Snøhetta and a rather grey Week

I was itching to jump on my bike again and hoon through the forest testing out some new skills after all that riding in Italy, but the rain just kept pouring down!

In Trondheim it was about 12 degrees, Chris had work to do and I was wondering why I wasn't still in Italy? Fortunately I managed to occupy myself by catching up with some friends, reading 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo', and completing another painting for our wall.

On Friday we started to look into hiring a car for the weekend because we were heading down to Lillehammer to pick up my brother Alastair and his girlfriend Amber who were flying in from New Zealand. The cars were all so expensive to hire and we hadn't been looking long when Chris said "why don't we just buy one instead?" 5 hours later we bought a second hand Toyota Corolla from a couple living round the road from us. It seems ok, so here's hoping! At least it was pretty cheap.

The next day Ally proposed a walking trip up Snohetta, the biggest mountain on the Dovre Plateau, several hours drive southeast of Trondheim. I decided this sounded like fun, so I agreed to join him. The road into Snohetta is only open for a few months a year - otherwise it is a long ski or bike ride in to the base of the mountain.

Receding glacier on the way up the mountain

On top of Snohetta
Great views along the ridge

We had a nice day roaming up the big rock covered hillside to the top of the barren mountain, along with lots of other people who obviously thought this was a good plan too. The real highlight of the trip was spotting a whole family of these crazy musk ox things that I had never even heard of before on the way out! They look little woolly mammoths with funny horns which come from their squashed heads - very cool.
The musk oxes! From a safe distance

We got back late on Saturday night, then on Sunday morning Chris and I headed away from grey Trondheim to go down to Lillehammer and meet up with Al and Amber.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Journey Through the Baltic

Image
After the Rogaine we spent another fun night at the local farm stay with the other Kiwis, then headed away in the morning with Julian, Jana and Sylvia in a large silver hire van. Most of us were pretty hobbly (with the annoying exception of Chris and Julian) so we drove back to the nice wee town of Otepa and spent the day hanging out in a pizzeria and visiting the 'Canyon' the largest in Estonia apparently... This photo is actually from before the Rogaine in Tallinn when Viv had the brilliant idea of hiring the terrifying 'Octibike', it proofed a highly entertaining and attention seeking way of zooming round Tallinn. We camped in a deserted campground and it was truly freezing, so the following morning all feeling chilled to the bone we decided to find a nice cabin for that night. We drove to the town of Tartu and wandered through its pretty cobbled streets. We took a visit to the KGB museum and saw grim pictures of Ghettos in Siberia – after which we definitely n...
Read more

Lofoten Return

Image
Reine - a classic Lofoten view I visited Lofoten last July with Mum and Dad - it is an amazing place in north Norway, and we decided that it was worth the expense for Al and Amber to see it too - I was certainly excited to go back there again. So Al, Amber and I took the plane up to Bodø from Trondheim on Sunday evening. The 10 hour drive takes a mere 60 minutes by plane. We were hoping for some exciting views from the plane but unfortunately it was pretty cloudy. Chris had had to stay behind in Trondheim because this was his last week of preparation for the World Orienteering Championships (WOC) which would start in Trondheim the following week. We arrived in Bodø at 8pm and trudged down to the same campground that Mum, Dad, Chris and I had stayed at last year. We had to muck around sorting out a hire car in the morning, but eventually got one sorted and drove up toward the ferry crossing from Tyssfjorden to Lødingen. It was cloudy, but we still enjoyed the craggy scenery and raw roc...
Read more

Good Godzone Prep! The Takahe Traverse

Image
An exploratory adventure in Fiordland with its remoteness, steepness and dense bush holds a definite allure for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing. Since back in 2004, when we bush bashed down the Neale Burn, swimming at times up to our necks in the meandering river to avoid the near impenetrable bush on either side, packrafting seemed like the answer to Fiordland travel to me. So, with this thought in mind (and knowing that in a few months we would be racing Godzone in this exact territory), a group of trampers (myself, Chris, Nick, Dan, Georgia, Patrick) jumped aboard a watertaxi and hooned across North West Fiord in late December with a mission in mind. Our Route Earlier in the day, after frantic packing in Queenstown, we had received our certificate of 'didymo checked' from the DOC office in Te Anau. The water taxi man eyed the certificate suspiciously. He looked at us sternly, clearly unconvinced by our humongous packs, running shoes and light hearte...
Read more