Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

Today I tried my new randonnée skis outside of a ski area for the first time. I wanted to start with something easy, so I picked a small (500 m) mountain about 15 minutes drive from my flat in Tromsø called Rødtinden. Navigationaly it was a very simple trip; I could see the cairn on the top from behind my steering wheel in the car park at the bottom and headed straight for it – absolutely no faffing with the map required!

I was completely blown away by how well the full-sized climbing skins on my new skis worked compared with the small ones on my old skis. I could just march straight up the 30 degree slope, instead of tediously having to traverse (tack) up it as I would have had to with my old fjellskis. I made a bee line for the summit and was there in under an hour, so quick that I went a bit further to another nearby peak a few tens of meters higher. I took these panoramas while lying behind a rock to get out of the wind (it was blowing a hoolie up there even though it was calm at the bottom). On the way up I was thinking that with my new skis I could have carried a light paraglider up without much difficulty, but today it was far too windy to have been able to take off safely. One step at a time…

The descent was great to start off with, there was about an inch of powder on top of some smooth, hard-packed snow. It was as if an easy blue run had been smeared out over the whole mountainside. But, within 15 minutes I was down to the tree line and had to start slaloming around the spindly birches that cover everything below about 300 m around here. This was pretty tedious, so I think next time I’ll try to find a less tree infested route. 

After two days of looking around ski shops I finally bought a new pair of skis on Friday afternoon. Shortly after we arrived in Norway, we bought fjellskis, which are good for skiing up gentle slopes but are less good for going up steeper or icy slopes. The skis I bought on Friday are more suitable for that kind of thing, and behave like downhill (“real”) skis on the way down. It was hard to choose between heavy skis (good for going down) and light skis (easy to go up), but I finally decided on a pair of Völkl Snow Eagle skis with really light Dynafit bindings. Today I went to a small local ski slope (Tromsø Alpinsenter) to get used to them before trying them in the wilds 😉 I was a bit worried that the fat skis (good for powder) would be difficult to use on piste, but actually they were just as easy to use as downhill skis. Hanneke came as well and rented some skis from the centre. 

The centre is quite small, just three anchor lifts, the highest of which goes up to 600m. However, you can ski right back down to sea level, the views are fantastic and there are no queues! The last time either of us did any downhill skiing was more than two years ago, and in the mean time we did a lot of cross-country skiing, so it took a while to readjust to alpine skiing. The first run was much more scary than it ought to have been! We went straight to the top of quite a steep run, as we used to be able to ski down a slope like that quite happily, but it took a while to regain faith in the control you have over downhill skis compared to our cross-country skis. Hanneke was nearly ready to give up downhill skiing forever after the first slope! 

Below is a panorama from the top of the 600m lift. This picture is all Hanneke has seen of this view, as she spent all day on the kiddie slope trying to get comfortable again. 

 

I really enjoyed skiing on groomed pistes again and think I will be back here more often! Tomorrow though I plan to try my new skis in their proper environment so will try to climb some nearby mountain without any lifts 😉