The weather was much better than expected. It wasn’t raining and it wasn’t snowing. The sun was even out in places. We drove around the side of the hills to the main Tromsø fiord and started from there. I chose to wear tights thinking it might be cold higher. This turned the climb into a sweat fest to begin with and both Hana and I stripped off for the ascent. There was no wind and it got sunnier as we climbed. We motored past another group going to the summit. We reached a point high enough that the wind could catch us coming over from the fiords on the other side of the hill and we wrapped up again before continuing skinning to the summit. We had a long flat section towards the summit and amazing views back down to the water. A nice mix of blue and white. We sat at the summit for a while looking out over the fiords below.
The descent was enjoyable with plenty of powder to float over. I followed Hana, filming her gracefully cutting turns in the powder and then crossed over to Johannes with his somewhat different style. We skied back down almost to sea level and drove back home for lunch. We lazed and chatted for a few hours before getting ourselves together and heading out again. The weather was too good to waste. We drove around the side of Kaldfjord and South West into a long valley with a dozen wind turbines visible at the far end. Hana had picked a particular tour but it all looked so good so we decided to stop spontaneously along the way instead and tour up a short popular looking route.
It was a steepish direct climb and we skinned past a few groups as we ascended. It flattened off before hanging to the right and then sharply left back along a short ridge to a flat top. The summit of Tverrfjellet was along the ridge above a frozen lake and we discussed whether to head further up to it but decided not to. There was a mix of Norwegian and English being spoken at our flat-halfway summit and we’d seen a family with small kids touring down when we arrived who’d spoken German. I guess I was the only New Zealander there though.
We skied back down. It was another mix of powder and hidden lumps but still quite fun to ski on. We’d somewhat joked at the top about going up to the peak across the road as it was still in sun and our tour had only been 450 m of climbing. The weather for Saturday was not looking so good so we decided to continue. We ate a couple of Bole (the Norwegian spiced buns that are everywhere) and put our skins back on. We had a little technical section getting over the stream but then toured up as the sun tried hard to push it’s way down below the mountains. We stopped a couple of hundred metres from the summit and had a nice powder descent with lumps and then back through the scraggly trees to the stream and car park. It was after 8:30pm by the time we were driving back but the sun had failed to make substantial progress with the challenging latitude it was working with.
Above: Our first tour of the day up Botnjfellet.
Above: Ski touring up Botnjfellet.
Above: Our second and third tours of the day.
Ughhh, why does HEVC need to be full of patents? Ok, maybe I’ll encode these as AV1 at some point or you could hope that by the time you read this HEVC licensing has been resolved.