An amazing day on skis. Today was the day we’d been waiting for. The sky was blue and it was sunny. We drove along the side of the fiords early in the morning starting our tour at 8:30 am from a small car park in a farmer’s yard.
We headed up a valley, crossing a river and skinning through forest. We followed existing tracks up on the true right of the river heading up through the trees, leaving the tree line and continuing skinning up. It was about –5 degrees in the car park and it wasn’t getting warmer as we climbed! In front of us, in the distance, we could see our mountain for the day, Runfjellet. It’s a big flat topped mountain that can be approached from the South West (the normal way) or along a steep ridge from the North. We continued over very gentle slopes and I hung back and took bazillions of photos. The blue fiords looked amazing with the mountains covered in white icing sugar.
Johannes D and Theresa opted for the ridge ascent. I’d packed my crampons but decided to take the easier route with the others. We traversed to the left of the peak so to approach from the South. Martin cut the route through the powder far ahead with Johannes R and Kristian and I dawdled up behind. I picked up the pace on the last steep ascent following the zig zag route up onto the summit plateau. We skinned across to a pile of stones at the summit and waited for Johannes D and Theresa to appear. They did soon after, arriving at the same time as Kristian. The ground dropped away very steeply in front of us and we kept our distance from the corniced edge.
We skied down, poling our way back along the flatter sections. We weren’t finished for the day and so we cut directly across towards the river. We had some more great powder as we descended into the river picking our way down between trees. We crossed and then skinned up the far side heading North towards another peak. Johannes D caught us up after having done some extra for experts. He passed us and continued to the summit of Kavringtinden. The shadows were growing longer on the snow as the sun sunk lower in the sky. We skinned up to, perhaps 600 m below the summit. Johannes D started down, carving wide turns down the face and we began skiing down also. The powder was very good and we traced our tracks back down towards the river. We kept to the true left and it wasn’t long before we were back at the car.
