We just got back from our 2 day skiing adventure! I’m writing this as my sister is already sleeping upstairs, and Paul has fallen asleep in his chair – we came back really tired 😉 but we had a great time! We woke up to rain on Saturday morning, but we decided to go anyway. We drove to Snarbyeidet, where we parked the car and started our trip. Luckily it had stopped raining! My sister (Laura) had never done any cross-country skiing before, but she picked it up quickly. We had lunch at Trollvasbu, where we met a group of students who were staying there for the weekend. After lunch, we continued our trip, and from this point on we didn’t meet anybody for the rest of the day – just us in these enormous landscapes!

Laura and Paul were quite exhausted at this point in the trip 😉 It was actually very “warm”, a few degrees above zero, with a very strong wind. It was tough going against the wind – good thing it was warm but having to work hard against the wind does make you very sweaty and warm.

The last bit was quite tough going, as the snow was very icy. Here I am warming up with a mug of a kind of blueberry drink that you prepare with warm water – a good compromise when you’re with a group where some people don’t want to drink coffee, some don’t want tea WITH milk and some don’t want to drink tea WITHOUT milk 😉 

 

At around 17:00, when it was getting dark, we finally reached our destination – a hut called Nonsbu. It turned out to be a small but cosy and comfy hut, divided into 2 parts. We had the entire hut to ourselves, so we chose the cosiest part of the hut – the part where you can sleep around the fireplace 🙂 These huts don’t have electricity or water, but they have a large supply of wood for the stove, and also gas to cook on. So we had candlelight 🙂 and we had to melt snow on the stove…

 

It was very cold inside when we arrived, but after we burnt the stove for a while, it actually became too hot inside and we had to open a window! We had a nice dinner, played some games and then we all fell asleep quite early. 

I was up early the next morning, and took these photos of the hut… it was beautiful!

After breakfast, cleaning up and packing our backs, we continued our way. It was again a cloudy day, though the sun was breaking through the clouds sometimes, and there was no wind at all. We skied up quite a bit, and then started out way down. We found very nice snow and nice open slopes – lots of fun! My sister is a tree hugger…

We had lunch at another hut, Blåkollkoia. This one is even smaller and sleeps only 4 people. We didn’t stop for very long, as we still had to continue to Movik to catch our bus back to Tromsø.

We ended up missing our bus though… We were getting a bit tired and it was still a long way to go. We crossed Movikvatnet (a lake) and from there down to Movik. There are some very steep bits there, and it was getting dark so we were quite slow. We didn’t really mind missing our bus, instead we got a bus going north so we could pick up the car and drive back to Tromsø. This took quite a bit longer, but it means we have the car back now instead of having to go get it tomorrow night. 

We had the GPS with us, and Paul made this nice image of the map with our track on it… red for the first day, and blue for the second day. We did about 13-14 km on both days.

And here are the height profiles for day 1 and day 2! They have some errors in them, like we actually started at about 100 m on the first day, and on the second day it looks like we dropped a 100 m but that was just adjustment of the GPS. 

I’m quite proud of what we achieved! And I enjoyed doing a trip where you don’t take the same way back. Staying in a hut overnight enabled us to get so much further than we ever do on day trips… very nice! It was tiring though, skiing with a heavy backpack, and it also requires quite careful planning on what to bring, especially food/drink wise, but Paul is very organized with that, and he even made a “feeding schedule” for both days. It all went fine, and I’d love to do it again!