Copenhagen based Scot Jim Chalmers is continuing his epic Norwegian traverse from south to north. Dave Hewitt updates the progress of his challenging journey.
More news this week from Jim Chalmers, the Copenhagen-based walker/skier first mentioned here in March. He's attempting a Norwegian traverse, end-to-end, from Lindesnes in the south to the Nordkapp inside the Arctic Circle. He started on 9 February and hopes to finish in August or September.
We last heard tell of him on the Hardangarvidda, on skis, and he has continued to send occasional reports from his Palm handheld machine, often prefaced with comments such as, "Hope you got the email I sent this morning. I was standing in the middle of a big frozen lake when I sent it, because I wasn't sure I'd have mobile access this evening."
He's been making steady progress and recently took the intended break back home between the skiing and the walking parts of the trip. The skiing remained reasonable for a while - eg when crossing the Alvdal Vestfjell he was able to say, "conditions were pretty good as long as I got up early enough in the morning. By afternoon, rising temperatures turned the snow to slush but I had some excellent sunny and ski-ey mornings."
Warmer weather and a thaw was always going to be a problem at some stage however and the skis began to feel like a liability when Jim reached Langen, a couple of days from the Swedish border. "It warmed up and rained and the serious thaw started. Little burns a metre wide that you just step over in the summer became 10-20 metres wide and knee-deep. There was still lots of snow, though but even in the morning I was wading calf-deep with my skis on. It took me eight hours for the 12km from Langen to Ljxsnavollen, the last hut before the border. After much heart-searching, I decided that that was it, that this was the thaw and I needed to get out rather than head up into the big hills of Swedish Sylarne."
This wasn't easy, however, "I needed to stop skiing from where it would be straightforward to continue walking and settled on Roros. It took me three days to get there. I had to partially reverse my route to Ljosnavollen and used 12 hours for the 27km to Marenvollen hut. After that I needed a rest, ironically during a day of heavy snowfall. My last day was the 29 April when I reached Rxros from where I took a train to Oslo and the overnight bus to Copenhagen."
Ending this section of the trip slightly ahead of schedule was evidently hard but pretty much enforced given the underfoot (or underski) conditions. But come the restart on foot earlier this week, at least the linearity of the expedition wasn't broken - Jim simply picked up the thread at Roros, on foot and carrying summer walking gear. The next stretch looks likely to feature endless daylight and hellish insects, "Arctic mosquitoes beat Scottish midges to a frazzle."
A while ago I asked Jim for his thoughts on his relative impressions of the Scottish and Norwegian hills, given that he knows both sides of the water well and is well placed to ponder such matters. "In many ways the two countries are similar," he writes, "but in many ways they are very different. Physically, the Scottish hills tend to be relatively narrow ridges separated by big wide valleys. This has created lots of ridges and peaks and has led to the Scottish sports of peak bagging and ridge-wandering. On the other hand, the Norwegian hills tend to be big wide plateaux separated by deep, relatively narrow valleys, some of which are flooded by the sea, the fjords.
"The scale of the Norwegian mountain areas is several times that of the Scottish hills, so the Scottish style of day-trips from a road up to a peak, along a ridge and back to the road isn't quite so practical here. Instead, the Norwegians have developed a mountain-wandering style of multi-day through-trips, more or less ignoring the peaks. To do this while carrying all your equipment involves heavy loads, especially in winter, so over the last 120-130 years an extensive network of huts joined by marked paths has developed, maintained by the Norwegian Touring Association, known to all as DNT (www.turistforeningen.no)
"In summer, the paths are marked with cairns and red-painted T marks on the cairns or on rocks. The winter routes can be very different from the summer ones and are marked with what the Norwegians call kvister, usually branches cut from birch trees or two-metre long bamboo canes. I have also seen (rarely) plastic poles.
"I suppose the best comparison between most Norwegian mountain areas would be with the Cairngorms and other eastern Scottish areas but the scale is much bigger. My trip could be compared with starting at sea level in Perth, then using five days to walk across the low ground to get up on to the high ground of the Mounth around Clova. Since then, I have skied on mountain plateaux like the Mounth and the Cairngorms for the equivalent of the distance from Clova to Shetland. And I am still [this was in late March] in the early stages of the whole trip.
"Having said this, there are some pretty substantial alpine-type mountains, too. The southern fringe of the Jotunheimen contains a lot of big ridges and peaks over 2,000m. Its western end, the Hurrungane, is like the Cuillin at twice the size plus glaciers. Other areas with really substantial peaks are Rondane, Romsdal, the islands of Lofoten and - way up in the Arctic - the Lyngen Alps. There are many glaciated areas, including several icecaps. The biggest, Jostedalsbre, is over 30km long and up to 10km wide."
As Scotland served up a distinctly iffy spring, I asked Jim about climatic comparisons. "Norwegian winters tend to be substantially colder than Scottish ones," he wrote. "This means that snow falling on Norwegian hills tends to stay there all winter. You don't get the freeze-thaw cycle so prevalent in Scotland. This means that Norwegian skiing is much better than Scottish but that Scottish ice climbing is better than Norwegian, because the high hills are blanketed in snow. Norwegian ice climbing tends to be on frozen waterfalls at moderate altitudes.
"The snow generally melts all at once, in May and June [early rather than late this year], which puts the hills somewhat out of bounds at those times because of the dangers of avalanches and floods. Summer conditions tend to be much more similar, though Norway, at least away from the west coast, is a good bit less windy than Scotland. That's one of the reasons the treeline here is at about 900m, though lower in the west. I guess trees would grow to the same height in the Cairngorms if there weren't so many deer."
As for accommodation, Scotland has a habit of appearing primitive compared with the continental ranges and this certainly seems to be the case when compared with Norway. "The huts come in three different types," Jim writes, "unserviced, self-service and serviced." (Scottish bothies tend to come in just one type, in my experience.)
"The serviced huts are basically mountain hotels, somewhat like the alpine huts. They have a staff who clean and maintain the building and meals are served - and often the food is excellent. Breakfast always consists of a buffet, fixed price, eat what you like. There's usually porridge, muesli, other cereals, lots of milk and yoghurty things, many types of salami and other meats, cheeses, bread, often freshly baked, tea and coffee. You make up a lunch packet from the breakfast buffet. Dinner is usually three-course and helpings are large, though you can opt to have just the main course. Starter is often soup but can be many other things, including some substantial salads. Main course is usually meat or fish (or vegetarian if you want) with lots of veg and potatoes. Then some kind of milky dessert, followed by coffee and cake."
Talk of such feasts makes this walker a tad annoyed at the often woeful level of service and hospitality available in the Scottish Highlands. Whether it's a consequence of a lacklustre tourist board, a near-absence of inter-hotel competition or just plain old-fashioned miserableness, far too many places in Scotland leave the paying visitor underfed and give off an air of having provided a grudging favour, not a service. The most curious aspect of this, for me, is the paradox whereby the hospitality of individual Scots is rightly famed but the instant it toggles into the commercial sector the chances are that the service (for example re bar meals) will be dismal.
Jim continues, "The unserviced and self-service huts are basically similar, though with one substantial difference. In both types you get beds and bedding, a fire and fuel (always wood), a gas cooker and cups and plates and cutlery. In the self-service huts, in addition there is a supply of food. You take what you want. There is a price list in the hut and you pay for what you take. The food available is pretty reasonable given that it has to stand for long times, often frozen. So there are packet soups, tinned soup and meat dishes of many kinds, often meatballs, rice, pasta, potato powder (good!), crisp-bread, processed cheese, jams, honey, biscuits, milk powder, sugar etc. DNT report a mis-payment rate of 2% - that's to say, 98% of the food taken is paid for.
"The huts can be of many different sizes. The big serviced huts have beds for up to 150 and more on the floor. The biggest self-service huts have beds for 50 or 60." Jim wrote this, however, from a much smaller establishment, "one room with four beds, and an attached wood store and dry loo. No one had been here for some days, so the hut was cold when I arrived. I had a cup of hot cocoa from the store when I got here. It's blowing a blizzard outside, but I have a fire in a typical Norwegian cast-iron stove, much more efficient than open fires, and the hut is warm and cosy. I've been out to choose my dinner from the store. Soon I'll light the candles and settle down for the evening. It's not quite a bothy." Indeed. As to prices, "a night's lodging in an unserviced or self-service hut costs 130 kroner, roughly £10. A serviced hut costs about £13 plus about £6 for breakfast and £13 for three-course dinner. In the unserviced or self-service huts, you pay for your lodging and food by putting cash or a credit card payment authorisation in a box in the hut. All on trust.
"When you're wandering the hills, you're not quite coming over the tops. Most of the routes, especially the skiing ones, are several hundred metres below the high tops. The huts are generally at between about 800m and 1,600m. I have been over one area that resembled Monadh Mor, on the Hardangarvidda, but often I'm skiing with scenic hills all around. Other times I get dramatic views over big valleys below me, and there have been quite a few places where I've skied under huge crags like Lochnagar or Coire Etchachan.
"All this of course is helped by the Norwegian law of access, the allemannsrett. It basically says that anyone has the right to walk or ski anywhere that isn't cultivated ground, and cultivated ground is defined fairly tightly. I think the crop needs to have been planted or sown, so a farmer cannot say that unsown grass is cultivated. Everyone has the right to camp for up to two nights on the same spot that must be more than 150 metres from a building. Everyone has the right to navigate on any inland waterway using human or wind power. And anyone in possession of a fishing permit (available for nominal sums) has the right to fish any water. Quite a difference from Scotland."
Interesting stuff. There is a lot we can learn, both individually and in terms of the structures and legalities. News of Jim's summer progress will be reported in Summit Talks in due course. He's contactable from time to time at jim.chalmers@get2net.dk
Dave Hewitt
6/6/2002
Dave can be contacted at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
