My friend Audun and I however, are snowboarders. So we decided to bring along our snowboard boots and snowboards along with us on top of all the other gear we had. This made the half hour trip to base camp seem a little bit longer. It would have been worth it too if the weather held up.
The first day was fine, we drove up to where we would leave the cars, unpacked the gear, packed the gear onto us, and then started walking to make camp. (Map) It was partly cloudy with some sun which made it great for putting up the tents. They actually went up pretty fast considering all the work you have to do to put up tents in the snow.
-Pitching a tent in the snow is a little different then pitching it on solid ground. First you have to walk over the area that you want to pitch it to pack down the snow while wearing skies and then put it up while wearing skies. When your done with that, you have to dig holes at the entrances to store clothes/gear,change, etc. Well I guess I dont make it sound like a lot of work but it is in reality..
Anyways, like I said the tents went up pretty fast and then we decided to take it easy and call it a day. Unfortunately it was very warm that night and the next day so we got some rain.. Rain isn't that good for skiing for a number of reasons (avalanche danger, slow skiing, wet leading to being cold). We still took a trip into the mountains however, well half a trip. It was extremely windy towards the top so we headed down early. Now how it works is we went up on skies and then skied down BUT, I was the only one to strap my snowboard to my back and snowboard down! If we back up for a second youll recall that I said it was fairly windy towards the top. Imagine a long, wide board, strapped horizontally to your back. There was A LOT of wind resistance and not to mention the snowboard boots in my backpack for extra weight.
We had lunch before we headed back down the mountain, but again, like I said before it was fairly windy so we had to build a snow-wall to protect ourselves from the wind while we munched on our cold lunch. I finished early and it was a good thing to because I had to take of my skies and ski boots and then put on my snowboard boots and snowboard, then strap my skies to my backpack and put my ski boots in my backpack. And of course the wind had to pick up to epic proportions when I was trying to do all of this.. I did it though and snowboarded down the mountain. It wasnt as amazing as I had hoped and I thought it was because of the weight of the skies and other gear on my back but it turned out that everyone was slugging down the mountain. Thanks to the warm air and the rain the snow had become a gluey mess. I was able to snowboard straight down an extremely steep mountain with ease.
The report was that this was going to be the worst day (Tuesday), so we stayed the night. I was in my tent around 16:00 (4:00PM) and was up until about 23:00 (11:00PM) and all I head.. rain. So when I woke up the next morning we had our normal morning meetings (gathering) and we took a vote to head back to school and go river kayaking the rest of the week. Now it was too bad that the weather didnt hold up but we still did get to see some amazing scenery of Norway and some epic mountains. Im happy we at least got to try though! And now we're spending the rest of the week kayaking! Oh man was that fun today!!
Heres a link for some of the pictures =)
https://picasaweb.google.com/norsyn/WeekInTheMountainsMarch?authuser=0&feat=directlink
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