Journey 2008 - Norway
If all goes as planned I should begin hiking again on June 14th. This time I am headed to Iceland to hike across Iceland and then to Scandinavia to hike across Norway/Sweden through the Scandinavian Mountains. I think these will both be very exciting places to hike and it will also be very interesting to see Iceland’s extensive use of geothermal power (a renewable energy source).
The Iceland route will mainly comprise of cross-country routes, trail, and little used jeep tracks. People have hiked across Iceland before but it seems no two routes are ever the same. From researching people’s routes, I have tried to find the best one and mix and match some of the highlights. I will mostly follow Jonathan Ley’s route, with a few changes. His route seemed like a great base route to me because of the places that it visits and it seems to follow trail a bit more. The route that I take across Iceland will probably be around 400 miles.
The Scandinavia route that I have put together is also a mix of trails, cross-country travel, jeep trails, and on occasion a little bit of paved road to get to a bridge over a river or lake. I could not find anything about anyone who has done a similar north/south hike across this terrain, but I would assume that people have. But, there was nothing really to help me plan besides for finding trails going in the right direction and trying to piece them together. The area has tons of lakes so I am preparing for hordes of mosquitoes to go along with the 24 hours of daylight.
Then in the beginning of September, myself and possibly a few hiking friends will put together a loop hike using the Sierra High Route, a traverse of the crest of the White Mountains, and through Death Valley and back to the Sierras. We are hoping to start and end on Mt. Whitney, but we’ll see more about this hike as it gets closer.
Click here to see map of completed Iceland route.
Click here to see map of Norway route.
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Tuesday July 22, 2008 (Norway final update)
I guess it has been a little while since I have typed anything, but basically I have done a lot of hiking in a bunch of different areas. I am actually glad that I made the decision now to stop the continuous hike because I got to see a lot of really nice places, some that wouldn't have even been on the route and it is amazing how efficient the Norwegian public transportation system is so that made it really easy getting from place to place. I just wish the United States had something a bit better Greyhound and Amtrak. The hiking was all very nice. I was in the Rondane, Dovrefjell, Jotunheimen (translation is the land of the giants), and Breheimen (means the land of the glaciers). I saw a bunch of wild musk ox which was one of the highlights of the dovrefjell. These animals are pretty cool because during mating season they will run at each from like 1/2 a mile apart and collide head first at full speed to determine who gets to mate with a certain female. They have 3 inch thick skulls on the top to prevent brain damage from this amazing collision that sometimes you can hear a mile away. I didn't actually see this part of their routine though.
Apart from that, some nice mountains, deep valleys, lots of flowers in bloom, a lot of really flourescent colored lichen, and some atypical summer weather. The past 8 days or so I have hardly seen the sun and it has snow showered during 4 of those days and rained at least at some point on the rest of them. I have realized that since I left California in mid June I think there has been only a handful of days above 50 degrees, not factoring in the wind chill, and only a few days where I have not worn my snow hat and gloves at least some point during the day. I actually really like these temperatures for walking, but there just won't be any time to adjust now to the summer heat. I will walk off the plane tomorrow in NY and I am sure it will be the classic hazy, hot, and humid summer temperatures and I will pretty much just melt. Besides for that it will be interesting to see darkness again (since I haven't seen that for a while now). It has just started getting a bit darker between midnight and 4am here in the central part of norway, but it is by no means actually dark.
I guess that is all for now and that is all from Norway and Sweden. I'll try to get some pictures posted when I can.
Thursday July 3rd 2008 (Norway)
I was having some second thoughts when I was about to catch the plane between Oslo and Tromso and realized that the plane flight was 2 hours long. I started thinking and realized that I had drastically underestimated the distance of the route, maybe by as much as half the distance. I started looking at the map in the seat pocket on the flight and thinking about a 2 hour flight and realized that is basically the distance from New York to Florida. I started hoping that maybe the plane just flew in circles for a little while to make the flight seem longer, but that never happened, so I realized that the hiking route would probably be over 1500 miles and probably closer to 2000 miles. So, from the get-go I was trying to really push it to see if it was possible to do that type of mileage in the 28 days that I had intended to do it in (I can't change my plane ticket because I have to be back in NY for a friend's wedding the next day, so it is cut as close as possible as is).
Anyway, I have been averaging probably about 42-45 miles per day since I started and have set a personal daily record for mileage and tied it the next day (around 57 miles each day) and still don't think I can make it in the time frame. I think I would almost need to double the amount of time that I have, or at least have about 15-20 days more. So, I have made a tough decision because I don't like to do this and haven't done it before, but I have decided to skip around and just try to hit some of the places that I think would be the highlights of the hike. I always thought this northern section that I have done would be one of the highlights and it was quite nice, so now I think I am going to head down to a lot of the national parks in norway and along the sweden-norway border a bit further south and just hike around for the rest of the time that I have. It is a bit disappointing, but at least I will still get to see most of the places that I was hoping to see.
On a different note, the hiking this past week has been nice. The weather has been warm, humid, and scattered downpours in the afternoons, so basically a complete change from Iceland. I have seen a lot of reindeer, had my head nearly taken off repeatedly by two long-tailed skuas (a type of bird that seems to get very aggressive if you get near its nest), seen a bunch of swedish hikers hiking in rubber fishing boots, and stopped to wait out a thunderstorm at 5pm and as soon as I stopped I couldn't keep my head up and slept for 14 straight hours without waking up at all (I guess I was exhausted from all the long days of hiking). I guess that is all for now.
Wednesday June, 26th 2008 (Iceland completed)
I finished the walk across Iceland this morning. The last few days were phenomenal, probably up there with the top 3 hiking places that I have been. I even had moments where I thought I was entering heaven or eden and thought that they should not let people into these areas because they are too incredible. It was stunning and the weather helped a bit because instead of the constant struggle with wind and grey skies, I was only having scattered downpours of rain and hail mixed with long sunny breaks. Definitely a huge improvement and it made for great lighting at times.
I do have one crazy story that I forgot to mention in the last update. So, I was in the middle of the country, also known as the Highlands, and the weather was piss poor. The visibility was probably a quarter mile or less, the winds were a steady 30mph, and it was snowing sideways and I went over a high pass spot in between two glaciers, it was supposed to be a super pretty area but i obvioulsy couldn't see much of it. anyway, the Highlands were pretty much deserted and otherworldy. It is still early in the summer for the Icelanders and they don't seem to like to walk, but they really like to 4x4 and all of the roads and jeep trails are still closed because they are snowy or muddy. So I was in this valley and couldn't see anything and realized there was a hut a few miles away so I headed for the hut hoping that it would for some reason be unlocked and I could get out of the wind. I finally made it to the hut and took the winter shutters off of the door, (no, I didn't break in) I just unlatched them and the door was unlocked. sweet. I got in and sent my location through the SPOT thing and about 10 minutes later this helicopter comes buzzing right up to the hut and turns to look straight into this double window to see what is going on. I was like, oh man did I press the wrong button on the SPOT or am I getting arrested in Iceland for breaking into the hut, or is this straight out of a movie and they are just going to open fire. Anyway, I dove under the table to hide so I don't think they saw me. They buzzed around the other side of the hut to look in, did the same thing and then took off. The helicopter was literally 10 feet from me through a pane of glass. pretty crazy. that's all from iceland, now on to northern Norway.
I changed my flight and i am headed out tomorrow morning, june 26th, and should hopefully get up to Tromso tomorrow evening and be able to start moving south again. I have a pretty good idea of the route but honestly don;t really know how many miles it is going to turn out to be, probably somewhere between 700 to 1000. i know that is pretty broad but I haven't taken a string to the maps yet to measure it. i'll let you know afterwards how long it was. I guess it partly depends on timing because I am not sure yet if I am going to end in Bergen or Stavanger either. They both seem like fairly logical ending points, but there might be a little bit less filler ending in Bergen because it is very close to some national park that starts with a j, whereas ending in Stavanger seems like the mountains start to peter out a bit and might have a bit more roadwalking to get there, but i'll play it by ear as i get down there. At least i will have pretty good maps though because half of the time in iceland i was using 1 to 300,000 scale maps which honestly don't work all that great for cross country travel. I'll try to keep posting but i think this route is not going to have many computer options along the way.
One more thing...
Apparantly a polar bear swam to Iceland about a week ago. Every time I get to a town or near some people it seems to be the hot topic of conversation. Here's the punch line, not like a joke punch line but like oh man what the heck are people thinking punch line. they tried to catch the bear to relocate it, but they say they were having some problems, so they just shot and killed it instead. what the heck. that polar bear just took on an epic adventure and swam a lot of miles and finally got to land and i am sure all he wanted was a piece of seal to eat and the people couldn't handle that. Maybe he wouldn't have been able to live here anyway because of the climate, but it would certainly have been cool to let nature run its course and see if they could have expanded their territory in this day of global warming and polar bears being one of the first species that will go. I sure hope that I don't walk a thousand miles to get to the biggest vat of Ben and Jerry's on the planet for somebody to just pull out a gun and shoot me right before I can open it.
Monday June, 23th 2008
I am now in the town of Hella, yeah kind of a funny name for those of us from California or the people who watch South Park. It is a bit off the route, but when I got to Landmannalauger, there wasn´t too much going on there and the warden said the store wasn´t open yet. I guess it is still too early in the season for that. So, lucky enough I was able to catch a tourist bus to this town to get some food for the remaining couple for the remaining few days of the trip. I´ll catch the bus back out there tomorrow to continue south. I can´t wait because Landmannalauger was spectacular and the rest of the route south is supposed to be phenomenal.
Oh boy was I hungry when I got to Landmannalauger, which is basically just a campground by the way. I had been rationing food for a few days to make sure that I had enough and I cut it very close. It didn´t help that the weather was cold and wet so my body was burning extra calories either. When I got there and realized there was no store, I sat down to cook my last ramen packets and the tourist bus driver offered me a sandwich, which I scarfed down in about a minute, so offered me another, needless to say I ate 4 sandwiches, 5 things of yogurt, 3 slices of some sort of desert bread thing, and my 2 packets of ramen and have still been eating since I got to town. During the last couple of days I was trying to drink liters of water all at once to at least feel full for a little while. I guess I underestimated the distance of this section a little bit. I did it in 6 days, but I think it might have been over 200 miles, not the 180 miles that I thought. Oh well, all´s well that ends well. They even had Ben and Jerry´s in the market here and I was tempted to get it, but I couldn´t bring myself to spend 13 dollars for a pint.
Anyway, the last stretch was very beautiful also. It was very desolate and stark. Somtimes I would go 30 miles or so without even seeing a plant growing. It was amazing. Sometimes I couldn´t even see 30 feet in front of me though because it always seemed to be windier than heck and then at least half of the time there was either rain or snow blowing horizontally with absolutely no place to hide from it. It is an amazing place though and the beauty makes up for the weather. To me it seems like it precipitates so much that minus the cold temperatures and the lack of vegetation it could be almost rainforest.
It is 11:15 pm and for those of you that know me, know there is no way that I should still be awake, so obviously the 24 hours of daylight is having an impact on me since I am wide awake still. I might make it to midnight for once in my life.
Monday June, 16th 2008
I am going to start this off by saying please excuse this email for any weird symbols, punctuation, words slurred together, etc., I really can't type using these strange Icelandic keyboards, let alone find half of the usual ingredients of american speech.
Anyway, everything is going well. I am on the 3rd day of hiking and am about 70 miles into the route and am resupplying atthe town of Reyka...., I can't type it or say it because it has some weird letter that looks like a cross between an o, t, and d, but it is on Lake Myvatn. the scenery has been very, very pretty and has been constantly changing. I started from the town of Husavik, a little different then the planned route but I'll go into that later, and crossed a small mountain range and into mixed tundra and lavafields. Next, I followed a river with massive waterfalls and amazing views. Then, I went cross-country across anamzing volcanic landscape. Today has been so windy that I have nearly been blown over sideways. but at least it is keeping them midges away, which were out yesterday a bit. In case you don't know, which most americans probably don't....midges=some sort of flying insect which doesn't really want to bite you, it seems more like its purpose in life is to just fly into your ears,or if it can't get in there then into your mouth or eyes. Gotta love it. At least they seem way better than all of our insects back home because they stay away fromthe bloodsucking and leaving an itchy bite behind.
Back to the change of the starting point, I was going to start near Rifstangi, one of the northern points of the island, but I got into Akureyri on Friday night and wanted to start on Saturday. Anyway, the bus doesn't run into the rural country near Rifstangi on weekends and I didn't want to wait two days in Akureyri where there was some weird suped up car rally going on and people were speeding all over the streets and it seemed like it was straight out of the 'Fast and Furious' movie. I headed out as far north to a coastal town as I could get by bus and started there. It was also a very nice starting point, so no complaints. I did have to camp in Akureyri one night untiul I caught the bus Saturday morning and it was utter craziness. I was wondering around town at 11pm, it is light out all of the time so that wasn't the issue really but i did just kind of feel like i should be asleep, trying to find a place to stay until I came across a campground. Finally, 2 a.m. came around, it was still light out, dragsters were racing around the streets, people were stilll barbequeing, families were still playing badminton, and I don't even know what else was going on, but i definitely couldn't sleep because it still felt like 5 p.m. with how light it was. My body clock is still way off though that is for sure. Anyway, i guess that is all for now.