This land is Aurland, this land is our land…

Jessica and I are back in Santa Cruz now after a few weeks of busy travel. I’ve got some more Norwegian adventures to catch y’all up on, so hopefully I’ll get a few more posts out before I get completely hammered by work…

After Jessica finished her interviews in Oslo, we ended our second stint of European travel with three weeks of (mostly) hiking in Norway’s fjordlands. We dumped most of our stuff in a hotel in Oslo (where we would return before flying home) and jumped on a train. The first leg of our trip took us up to the area known as Aurland, a region on the southeast end of the gigantic Sognefjord.

Here’s the short version of the rest of this entire post: We hiked a bunch; there was some snow; there were a bazillion waterfalls; it was awesome. For details and pics, feel free to continue reading.

Our train from Oslo ended in Myrdal, a tiny conglomeration of cabins and a couple of hotels hanging out just above a deep valley leading down to the town of Flåm and the Sognefjord. In Myrdal we switched trains to hop on the Flåmsbana, an incredibly touristy little line that winds down the cliffside and eventually to our destination, Flåm, at the far end. It looked like this:

Of course, it’s popular with tourists for a reason. You get tons of great views out the windows, and it makes a stop at this incredible waterfall:

Of course, the waterfall alone isn’t enough, so they pipe in some music and have a woman dancing in the mist. Sooooooooo cheesy!

You really get a sense of the level of tourism here when the train pulls into Flåm. Flåm is a tiny town (Wikipedia says it has a population of 350), but as we pulled in, there was a giant cruise ship built for thousands towering over the village and a dozen tour buses lined up to whisk people off in one direction or another. (And, when we woke the next morning the cruise ship had been replaced by a new one…)

Regardless, it wasn’t too bad. Most of the tourists there don’t go anywhere other than the ships, the Flåmsbana, and the couple of little shops right in between the two. We wandered the area in the light rain and had the beach along the fjord pretty much to ourselves.

We stayed overnight in a little youth hostel, and awoke to a beautiful a view…

…before setting out to hike past everything we’d seen the day before.

DAY ONE: Flåm to Myrdal

Our first day of hiking took us right back up the valley where the Flåmsbana runs, all the way back to Myrdal. It was so much better on foot. I won’t belabor every step of the journey, but here are a few of the highlights:

• Fuzzy cows and some confused looking goats.
• Waving to the equally confused passengers on the Flåmsbana. (There weren’t too many hikers out there.)
• Approximately 800 waterfalls. I don’t actually know how many there were, but they were everywhere.
• Several cute little villages and farms. Many of these had plaques nearby explaining their histories. They gave details about altitude and population, but also told about the history of church ownership of the lands, or gave a census of exactly how many cows and sheep were on each farm in various parts of the past several centuries. We even learned about the teacher who traveled between the various farms to teach the dozen children in the area before a school was built in 1899 to accomodate the growing population.
• And watching people take the mile-long zip line from Myrdal down into the valley was amusing.

We spent the night in Myrdal at a pleasant little hotel with great views and an endless supply of tea that fueled us through several afternoon iPad games. The hotel had a pretty robust dinner and breakfast buffet. In particular, this was our first hotel breakfast in Norway (really all of Scandinavia), and we learned that besides the typical “continental breakfast” kinda stuff, there’s also several types of pickled herring (including curried?) available. I steered clear of that and just enjoyed the otherwise standard (but well done) offerings. Jess was braver, but unimpressed.

DAY TWO: Myrdal to Hallingskeid

While there was a touch of light rain on our first day of hiking, the second day had that pretty constantly. It was grey, grey, grey out, and temperatures were in the upper 40s (fahrenheit). Despite that, it was an absolutely gorgeous hike. While we had passed a couple of other hikers the day before (folks getting on and off the Flåmsbana), on day two we didn’t see another person throughout our hike except for one guy who stepped out of his cabin for a quick smoke.

Speaking of cabins, one of the features of our hike on this day was passing a ton of little summer cabins in the woods along one lake or another. Evidently a fairly large portion of the Norwegian populace owns summer cabins off in the woods. According to Erika, they often brag about how long a walk it is to reach them. Well, the places we saw don’t get those bragging rights. While they were in stunning locations, our entire walk that day was along a narrow dirt road, one we could tell was used by ATVs, so my guess is that’s how most of these folks get to their summer homes.

As I implied, our hike this day was basically along a series of streams and lakes, and as we gained elevation, past an increasing number of snow fields (fortunately not on our trail). Despite the weather, it was well worth the effort.

Eventually, we arrived at our first DNT-run cabin in the tiny conglomeration of houses known as Hallingskeid. The DNT is the Norwegian Trekking Association. Jessica and I became members in order to get discounted prices for staying in their various cabins. Besides providing tons of hiking info and a nice shop in Oslo (and elsewhere), the DNT runs three types of cabins: full-service, self-service, and unserviced. Over our time among the fjords, Jess and I visited all three. As members, we also received a key that would unlock all the DNT cabins in Norway, but we never needed it, as all the cabins are unlocked.

The cabin in Hallingskeid was one of the nicest we visited, and was of the most common type: the self-service cabins. These were also the most fascinating. The self-service cabins have all the typical things you’d expect: bunk rooms, a drying room for wet clothes, space for hanging out and eating. But, from there, we get into what makes them unique. These aren’t like the huts in the Alps where a full staff prepares meals for you, cleans, and generally keeps things running–in fact, there’s no staff at all. Instead, DNT members and workers stock a giant provisions room, leave a ton of cookware and tableware in the kitchen and then leave the rest to the visitors.

At these cabins, you can reserve space in one of the rooms ahead of time online, or you can just show up and look for space. You cook your own meals and clean your own dishes. If you didn’t bring food to cook or eat, you just wander over to the provisions room and grab what you want. These rooms are stocked with canned and dried goods: stews, pasta, sauces, oatmeal, coffee, tea, jams, and even some more unusual things like boxed reindeer meatballs. (We avoided some of the more unusual Norwegian specialties with slightly off-putting names–Bog, Sodd, and Snurring–and stuck to some mac’n’cheese like pasta and the like.)

When you’re done with all that, you simply get on the DNT app and pay for whatever you took (and your bed if you didn’t pre-book). The Hallingskeid self-service hut had running water, but most of the rest just have a nearby stream and everyone is expected to fill a few buckets of water for cooking and washing. And, before you leave, each room is generally assigned some sort of group cleaning task (kitchen surfaces, sweeping, restocking wood, etc.).

All of this is completely on the honor system…and it works. Weird and wonderful in a way that I’m pretty sure would just lead to a bunch of trashed cabins if we tried it in the United States.

When we arrived at Hallingskeid, a young French couple was just finishing lunch and cleaning up, but once they left, we had the place (which can house a couple dozen people) all to ourselves until we left the next morning.

The view from there was great as the sky cleared up in the late afternoon…

…speaking of which, can you tell what time it was in the pictures above? No? Here’s the same view a minute later, but with a watch…8:56pm.

Throughout our time in Sweden and Norway, it stayed light until about 11pm, followed by a few hours of dimness (not darkness) before returning to full brightness by 3am. I was glad I brought a sleep mask.

DAY THREE: Round and about to Steinbergdalshytta

Our next day was a little disappointing. We had planned our loop so that we had two 10-15 mile days scheduled for days three and four. Sadly, when we went to book the huts we were hoping to stay in, we learned that our day three destination was closed until July. (It turns out June is not really hiking season.) Lacking a better alternative, our plan going into this trip was an epic 23-mile day three.

But, as we took the train into Myrdal coming from Oslo, we noted that at the elevation of most of our day three plan, about half the ground was snow-covered. And, while that wasn’t a problem coming into Hallingskeid because we were on a dirt road that had been cleared at some point, from Hallingskeid onwards was just a footpath.

Eventually, we determined that we had to abandon our epic plans. Instead, we found a way to take a train and a bus around the highest part of the hike and do a shorter, safer hike to our destination.

So, day three started with hiking up to the completely empty Hallingskeid train station. There, large signs in Norwegian told us the train only stops if they know passengers are waiting. This sign was by a phone that was supposed to call directly to the Myrdal station–the next stop on the train line–but it alternated between just ringing and getting a busy signal. We fretted a bit, but hoped that since we had bought tickets online, the train would stop.

Luckily it did and we even managed to catch the right bus from Ål on the other end.

From there, we hiked over a small pass along a dirt road, passing the closed Geiterygghytta, where we had originally hoped to stay.

Shortly after we passed the bridge (see it?) where our epic trail should have come into the valley. As you can see, on the other side of the river from us it was completely snow-covered and there wasn’t much evidence of a clear trail. Sad to miss the epic hike, but we definitely made the right call.

From there, we contemplated taking our originally-planned path to our eventual destination (that would be up the hill on the right side of the road), but backed off after noting how much snow was above us in that direction as well. Instead, sadly, we followed the dirt road for another mile or so and then hiked about 5 miles along the gigantic, paved superhighway…by which I mean, a paved two-lane road where we saw just a few dozen cars in the two hours we were walking along it. While it was sad to just be going along the road, the views of the melting lakes and snow-covered surrounding hillsides were still pretty spectacular.

Eventually, we arrived at Steinbergdalshytta, a privately run full-service hut–in other words, a very basic hostel/hotel with meals served (and by basic, I mean our room didn’t have a lock on it). We enjoyed the views from there while chilling out and playing yet another game of Terraforming Mars on the iPad (we played exactly 160 times during the 13 months we were away from home…along with a few hundred plays of other games). We were, however, a bit distracted by the small army of teens on a trip there, but at dinner we were seated with the other adults–a nice older German couple and a young Norwegian couple (who were doing the same route as us but carrying way too much).

DAY FOUR: Steinbergdalshytta to Østerbo

Day four gave us our first real taste of Norwegian hiking. No more roads, just a rocky, rooty, occasionally snowy, trail winding back and forth along the mountainside across any number of streams and through the occasional waterfall, with some jaw-dropping views…and some views of drops we definitely wanted to avoid. It was a pretty short hike, and ended coming into a small community of cabins around Østerbo lake.

At Østerbo we stayed in a full-service DNT cabin. This is much more like the cabins in the Alps–basically a hostel in the mountains. There we thanked Ole, who we learned had gone up the trail to clear snow from a few parts, and were generally amused by all the DNT-themed items, from pillowcases to napkins.

DAY FIVE: The Aurland Valley

Day five was the day we had been waiting for. While the previous few had been fun and beautiful, the stretch we hiked on day five is often seen as one of the top day hikes in Norway. Every blog, map, and conversation we had that steered us here was absolutely right.

Imagine a valley that looks a bit similar to Yosemite (steep granite walls, tons of waterfalls), but bring the scale down a little (narrower, a bit less tall), add more waterfalls (a lot more), and then dump a ton of plantlife on top (as opposed to the general dryness of the Sierra Nevada). Add in that we were scrambling over rocks, past gorgeous lakes, and saw just a handful of other people, and you have a pretty perfect day of hiking. Here’s a few too many photos:

We also saw some lovely wildflowers…

And passed a few of these fasinating rock formations–evidently caused by whirlpools when this used to be a river.

But, the real highlight was the goats. After passing a massive waterfall, we came to a small farm hanging on the side of the canyon with a fair-sized herd of goats blocking the path. A young woman sitting among the goats said it was fine to just push through them, that they were friendly and wouldn’t hurt us. This statement was immediately followed by the two goats closest to us head butting each other. But we pushed on through and were greeted by the cutest, friendliest goats ever. The little ones in particular wanted to be pet, and one followed me for quite a way.

Eventually, at the end of our hike, we ended up fast-walking as best we could into the town of Vassbygdi, where we planned to catch a bus. The issue was that we were running perhaps a couple of minutes late to catch the two o’clock bus…and the next bus didn’t come until five hours later. We were pretty scared we’d missed it, but when we saw the bus in the distance, we ran to catch it just as they were loading people on. Yay! (And there we were greeted by the German and Norwegian couples again…)

The bus dropped us off in Aurlandsvangen, a town just a few miles up the fjord from Flåm. We stayed in a nice little hotel where we were able to clean up a bit (we had even reserved one of our three shirts to be clean for hanging out in town–we were traveling light!) and then spent the late afternoon mostly hanging out fjord-side, watching the ferries (which we would catch the next day) come and go…

DAY SIX: Turlidfossen/Stegastein Loop

Before catching the ferry out of town, we spent the morning doing a beautiful little loop right out of Aurlandsvangen. We started by heading up the Aurlands Valley past a bunch of small farms.

Eventually, we approached the Turlidfossen, an enormous waterfall. To us, this was stunningly beautiful and dramatic, but it didn’t even show up on the maps around the area pointing tourists to the best waterfall hikes. Whatever, we loved it.

The trail was pretty ridiculous though. It led right up to the base of the waterfall, where we were completely soaked before we got anywhere close to it. There was so much water in the air that it was hard to get a picture as my phone was instantly soaked each time I took it out of my pocket. But, it looked something like this…

Luckily, the sky cleared up soon after and we dried off pretty quickly as we went climbed up the cliffside and eventually crossed the stream that created that waterfall. The views kept getting better the higher we got, and we also encountered some lovely wildflowers and a lamb with a bit of a “fuck off” attitude (as opposed to most of the very scared sheep in the area).

Rounding the shoulder of the mountain, we came across the area’s second biggest tourist trap (after the Flåmsbana), the Stegastein Viewpoint. This has a lovely wooden walkway extending out from the hillside to an overlook of the Aurlandsfjord, the branch of the Sognefjord where Aurlandsvangen and Flåm are located.

We then descended steeply down towards Aurlandsvangen, passing over rugged, rooty, woodland trails, glimpsing a fancy new one-family rental hut, and eventually getting some nice views over the town as we wandered in.

After another few hours of chillin’ in town, we caught a ferry headed out along the Sognefjord towards Bergen…

…but that’s a story for another day (or maybe week), so you’ll just have to wait. More Norwegian adventures to come (when I’m not busy studying for my next math test or trying to figure out what it means now that I’m going to officially be a math teacher in two weeks)…