Norway, Summer 2020:

This isn’t my regular blog where I’ll take you with me from destination A to B, but my day trips in Norway during our pandemic summer were simply too good to pass up.

Coronavirus has turned all our lives upside down. I was living the happiest time of my life as an MA student at King’s College London. Finally I had found my place of belonging, a city I could love forever and people among whom I was home at last. Every day I walked from Vauxhall to Waterloo Bridge and loved being me. I was doing my degree at a top university, climbing every week, the world was so full of promise. Until everything came crashing down over the course of one week. King’s closed, my friends left, London shut down. Suddenly I was faced with writing all my final essays and my entire MA dissertation from my bedroom. Alone. No Maughan library, no grabbing coffee at Pret a Manger, no more climbing the pain out of my back after a day of studying. No more scanning my red student ID and feeling the giddiness of living my dream. I crashed.

I went back to Norway for a brief visit after two months in London lockdown and full-on depression. “Hike more, worry less” they print on t-shirts. Time to follow my own advice. I needed a break from sitting alone in my room, I needed nature. Dad, ever the eager adventurer, took a week off and we sped away into Western Norway – Vestlandet. Time for some snow and sky!

Day 1: Folgefonna

Today started with a long drive to Hardangerfjorden from our cabin at Rjukan. Rjukan lies to the east of Hardangervidda National Park, a great plateau where polar expedition teams come to practice on the vast, cold flats. Spring hadn’t yet reached the mountains fully, and the skinny birches on our little hill looked rather moth-eaten against the dirty spring snow. The landscape grows more dramatic the further west you go in central Norway. Higher levels of precipitation leaves a lusher vegetation, skinny birches become dazzlingly green leafy trees. People keep fjord horses (cheeky, sandy-coloured things, our national breed) in their gardens, and you can clearly see the inspiration for Norwegian Romantic era art and literature. Today’s destination: skiing on the massive glacier Folgefonna above the Hardanger Fjord.

At Jondal we picked up the third person of our glacial party, Roald. Roald is the dad of one of my best primary school friends, Ingeborg. The four of us used to do multi-day hikes in Norway ever since Ingeborg and I started high school. These were my first long hikes before I started thru-hiking solo, and I’m very grateful for all the experiences we had doing long days, swimming in rivers, getting lost in the rain and eating canned peaches straight outta the box. One peach half in each cheek, chipmunk style. Roald and Ingeborg always got substantial packing assistance from wife/mom Bjørg, whose most memorable miss was in 2012 when she zoned out and sent them both off with a full load of raisins. We discovered the mishap on day two, when Roald and Ingeborg had already lugged about three kilos of raisins across central Jotunheimen…!

Folgefonna is a wildly popular skiing destination, it has a ski lift for alpine skiiers, which we also paid to use. Definitely worth skipping the long trek straight up the steep mountain, even though taking the lift on backcountry skis was a tad wobbly. Cars were parked for over a kilometre down the road against massive snowbanks, the drive up from the treeline was all done in a white tunnel. Once off the ski lift we were hit with a wind unsuitably chilly for June, and I scolded myself for leaving my warm gloves in the car. However, as soon as we began the long, gente climb up to the top of the glacier, the wind was in our backs and the sun warmed down pleasantly. The 360 degree view was epic. Way down below ou could see tiny towns and the blue Hardanger fjord. Summer crept up the mountains until winter took over, and everything from halfway up was still covered in snow. The going was easy, I could cruise along and not even think about being over 1600 m above sea level.

At the top… lay everything. The entire Hardangervidda spread out before us. Hallingskarvet ridge above Geilo, Hardangerjøkulen glacier, the Hardanger Fjord down below, Gaustatoppen by my cabin in the far distance, and right head: Hårteigen, the wart-like mountain sticking up out of nowhere that the three of us and Ingeborg had climbed together nine years before.

Folgefonna stretched endlessly around us, an everlasting white plateau reflecting intense sunlight. Only mountaintops make you want to raise your arms to the sky, no one does that in a forest. This was the roof of the west. And now, all that was left was the epic descent back to the ski resort, we could glide down with the wind in our backs completely at ease.

The alpine skiing slope dropped down like a roller coaster in front of me. I braced for my skis to send me careening to my death… But the snow was so soft and slushy, it was probably easier to ski cross country down there! I pizza-skied myself into a near split and was almost flattened by an overly ambitious snow-boarder, but made it rather smoothly (aka no faceplanting) down to the resort. Heck yeah! Killing it!

Down at the picnic tables – where we enjoyed some lovely Norwegian-style rewards – I looked at the people around me and recalled my Scottish friend Gemma’s remarks on Scandinavians. She was right, they really are a ridiculously good-looking bunch. Long blonde hair, honey skin from skiing in the sun, rippling leg muscles, shades so fast they were about to meet at the back of their heads. Jesus Christ. What a crowd. I suddenly felt a bit shabby in my recently cut-into-schoolgirl-length pigtails and H&M tights. This gang exhibited very low hiker trash factor. And very high gear supremacist factor.

After saying goodbye to all the Barbies & Kens and stuffing our sticky gear into the car, we drove leisurely down to the Hardanger Fjord. A quaint old ferry carried us across the green waters to the lilac-splattered bank where Roald and Bjørg’s summer farm lies in a secluded nook just above the water. White farmhouse, red barn, rhododendrons blooming everywhere, wasps buzzing about lazily. Postcard Norway. The evenings are so light now that I need to sleep with a mask covering my eyes, or else my body thinks it’s daytime all night. Adventure-radar was now purring constantly.

Day 2: Hardanger and sognefjellet

We had a glorious morning waking up at Bjørg and Roald’s summer farm. During a heated breakfast discussion on the EU and transparent politics, I looked over Bjørg’s shoulder to see a pair of dolphins blasting through the turquoise water. What a place!

We spent almost all day driving from the Hardanger Fjord to the Sognefjord and then up Sognefjellet mountain. Norway’s western provinces are packed with waterfalls, wooden stave churches – some of which are UNESCO World Heritage sights – tiny apple farms and towering mountains dropping into the clear-watered fjords. We popped over Sognefjorden on a ferry and fried up some salmon on my MSR stove. Lunch with a view! I was super excited to get up to snowy Jotunheimen and see the jagged peaks around Sognefjellshytta, the staffed DNT hut where we were staying.

So far Sognefjellshytta has blasted through our expectations. We popped out for a short ski to check out the surrounding terrain and had to force ourselves to turn around for dinner (the best entrecote I’ve ever had). The peaks of Western Jotunheimen jab at the sky - they are some of the most iconic peaks in all of Norway, a mecca for randonnee skiing and climbing. The hut itself is a feat of architecture at 1400 m, and it killed me to see it so empty on such a glorious bank holiday. Tomorrow we are skiing up Smørstabbreen glacier. We asked the reception dude about glacier safety, he said we will be fine as long as we keep our skis on. Apparently, the crevasses can only swallow you if you take them off. Now that’s a margin to remember…