Folgafonna Roadtrip

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5 July 2021 - Bergen

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This past weekend I decided to get out of Bergen and celebrate the 4th of July properly in Nature. I drove down to Sunndal on the Folgefonna peninsula to hike up to the glacier. As it often does in Norway, this trip involved one of my favorite pastimes: ferry riding. It's been 14 years since I first drove onto the ferry at Bremerton to ride into Seattle in style, and it still never gets old.

Sadly I shared photos of the trip on the now defunkt LiveVideo.

Sunndal is clearly a tourist town, but covid has made everything weird. I'm glad that the parking lot at the bottom of the valley wasn't full, because they only charged a hundred kroner and I can't imagine that stopping EVERYONE from parking there in a normal year. It's Vipps for payment, which requires a Norwegian phone number and bank account, but fortunately there was also a guy taking money from gentiles like me. Not so at the Baroniet Rosendal on Sunday. The hike up to the glacier starts on a farm. It could be California with the smell of cow manure and salt air under the fog. And it was a thick fog Saturday! As I hiked along the incredible blue of the glaciermelt river I really couldn't see much else. Supposedly there were mountains, but I didn't see them. It wasn't long before I crossed the river and was climbing them though! In a cloud so thick that I had to remove my glasses to see.

In a cloud

It took me a few hours to get up to Gardshammar, the halfway point. No one else of the many hikers along the river route made the turn up though, so I was to be basically alone. Hot summer day on an extremely popular hiking route even if they don't celebrate the 4th here I was surprised. Up to this point it was basically rainforest, complete with dense fern undergrowth and moss on the trees, but here on that started to taper into scrub. Being in a cloud though, I had to imagine the views and hope that there might be views tomorrow on the way down. It was so sticky I hiked shirtless and my shorts were soaked with sweat and cloud. Cloud which also condensed on my arms. Scrub gave way to rocks as I got higher and during breaks I sat and imagined what views there might be.

The first hytta I reached dates from the 19th century and was built by Deutsch tourists, who also built the path up. The Deutscher Nordland Turverlag or something like that. DNT has always been a confusing abbreviation, but the red Ts they spraypaint everywhere in Norway sure make trails easy to follow. The hytta, Breidablik, was empty but very koselig. Not long before that I'd gotten above the clouds and started to appreciate the thousands of feet I'd gained above the fjord. Not that I could see the fjord, but looking down on the fog is nice and reminded me of Fremont Peak where we camped by the observatory not to many summers back. Fremont was also top of mind since I'd finished reading The Island of Lost Maps the day before, and that early Republican partisan's foolhardy exploits figured in the mapmaking history of the American West.

A tongue of the glacier between Breidablik and Fonnabu

So passing into the land of rock and snow felt more like the Rockies than California, a nod to how compressed the various biomes are into eachother here in the high latitudes. One day I'll compare it all to Alaska. Somehow in my headed driving to the mountains in Summer is the American West, regardless of being in Norway. and how empty it was! The path from Breidablik to Fonnabu seemed ready to encompass multitudes, but I was completely alone. And fantasizing about crossing the glacier to Odda. Perhaps fortunately the scale and bleak white expanse of in daunted me into submission. Fonnabu is a complex of buildings, but I found myself wholy alone there like George Clooney in Midnight Sky. There at the World's End I wrote a poem.

I feasted on a dinner chana masala, rehydrated with a broken can of gas. And my also broke. And my shoulders and knees ached from 40 some odd years of misuse and the past afternoon testing their limits. The cold sleep of the glacier called, as did the warm sleep in one of those beds. But I turned back, knowing that I was ill prepared if the weather took a turn for the worst and understanding just how much I had tempted fate already.

My goal was to make it down to the snow line before pitching my tent, and I was everso fortunate that my eyes were able to feast on greater and greater vistas revealed by the retreating fog. Look at the pictures. They're breathtaking. Down by the Botnavatnet I finally collapsed into my tent to await the morning. Again the hot weather remained a gift despite the evening rains. And morning came early as it does in the North.

Morning brought the full glory of the valley into view. The fog ebbed and then flowed in the lower valley by Sunndal. It's hard to imagine a more beautiful view. The no-see-ems were vicious around the water though, so I broke camp quickly and breakfasted down at Gardshammar. From there I could see the parking lot and a couple hours later I looked up to Gardshammar from my car. No people disturbed my morning. Pure Nature.

From there I drove down to the medieval Halsnøy abbey ruins (underwhelming compared to those on the island in the Oslofjord), getting coffee on the way at the one open gas station in Husnes. Then I took the long way home through the tunnel to Odda and then up through the fjordside cherry orchards to Voss. Hardanger is magnificent when there's fruit on the trees. If I didn't know what a crushing financial burden the state puts on business here in Norway I would fantasize about owning one of those farms myself. And sheep.

Hard to imagine a more rewarding weekend!