Walking from tip to tip of Norway Scot Jim Chalmers updates Dave Hewitt on the latest leg of his challenging journey.
It's been a couple of months since we've had an update on Jim Chalmers, the Copenhagen-based walker/skier mentioned previously in March and June. He's nearing the end of a Norwegian traverse, Lindesnes in the south to the Nordkapp in the north, a kind of Land's End to John O'Groats with icy knobs on.
Not only that but in the finest Jack Bauer tradition he's carrying Palm Handheld (while hopefully not having Dennis Hopper chasing after him) and so is able to keep the world updated as to his progress. So here, for the benefit of those such as Mike Thewlis of Perth who have been asking, is where he's up to now.
The expedition started on 9 February, included an at-home interlude in late May between the skiing and walking sections, then restarted, on foot, from Roros on 31 May. To get some kind of idea as to how far Jim still had to go at this point, Roros is only slightly further north than the Faroe Islands - and he was aiming to finish a further nine degrees north, well inside the Arctic Circle. He crossed into the Circle on 15 July, coincidentally within 1km of clocking up 2,000km for the whole trip.
Three weeks after leaving Roros, on 22 June, Jim had mailed to tell of his crossing of the "lowland" areas of mid-Norway, the Trondelag. "Even more than in Scotland," he wrote, "lowland is not quite accurate, for there are quite high hills, up to 1,000m but most of the area consists of rolling, forested, hilly country at between 200m and 800m with a lot of cloudberry heath. There are also a lot of big lochs and rivers, so I have spent a fair amount of my time on minor roads. Luckily it's possible to connect together the hill areas by walking mostly along gravel roads but they are roads nonetheless. This has meant fast progress and I covered nearly 500km in a little over three weeks."
The North Trondelag he described as being "what much of the Highlands would be like if the Great Forest of Caledon hadn't been removed." The changeover between the last of the winter snows and the warmer weather of summer led to worries about the snowline but "everyone is commenting on how early the season is. There is little or no snow left below about 1,000m and only patches of what they call summer snow, old snow in firm condition, above that height. So no problems."
After much solo progress, Jim was joined by his wife Anne for the initial ten days of this stretch - and, unlike most of Scotland at that time, they were lucky with the weather. "Temperatures well up in the 20s," he wrote, "and sunshine, sunshine, sunshine." Then, alone again, came a spell that was "almost October: cold, windy and heavy showers".
"Even road walking in the rain is lovely at times because of the flowers. There are still beautiful areas of wild flowers here, like I remember from Scotland in my childhood 50 years ago, but that has been destroyed by modern farming. So I'm continually walking past these big expanses of colour. A lot of birdlife too - with most of them rearing chicks. It's common to have a ptarmigan family (and once even a capercaillie) explode out from under my feet as I stumble through their home."
The end of this lowland stretch saw him enter Borgefjell, a national park "where no development of any kind is allowed - no farming, no industry, no new buildings, no motor vehicles off-road, unlike the Parks for Skinning Money off Tourists being instigated in Scotland." Indeed.
Just before writing this I mailed Jim to tell of the shiny new Loch Lomond and Trossachs park. Contrasting sharply with the Borgefjell, Lomond/Trossachs is being marketed/hyped with particular reference not to its hills and glens, nor to Loch Lomond itself, but to, ahem, shopping. At the time of the official opening, the quotable line was that the new £60 million shopping complex at the south end of Loch Lomond would be "the jewel in the crown" of the park. Heaven help us.
Jim spent a week crossing the Borgefjell, despite his original plan having been to avoid it entirely, "thinking it would be a bit dangerous with several crossings of big rivers. Once here, I discovered that perhaps the only amenity the park offers is a few bridges across some of the biggest of the rivers at strategic points."
On 17 July he mailed full of the Borgefjell joys, "In the east, where I was, it's wild, high country with big rivers and lochs and bare, slabby peaks. I even managed Scottish-style hillwalks over a couple of them. In the west are even higher, alpine mountains with glaciers, where I wasn't, but they gave me superb views during some pretty pleasant weather.
"I also had some fairly close encounters with wildlife, especially reindeer. In summer these live in groups from a few up to 40 or 50. They tend to be as nervous of humans as red deer are, especially if they have calves. But one group of stags behaved quite differently. I came across them in the afternoon when the animals tend to lie on snow patches to ruminate and avoid the biting flies.
"I didn't want to disturb this group, so tried to circle round them out of sight, but they spotted me and were very curious to find out what I was. At one point, I was crouched in a corner of a wee crag with a semi-circle of reindeer around me 10-20 metres away and the one with the biggest antlers sniffing from a range of about five metres. Maybe I've been out so long now that, like Hamish Brown and his mouse, I no longer smell human - despite fairly regular applications of soap and water."
This stretch also produced sightings of an arctic fox, and Jim was mobbed several times by buzzards through walking too close to nests. Further north, he reports snow buntings and alpine larks as common sights on the higher ground, while there are regular sightings of "a bird a little like a robin but with blue and orange stripes on its chest instead of red. I don't know its name in English. In Norwegian it's called a blastrupe."
North of the Borgefjell, Jim met two Danish friends for a tour of the Okstindane and Svartisen glaciers then aimed for "the wonderful valley of Stormdal. It was hot sunny weather when we came through the middle glen. There was no path through the birchwood and bogs, most of which were covered in bog willow. It was unbelievably hard work, never anywhere we could walk a straight line. We had to weave from one slightly easier passage to the next, trying to avoid the small birch that's always totally tangled and above all trying to avoid the willow that is not only tangled but grows in muddy bogs. We were not always successful in either. The hot sunny weather brought out the clegs in squadrons.
"We had to cross two fairly big rivers and the crossings had to be found, for most places were rapids and waterfalls. It was, of course, melt water and icy cold and we crossed above knee depth. Despite being tired, wet, muddy and sweaty, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. Between the trees were the most wonderful little meadows of flowers, red, blue and yellow. Beside us roared a big blue/green river and high overhead soared splendid mountain peaks, some with little glaciers hanging under the lips of their corries. And the sun shone.
"A path climbs up the lower glen to a very basic hut, and were I to recommend any single walk in Norway, it would be this one, especially if you learn a bit about the history of the glen. Saltfjellet is rough. The rivers mostly run in gorges, generally impassable were it not for the little suspension bridges high over the roaring water. The glens are either wooded or wet or both, but we were mostly on the good paths that connect the huts.
"Above the tree line is a thin layer of moorland below the big, bare spiky peaks, and even the higher glens are free of vegetation - just lichens on the rocks and arctic buttercups peeping out between them.
"In addition to the reindeer, I've seen all sorts of other wildlife. Only two of Norway's ubiquitous animal, though, the lemming. Last year was a lemming year, and one man told us that it was sometimes difficult to drive without crushing lots of the animals under your wheels. This year, the remains of their winter quarters - grass-lined nests - are everywhere. But the animals are gone, just the occasional mummified corpse. I don't know why they die."
The weather for this stretch has been good, "mostly a bit overcast with some sunshine and temperatures in the low teens Celsius. I've had several really hot days with temperatures near 30C (yes, just south of the Arctic Circle) and rare days of heavy rain - only one of which was actually a walking day. I've been lucky that most of the really bad weather has been either at night or on rest days."
Mention of huts led to Jim querying my earlier comparison of Norwegian huts with Scottish bothies, where I didn't really compare like with like. "I don't think you were entirely fair to Scotland there," he writes. "There are bothies on the Norwegian hills too, stone shelters called steinbuer if they are big enough to walk into or kryppinn if they're not. They are the equivalent of Scottish bothies.
"In my opinion Scotland's club huts, independent hostels and youth hostels (remember them?) are much more the equivalent of the Norwegian huts than are the bothies. In my young days we all used youth hostels and some were great favourites - Ingrid at Glencoe and Jack Savage at Glen Nevis for instance. The remote ones at Affric and Corrour are like Norwegian unserviced huts. The independent hostels - some of them of really high quality - have burgeoned in the last few years, whereas in the old days we had Gerry's at Achnashellach, Nancy Smith's at Fersit and Glen Cottage in Torridon and that was all."
The most recent message arrived on 15 August, from Kilpisjaervi, "the last hamlet in northwestern Finland". Jim was cutting through Finland for a couple of days while linking Norway's Troms mountains with the mountain plateau of Finnmark. "Just over 2,500km down, about 500km to go."
The late July/early August spell had seen Jim accompanied by Anne for the "Northern Cap" route through Sweden. "This took us through classic Sami reindeer grazing country and past Sweden's (and northern Scandinavia's) highest mountain, Kebnekaise [2111m]. Anne went home from Abisko and since then I've continued along the Northern Cap trail through the really wild mountains of southern Troms. During next week [ie this past week] I'll cut through the top left arm of Finland then back into Norway to walk along the Reisadalen Canyon on my way to Kautokeino. From there it's straight north for 350km across pretty trackless terrain to my final goal, which I hope to reach on September 14 or thereabouts.
"In Norway, I met few people at all. The Norwegians, and particularly young Norwegians, seem to have given up walking on their mountains. As soon as we crossed the border into Sweden we met many people. Particularly young Swedes at first, but later, when we walked along part of the Kungsleden (the King's Path) we met other nationalities, too - but no one from the UK.
"Among the Troms mountains I met a few Norwegians, lots of Dutch, Germans and a few Italians, but only one Englishman - and he was really a cyclist, he said, not a hillwalker. It's an interesting reflection on the UK that, especially in Scotland, we have a huge debate about wilderness and access but few if any people from the UK visit the biggest and best wildernesses in Europe, where access is guaranteed by law. It seems to me that cheap wine and Alpine greasy poles may be more attractive to Brits than wilderness. And that really calls into question the reality behind our whole discussion on wilderness in Scotland."
On which stimulating note (feel free to contribute thoughts), Jim signs off prior to his final report from the Nordkapp in mid-September.
Oh, brief mention ought to be made of another walker heading for the Nordkapp - the insatiable James Gordon who was until recently based on Lagganside (from where, on 24 February, he became the first person known to have climbed all the 669 Corbett Tops). He's now away on a long trek, eyes set on the Arctic but having started from Gibraltar. There are some keen - and happy - people out there.
Dave Hewitt
22/8/2002
You can contact Dave at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
