After the weather hadn’t delivered in the weekend we decided to take Tuesday off as yr.no was painting a positive picture of how it might be. So Monday evening after work we drove South to Oppdal and then onwards to the Bårdsgarden DNT Hut. We arrived in time to boil our dinner, pasta and chickpeas, what a treat.
The blue sky had been installed in the morning and so had a big ball of burning gas. Despite this it was cold, some degrees below zero as we set off snow that crunched under our skis. I skated along the cross country track while Johannes opted for skinning. We headed further up the valley to the end of the road and continued on the cross country track into the hills. Unfortunately as we continued we began to leave the blue behind and instead a blanket of high cloud arrived slowly. We decided to stay on the ski tracks for as long as possible rather than going up the ridge, which we’d initially planned on. We left the tracks and started to skin up through the deep powder. I cut the the trail as the light became flatter and flatter. It began to snow as we climbed. We stopped periodically to check the map trying to decide which would be the flattest ascent. It was avalanche warning level 3 and there was a lot of fresh snow.
We picked our way up between rocks to a flat plateau West of the summit. It was another 160 m of climbing but there wasn’t anything in the way of visibility. We decided to bail. Annoyingly my Garmin Forerunner had mysteriously lost my track after we’d left the trail but we had most of the ascent. We skied down sticking closely to our ascent tracks. They were sometimes hard to make out even just a couple of metres in front of us. The snow was great but with so little visibility it was hard to really make the most of it.
We arrived back on the ski track in the valley and began the long slog back to the DNT hut. All-in-all the tour was quite long, around 20km. We ate at the hut and watched as it began to clear somewhat. We began the drive back to Trondheim with patches of blue sky again.