Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

The day after climbing Stålhovet, I took Paul to the airport at noon. I was hoping his flight would be cancelled due to fog, but no such luck 😉 In the evening I decided to get some fresh air, and I drove to Finnvikvatnet, where you can park your car at a height of about 250 m. I was hoping this would be above the fog, but it wasn’t actually. I took some photos of the very wet grass, and then followed the first part of the path to Kjølen, but only as far as Jamnfjellet.

It didn’t take long to reach the top of the fog layer, and I was excited to see a fog bow for the first time! It’s like a rainbow, but since the water droplets in fog are so tiny, the light gets so scattered that you don’t see all the colours, you see a white bow. A little later, I saw two other optical phenomenon: a glory (the rainbow around my shadow, you can see this quite often from a plane flying over a layer of clouds), and the rarer Brocken spectre (my long and strangely shaped shadow, in Dutch this is called Brockenspook – Brocken ghost :D)

All very exciting for a meteorologist 😉 Here is a panorama of the whole valley…

Walking further up, I was in full sun and the views were just amazing. So much fog, and yet there were big cumulus clouds in the inland – the forecasted afternoon showers. The whole weather forecast in one photo 🙂

Towards the coast all you could see was a sea of fog…

I sat against this cairn for quite a while, watching the fog roll by, watching excited kids run around above the fog on the opposite mountain (Sørtinden). I was a bit sad and alone with Paul away for so long, but how can you stay sad with views like this? 🙂

And here is another timelapse I took from there, consisting of two different parts. The first one is a bit bumpy, as my camera was placed at an uneven surface (I’d left my tripod in the car).

One more post about hiking above the fog is coming, and then I stop – I promise 😀

When I came back from Stålhovet, I was planning to go for dinner in town with Paul. It was his last evening in Tromsø, the next day he’d leave for Svalbard and his annual research cruise (he will be away for a month). Paul was quite envious of the views we had above the fog though, and we decided to take the cable car up instead 🙂 The cable car station conveniently has a webcam, so it’s easy to check if there is a view from there. We took the cable car up at 21:00, just in time to watch the sunset over the fog 🙂

It wasn’t quite the romantic evening out that we had planned, as we were both running around taking photos 😀 But it was a beautiful experience that we didn’t want to miss. Here are some of the photos that Paul took:

In the mean time I shot a timelapse video of the sunset:

We couldn’t stay long, as the last cable car down leaves at 22:00. It was quite spooky to descend back into the fog…

We decided to stop in the city centre on our way home. The fog had become really thick, and the atmosphere was quite special – almost scary, I was glad I wasn’t alone 😉 Actually we met another member of the photo club here, the second one that day 😀

We walked to the end of the jetty in town, which is quite a strange place anyway. Half falling apart, and very far away from anything. Sounds become really distorted, and it was like a horror movie when you hear footsteps and voices but you can’t tell where they’re coming from at all. There was a student party going on at Driv, which we could hear although we couldn’t see Driv itself at all.

These were taken at the very end of the jetty…

What a fun little trip! The fog lasted for another two days, and I made the most of them – so more photos are coming 🙂