first post!

Welcome to this fully armed and operational walk blog, Kevin's Walk 8, for 2024. Expect big things as we build up to the walk in the fall. I haven't yet nailed down the exact dates for the trek; you can check out my itinerary (link is on the sidebar); the dates on that document are, for the moment, all dummy dates subject to change when I have a definite time period.

For those who haven't been following things over at my main blog, this year's walk is substantially shorter than the 633-kilometer trek I normally do along the Four Rivers trail. This year, I'm doing only the Nakdong River Gukto Jongju* (낙동강 국토종주), which comes out to about 385 km for the trail itself. Because my stopping points are off the trail, my total actual distance will be a little over 400 km.

Check back here for prose and pics. All walk-related thoughts will, from now on, find their way onto this blog as opposed to on my main blog.

The blog banner shows what I'll see on my final day of walking: the massive Andong Dam, which holds back the even more massive Andong Lake. I had wanted to think that the Nakdong River's source was Andong Lake, but no—the river actually comes out the other side of the lake and snakes along to who-knows-where. (Saying "comes out the other side" is a bit misleading: the river flows from the other side, then flows roughly southward out of Andong Lake toward Busan.) I tried following the river's eastward path on a map and got lost, and it looks as though there's no real bike trail on the other side of the lake, so I'm not sure how walkable the Nakdong River is on that side. Something to explore later, perhaps.

Right—well, welcome, once again, to this newest walk blog. If you're curious, check out my previous walks, each with its own blog and all of them linked on the sidebar.

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*Guk/국 = country
To/토 = soil, land, etc.
Jongju = end-to-end path

The path across the nation's land. Or something like that.

Traditionally, a jongju/종주 was a path along the craggy crest of a mountain range, from beginning to end. The meaning has since expanded, and it's used to describe many trails, especially bike paths, that run across South Korea with very few hills and mountains. There are big gukto jongju like the Four Rivers trail, which runs from Incheon to Busan; there's the east-coast gukto jongju that runs from the way-up-northeast Unification Observatory all the way down to Busan. There are also smaller paths that are arguably misnamed gukto jongju, including a local bike path that passes by my neighborhood.