With 3 Months in Europe it felt like we would have time to do so much, but how wrong we were. The time have flied by and we wanted to squeeze in a trip to Norway with a group of friends.
It's not easy to get 5 people together at the same time, organise the trip and hope for good weather as well.
We couldn't do anything about the bad weather, we just had to prepare us for rain and 3 degrees.
- The alarm went of at 5am Thursday morning, with only a couple of hours sleep everybody was pretty tired. But we all manage to have one last shower before our road trip to Norway and Joutenheimen National park started, at 6:30 we were on the road and had about 8 hours drive in front of us.
We had the sun with us all the way to Spiterstulen, the place where the hike up to Galdhøpiggen starts. Galdhøpiggen is the highest mountain in Norway 2469m
Spiterstulen, is a start point to many hikes and a information place, cafe, they hire out cottages and you can set up your tent there for a little fee, have a warm shower and sauna after your hike and use a simple kitchen if you need.
We arrived a bit late to start the hike up Galdhøpiggen, They say it takes about 4-5 hours up to the summit and 3 hours back down. We started the hike at 4pm, that mean we would be back at midnight at Spiterstulen again. With daylight to 10:30pm and head torches we thought we will give it a go. I'm comfortable hiking in the dark, but with the rain coming in later and knowing that everybody wasn't prepared with right clothes I was a bit worried. You never know what can go wrong.
But we started the long hike towards Galdhøpiggen, The hike to the summit it's just one long uphill. You start walking through a bushland to later continue over a very rocky area, you had to be very careful and watch out for loose rocks, we also had to walk through snow.
We pushed on and meet a lot of people on the way down from the summit. Some of them probably thought It was a bit mad to start this late. We had a few short breaks for a little snack and something to drink.
With only about 1,5 hours from the summit really bad weather came in. It was suppose to rain later and really thick Fogg came from nowhere. We decided it will be safer to turn around and we still had to get the tent up when we got back and start the BBQ. A bit disappointed but hey next time we will get to the summit.
Just in time to when we got back to the camp the rain started and we quickly got the tents up and started the BBQ.
The following the day our plan was to drive 2 hours South and hike Besseggen ridge.
But the rain was heavy and you couldn't see anything. Everybody didn't have waterproof so it was only 2 of us that would be able to do the hike so we changed the plans and drove back to Sweden to the sun.
On top of it we also had a flat tire, yeay!
Back on the road we had a very scenic drive over "Norska fjället" .
// Gina Johansen xx