[CFrance]

Originally Posted by John_W

Mine experience wasn't from a trip I planned, when I was 20 Uncle Sam sent me to Korea in 1970. Having grown up in Florida, I had never seen mountains or even too many hills.

We got a new guy, named Jim from Washington State and he showed up 300' of climbing rope, repelling gear and after a couple of months he talked about five of us into going.

Climbing and repelling is almost like a national sport in South Korea. Jim found out there was a great place about ten miles south. We were in the DMZ about 4 miles from Panmunjom and we got a cab and just went to the middle of nowhere and he said, stop here.

We got out, walked into the woods and about 100 yards in and not visible from the road, was a giant Buddah statue that had to be 50' or more high. All by itself, nobody around, it looked just like the photo below. We continue to hike and about a mile we came to a creek and set up our camp. We got out our gear and Jim had us practice repelling down about a 20' high rock face. After doing that for a while, we were now headed to what they call 'The Frog's Mouth'.

300' straight rock face with a 10' or so lip around the top and then a 50' gap which we would need to free-fall and then another 250' to the bottom. From the distance it looked like a giant opened frog's mouth. First time I was scared to death, in fact the photo below is the first trip down and I actually dropped the rope and was standing on the edge with nothing. I was looking straight down at was the lip and trying to figure out how to go over the edge. Jim on the right had to slide down and pick up the rope and hand it back to me. I loved it so much I did it about 8 more times that day. The photo is in black & white because we developed them ourselves in the rec center and B&W is all you can do.

Fantastic. You win!