Winter Sonata | Yongpyong Resort — The Slope Where the Contract Was a Pretext

The condos sit in a shallow bowl under Balwangsan. Yongpyong Resort, now branded MONA Yongpyong, was already a ski town when KBS arrived. Dragon Valley Hotel faces the runs. A walkway between the condo blocks is still on the resort's own Winter Sonata map, labelled as the place the two of them walked when the snow made conversation shorter.

Yoo-jin's firm and Min-hyung's office come here to sign a design contract. The contract is a pretext. The mountain does the rest. Inside the hotel, the Chalet and the Dragon Bar held the hot-chocolate scenes the resort still prints on its English tour page. Outside, the second hole of the nine-hole course and the lit slope at night did the work cameras cannot do in a soundstage.

Ride the access road in after dark in season. The lifts stop. The snow guns keep a hiss. What the drama needed was a mountain that could pass for a second chance and still look like work. The resort kept the labels. You can stand on the walkway without buying a lift ticket and see why they wrote the contract first.

Photo: public-domain image of the Yongpyong ski slopes, 10 March 2013, via Wikimedia Commons.