Waterfalls 2020 p2: Chuncheon
If you haven’t read part 1 of waterfalls 2020 please do so to see one of my favorite falls in Seoul’s vicinity.
If I tell you that this summer was rainy you will probably answer me that it is an understatement: Korea was soaked in rain water this summer north to south, west to east. East being where I’ll take you this time: Chuncheon.
You might know this city as the birth place of people’s favorite 춘천닭갈비 - Chuncheon’s spicy stir-fried chicken. That’s Naver’s translation for it anyway! If you can eat spicy food give it a try, it’s delicious. But cuisine aside, Chuncheon is know among landscape photographers for its hoar frost + morning mist on the two rivers that meet there. It is indeed quite magical to simply see.
But I digress! Last time I tried to show how magestic 문원폭포 - Moonwon falls are; this time I want to show that waterfalls, like humans, have very diverse personalities, different characters. So let me introduce you to two famous Chuncheon falls: 구성폭포 - Guseong falls and 등선폭포 - Deungseon falls.
Let me start with the pretty one of the two: 구성폭포 - Guseong falls. Take a look at it first and I will tell you more about it.
The “obvious” shot, because a picture is better than a thousand words.
This one is a more classic fall in its form. It probably resembles what you naturaly imagine when hearing the word waterfall, though not of the most impressive height (5-6 meters I would evaluate). Nonetheless it is beautiful.
It is situated on the path to 청평사 - Cheongpyeong temple. You can drive to that path’s entrance or take a ferry boat across the 소양호 - Soyang lake from the eponymous dam, making it a much more interesting trip. The hike up to the falls is barely a hike; short (15-20min), paved, populated and you have to pay a small fee to enter. I insist, the place is very popular, so I recommend week days. Therefore I need not explain further that when my wife’s family and I arrived there we weren’t quite alone!
That presented a challenge on its own: how to shoot such a pretty place and avoid the crowd? My answer was either zooming in or focusing on details around the falls… and arming myself with patience… obviously.
Although I admit, how can you produce an ugly image of such a fantastic place?
This waterfall almost looks like those tropical ones you’ll find in tourism magazines, trying to sell you an overpriced package tour to some south east asian country. The greens in the trees and the pool water were so heavenly that I couldn’t resist diving in after the shoot (even though swimming is prohibited… bad Romain!) and what a refreshing swim it was! I undoubtedly made a good number of envious souls that day, including my father in law who confessed he would have gone in too if it hadn’t been forbidden!
Swimming in such cool water was undeniably a highlight of the day, but the fact that the place is such a wonder definitely adds to it. That is the personality of that fall: if it was a renaissance person it would be a rich, well educated countryside noble. The straight vertical lines are fine and elegant, the cliff it plunges from resembles a delicate fortress whose wisdom can be appreciated in its wrinkles and the pool is as seductive as those perfumes of the time that masked the true beauty of their bearer behind a veneer of arousing dreams. It is an alluring and proud waterfall.
Here ends the voyage to heaven, I hope you liked it because now I’m bringing you to hell. Forget elegance, refinement and pride, meet 등선폭포 - Deungseon falls.
They are actually two and they are situated at the bottom of a chain of falls at the foot of 삼악산 - Samaksan, which has probably the best view over the city of Chuncheon, its rivers and islands.
I will set the stage for you: it has been raining for at least 5 days straight but for the last few hours before sunset tonight the cloud syndicate has agreed on temporarily stopping the downpour. So my father in law and I drove to the entrance of the trail under a menacing cloud ceiling, hoping for no rain until I was done though nothing seemed less sure at that point.
Light was at minimum and things were about to get even dimmer, I entered the canyon where the falls are. The canyon itself is only about 5 meters wide, 50 meters deep. Basically it is a minor crack in the mountain’s mantle. Stone walls are soaked, dark grey, chopped as if a blunt ax worked on them. Moss, lichen and other slimy fungi grow everywhere. The air is cooler inside the gorge than outside but it’s even more humid. My eyes had to take a minute to adapt and show me what I wanted to see, the roaring fall at the end, 50meters away: 등선2폭포 - 2nd Deungseon fall.
But long before I saw it I heard it, the canyon walls reverberated the water crashing noise very far away to the entrance. I also felt it, the wind the water created was so powerful it sent droplets all the way to the entrance. To summarise, all my senses were being stimulated, even taste as I could taste the heavily moist air around me, it felt earthy. Small place but condensed experience!
However, this first waterfall isn’t quite the star of the show. If you walk up the first flight of stairs leading above it you are faced with a choice: either keep climbing and exit the gorge or look to your left... beyond the fence... that you’d want to jump over... and reach the real star of the show, 등선1폭포 - 1st Deungseon fall.
And that one is in a power class of its own. It’s at the back of an even narrower canyon that feels almost like a cave, behind a deep-and-tormented-looking pool, after what looks like tons of rocks it has cleared off its path. Just standing on the other side of the fence, 20 meters away, the misty wind from the cave soaked my clothes and my father in law’s in less than 30 seconds. It almost felt like standing in front of a cool pressure cooker’s exhaust. We had never felt more alive!
Never felt more alive… and deaf! Even a meter apart from one another we could not hear each other! Imagine a sign communication between a 33 year old French man and a 65 year old Korean man, needless to say it wasn’t the fastest pace conversation! But it didn’t matter at all, we were both feeling the strength from the water and it gave us vigor and fighting power. Power to brave the wind, the deafening roar, the sharpish rocks that hurt our feet at every step and the crystal clear water current. Power to keep shooting even though I am wet and so is my gear, my wiping cloth didn’t wipe much anymore at this point. It is the positive rage that only nature can pass on to you.
Water shot down the gorge so fast, it hit the opposite wall and tumbled violently down to the pool underneath, sending such a strong current I am surprised my shots aren’t shaken. I did have to use stabilisation even though my camera was on a tripod. It was so dark in that canyon that any glare would stand out dramatically, so I had to use a CPL filter, which lengthens my shutter speed even further. Of course I could have raised my ISO but something I didn't notice at first became more apparent as I used longer shutter speeds.
When shooting waterfalls usually you want a longer shutter speed than usual to smooth out the water until you get a silky texture. However fun that technique is I find myself shortening my shutter speeds to retain some of the water action, as I did for the former waterfalls where you can still see the currents in the canal or the general dynamics of the water hitting rocks. Here though, for a reason I still cannot explain, shorter exposures only revealed a chaotic and unharmonious mix with the dark surroundings. Longer shutter speeds on the other hand revealed a shape that contrasts strongly with the stone walls and that made for a much more interesting combination. So I embraced the unavoidable consequence of shooting for a few seconds at a time in front of an effusive waterfall: being soaked to the bone, and having to wipe my glasses every few minutes and my filter after every shot.
It was a fight against the elements. A fight I could not win. All I could do was tolerate it until my curiosity and enthusiasm would run out. And then I understood why I shot such slow shutter speeds. It simply came to me; all that time I was looking at my shot on the back of my camera I was seeing a shape. I didn’t know what shape it was the water made but after it struck me I couldn’t unsee it in all my shots; the shape of a white-robed woman carrying a jar on her left shoulder. Look at the previous two pictures again, I promise it’s there! I really hope you can see it too because my next point rests on it!
We get to the final point of these two posts and 4 waterfalls. I wrote these posts to show you that waterfalls, just like humans, have different personalities. If you compare all four falls you probably already understood that. But I will go one step further, saying that some falls have more than one character, the example being the last one. Even though it was a furious animal, enraged by the heavier than usual rain, though it is in a dark chasm where walls are bare and covered in slime, its shape evokes delicateness, elegance and even feminity. Of course it is all but a trick of my human mind, I doubt a fox would see a woman. But isn’t it one of the traits what makes us human, the ability to see humanity in places it isn’t? Isn’t it, also, a poetic way to contemplate nature? A mirror to our collective soul open for all of us to admire ourselves in.
Thank you so much for reading this far, it was a fairly long one this time. As autumn is starting I will save the myriad of other waterfall pictures I shot this year for next summer. No alltrails this time because a simple google map pin will be enough for you to get to them. Also, as always follow me on instagram @romainphoto_outside (the link at the top of this page) for more photography than I can blog about!
Feel free to leave a comment below and share my blog so that, one day maybe, I can meet you during a hike here!
A bientôt!
구성폭포 - Guseong Falls
등선폭포 - Deungseon falls
