Besseggen

cad:

The next day, the plan was to hike over Besseggen pass in Jotunheimen - the cool part here is you hike across a narrow band of land separating two lakes that are at radically different altitudes - this was sort of my fallback plan if the really tall mountain were still frozen over (I decided not to risk sleeping in the car an extra thousand meters up - it was cold enough as it was!) I'm glad we got to see a little bit of Breheimen, but trying to make decent time over route 55 without burning out either my brakes or the little tiny transmission in our hybrid put us really far behind schedule. (Note for anyone finding this blog out there on the internet: TAKE ROUTE 51 INSTEAD)

PS - thanks to Mer for keeping this blog going - this may have been the missing ingredient from the last several tarvel bogs.

/cad

I don't know how we both missed this during our planning (I suspect out-of-date website) -- but we arrived at Gjendesheim exactly one day before the official start of the season. whoops! The original plan was to do as most people do: park at Gjendesheim, take the ferry west to Memurubu, and hike the ridge back to Gjendesheim.

But the ferry schedule wasn't due to start until the following day, though it was out there making dry runs back and forth just to rub it in our sleep deprived faces.  So we instead set out to hike from Gjendesheim up the ridge a ways and back.

The considerable upside was that this hike, which is evidently Norway's most popular mountain walk with 30k+ hikers per year, was way less crowded than it would have been during the official season. There were a few fellow climbers that seemed to be regulars that probably lived nearby (one of them, a wiry middle-aged dude, somehow sprinting down a fairly precipitous rocky descent like a friggin mountain goat with his Australian shepherd like it was flat ground), and a handful of people doing multi-day Jotunheimen camping trips, but it was all pretty chill.

Pictures!

facing south toward Lake Gjende: the building toward the left of the picture is the tourist hostel, and the lot to the right is the ferry terminal and parking lot that we started out from

up up! occasional rock scrabbling getting up to the ridge

mostly it was scree and snow

snoooooooooooow

looking down at Lake Gjende again

please ignore my sleepy derpy face and behold the norwegian to the right who is hiking up all this snowscree with a backpack terrier

woo!

woo!

along the ridge

Gjende to the left (blue, liquid, low), Bessvatnet to the right (green, still totally frozen, much higher elevation)

the snow was about shin to knee deep with a lumpy packed down trail that was a huge pain to descend, but if you kinda did the worm walk from Dune it was possible to shuffle-run down the smooth snow to the side of the trail without sinking all the way in

me and my janky left heel were less successful :)