summit, the old Cheorwon plain unrolls beneath you — flat, green, immense, the kind of view that makes you go quiet without deciding to. Up here once stood a Goryeo-era beacon tower, the first link in a chain of signal fires that warned the kingdom of approaching enemies a thousand years ago. Standing on that same ground, I could see why they chose it: nothing moves across this valley unseen.

What unsettled me most was the story underfoot. For decades after the Korean War, Soisan was sealed off — a military control zone ringed by minefields, refusing every footstep. The path I had just climbed exists only because the army, the local government, and the residents spent years negotiating it open, clearing the danger meter by meter. You walk it knowing that the peace of the view was hard-won.

This whole corner of Gangwon carries the war the way old wood carries weather — not loudly, but everywhere. Cheorwon was a thriving town before 1950; the front line erased it, and what remains is a kind of open-air memory.

There is a particular heaviness to traveling here, and I don't mean that as a complaint. It is the feeling of a place that has decided to remember rather than rebuild over the past. You feel it most in the spaces between things — an empty field that was once a railway, a hilltop that was once forbidden.

And yet the region refuses to be only solemn. Tucked among the war sites are quiet gardens, carefully tended, and small encounters with art that catch you off guard. The contrast is the point: tenderness and tension sharing the same ground.

The real reward of the north is the road itself. Linking Cheorwon to Hwacheon, Inje, Yanggu, and on to the coast at Goseong, the drive threads through river valleys and over passes where the only traffic is the wind.

I rolled the windows down. Mountains layered into blue distance, rivers ran clear and cold beside the asphalt, and for long stretches I was the only car in sight. After days of heavy history, the driving became a way of exhaling — each county handing me off to the next, the landscape doing the talking.

By the time the road tipped down toward Goseong and the East Sea opened up ahead, the whole trip had quietly assembled itself in my mind: nature, memory, art, and motion, all part of the same long sentence.