People occasionally moan that no one posts trip reports like in the good ole’ days, so here’s mine. Last week I was in Northern Norway, and I mean really northern Norway – Lofoten is well to the south. The action takes place within an hour from Tromso which would be obvious entry point for people coming from the UK.
Friday I left home in Helsinki and drove across to Turku in SW Finland with my family to Moomin World. After a day of stroking passing Moomin trolls with an excited two and half year old and relatively indifferent 8 month old we went round to my friend Dave’s house. Dave as well as living basically in Moomin World is another British climber who for various reasons has ended up in Finland. My missus and the kids headed back to Helsinki in one car and Dave and I headed north in the another. We left at 8 pm and I did the first shift until 2 am before sleeping as best you can on the back seat of Ford Focus doing 120 kmph. I awoke somewhere around where Finland meets Sweden 4 or so hours later and drove in Lapland as Dave tried to sleep in the back. Driving through south and central Finland is dull, Finnish Lapland is better but still bloody big and goes on forever – the roads are empty except for the occasional tailback: http://www.ukclimbing.com/images/dbpage.php?id=51162
We crossed the border in Norway late morning where the scenery immediately become far more dramatic than the rolling fjells of Finnish Lapland. Its only 30 kms from the border down to the sea at Skibotn and the Lyngen peninsular is just beyond. The weather had been grey and claggy until then but as we drove up to the western side of Lyngen the sun started to break through. Somewhat groggy from not much sleep and a diet of strong coffee and donuts from petrol station cafs over the last 17 hrs I wasn’t feeling tip-top, but Dave was full of enthusiasm yelling “look at the weather! We’ve gotta go! We’ve gotta go up!” like a Patagonia hardman. He’s a bit older than me and perhaps this shamed me into agreeing so by 1 pm we were throwing gear into packs ready for Piggtinden. I’ve only seen Piggtinden in winter and its a mighty sight to behold: 1500 mtrs high basically from sea level http://www.ii.uib.no/~petter/mountains/T5/Part-I/184.jpg In summer its not so scary looking and with the information in my recently aquired “Walks and Scrambles in Norway” from RippingYarns.com we no what to expect. An hour or so through woods and across moor sees us on the amazing west ridge. Some walking some scrambling and you gain height quickly. Around 1200 mtrs http://www.ukclimbing.com/images/dbpage.php?id=51061 it become a bit more serious and we used a rope for a few short pitches of around Diff but on trashy rock. The final summit tower is HS for about 60 mtrs. Pitched climbing feels safe in comparison to some of the scrambling below and we’re quickly on top. We get back down at by about 10 pm having been on the go for 9 hrs. We order two pizzas in a nearby bar to find that they are huge beyond belief. Between two of us we manage to just eat one, the other is boxed and provides food for about the next three days.
Sunday – the weather craps out and starts raining hard. I’m secretly pleased as my legs don’t seem to be keen on moving much. We head to Tromso and go to the interesting Polar Museum. If anyone doesn’t know the amazing story of Nansen’s over winter in the high arctic eating polar bears, it’s as good as a place as any to find out what hard really means. I limp around wondering how 1500 mtrs can do so much damage to my legs. We head out of Tromso onto Kvaløya island and find a perfect camping spot for the night.
Monday, my legs move again but are still sore. The weather is iffy with rain clouds over the mountains. We try out some local quartzite seacliffs, http://www.blixt.no/KvaloyaArchives/brensholmen/brensholmenIntro.php mixed sport and trad routes and have an enjoyable day racking up some routes. The weather improves through the day, as does my climbing – having lowered off whilst toproping a very exposed 6a sports route with the total screaming heebie-jeebies as the first route of the day. I do the trad crag classic “Stordiedret” (the big corner) at around HVS to redeem myself.
Tuesday – legs pretty much recovered and weather looking ace – we head for the the main reason for coming to Kvaløya – Hollenderan http://www.ukclimbing.com/images/dbpage.php?id=51073 This is essentially a 250 mtr high granite crag stuck about 800 mtrs up a mountain overlooking Tromso and the north Atlantic. We took the Blåmannsvikdal approach described http://www.blixt.no/KvaloyaArchives/hollenderan/hollenderanOverview.html#ap... as “more pleasant, with a nice walk along the small river up the valley. But it's longer and rather steep at the end.” It is undoubtedly beautiful but the walking is hellish. Firstly its through boulderfields where you have to hop from one massive boulder to the other, then up and incredibly steep slope to the crags. We were moving fast and it was still 3 hours of really hard slog. We choose to do a route called Gallionsruta which follows a line close to the insitu abseil points which seemed sensible for our first climb on the hill, as well as “only” being 5+ which from the climbs done the day before and in past years in Lofoten was well within our capabilities. As it turned out the crux http://www.ukclimbing.com/images/dbpage.php?id=51125 felt as hard as pitches of 6 I’ve done on Lofoten. I’ve said HVS 5b to be conservative but if someone had said E1 I wouldn’t have argued! NJ warned me before I went that the grades were hard http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=195890&v=1#2857421 and he’s right. The abseil chains make descending straightforward and back at our bags we were just faced with reversing the nightmare walkin. We got back to the car (which we could see from the climb) at 10 pm – 13 hours on the go.
The next day we headed up Hamperokken (1404 mtrs) http://www.ukclimbing.com/images/dbpage.php?id=51119 the first 900 mtrs or so is just a pretty slog up a hillside, but from then on the ridge narrows down to 2 kms of great scrambling http://www.ukclimbing.com/images/dbpage.php?id=51118 before the intimidating but relatively easy summit tower. We took a short rope but never needed it. If you can do the Aonoch Egach without a rope you can do this. Stunning views to Lyngen reminded us that we hadn’t managed to Jiekkivarri – the heighest peak in northern Norway and centre of the southern Lyngen peaks and glacier network, but we could see cloud building in the south. It clagged in later that evening and by morning was bucketing it down. Hence on Thursday morning soggy tents were chucked into the back of the car and the long drive south started at midday. I got home and crawled into bed at 5.30 am Friday morning, having driven 3024 kms! An hour later a two and a half year old yelling “Daddy!” jumped on me to wake me up; it’s good to be home.
I'd put up some pic but I think even the most liberal interpreters of "landscape" might not pass them! But if you are interested: http://www.muumimaailma.fi/englanti/index.html there's even some routes on the cliffs just around the corner from Moomin Island!
Cool stuff. Wish I could offer similar quality stories from my recent summer'ing in Squamish but 99% of holiday spent pursuing son on a mountain bike. However .. by coincidence I did read 'Comet in Moominland' to him.
In reply to Nj: Thank Nj. I've heard its been a pretty crappy summer through out the north. The weather forecast both online and in the newspapers were all hopeless as well - either they were just wrong or the forecast for say Tromso bore no relationship to what was happening 10 kms on on Kvaloya! It made it quite difficult to plan. As I said we wanted to do Jiekkivarri by its SW (IIRC) ridge, but were never happy that we would get the weather right. As it turned out we could have done it on the Hollenderan day, but then we would have missed that which was a great day in its own right. We've been looking at photos on this: http://www.ii.uib.no/~petter/mountains/T5/Part-I/Jiehkkevarri.html and have decided we really need to do it as a ski traverse.
BTW - you obviously been to Hollenderan a few times. Did you walk in from the west side? It's got to be a better option than from Blåmannviksdal! We've heard Finns (who generally aren't too practiced at walking up big hills) saying it took them 1.5 hrs from the west - as compared to our 3, and I really think we were going pretty fast. And second question - are the any other 5+ or 6- routes on it that you've done and could recommend? We will do another trip there sometime but stay in the hut next time for a day or two.
I never knew that the Moomins were real. I´d always thought they were just characters in a book. Amazing!
Am on my way back from South America. Torres Del Paine just extraordinary, especially when you have the park like I did entirely to yourself.
Just hiking, not worth a trip report, but will post some piccies.
In reply to TobyA: Nice work. I presume there must be some pretty sweet stuff around here in winter? Although I'd imagine it being pretty hard to get to in winter...
> (In reply to TobyA) Nice work. I presume there must be some pretty sweet stuff around here in winter? Although I'd imagine it being pretty hard to get to in winter...
In reply to Matt_b: Like Dave says lots and lots of ski mountaineering and also cascades. The snow in Lyngen doesn't always consolidate brilliantly and the rock isn't perfect so mountaineering can be picturesque but not always brilliant. See: http://www.ukclimbing.com/photos/search.html?text=lyngen&x=0&y=0 for more.
Winter routes are listed on the Kvaloya archive for Kvaloya where the rock is better, follow the links in my original post.
In reply to Matt_b: No worries. I would say Lyngen might be better for ski mountaineering that winter alpine stuff, check the photos galleries for pics of Lofoten in winter (Dave Hunter and Erik B's pics) that looks really good for technical Scottish style climbing without skis being necessary. Better rock than Lyngen as well.
