Yesterday I climbed Blåtinden with Ine-Therese. This is one of the extra tops, which are more demanding. Blåtinden is 1180 m hight. The total hike was 9.8 km and it took us about 8 hours – 4 hours to get up, 3 hours coming down, and a nice long lunchbreak on top 🙂

The hike starts very steep, but we had some help with us! Ine-Therese brought her 2 dogs (Luna and Sepi). They are sled dogs, and we both had a harness around our waist connected to the dog. I was surprised what a difference this makes! The dogs have a lot of energy and almost literally drag you up the mountain 😀 The first part of the hike goes through the forest, until you reach a plateau. From there it’s a steep and rocky climb to the top. These are some views on the way up…

After 4 exhausting hours, we made it to the top! The last bit is very flat, which was good – I had hardly any energy left by that time. The view from the top is really good 🙂

The cairn on this top is really impressive – it’s about 4 meters high and it has a room at the top that you can climb into. Of course we had to try that 🙂 It was about 9 degrees but there was hardly any wind, and we enjoyed a long lunch break in the sun.

You can look very far in every direction. This panorama shows the Lyngen Alps. Luna and Sepi also enjoyed their break, it must be quite tiring for them too!

Around the top there were some very steep drops. The path goes quite close to them at times, we tried not to look down too much 😉 There were some low clouds drifting below the top, and at some point we decided to go down in case the clouds would increase and cover the top.

The way down wasn’t easy, especially the bit with loose rocks – very hard on your knees. And the dogs can’t help you much coming down 😉 They are very well trained though, on the way down they walk behind you so that you don’t trip over them or get pulled down by them. It took us about 3 hours to come down. We were quite exhausted and very happy to see the car again 😀