2 Mountains 2 Days

When I got here more than a month ago (what even, how does time move so fast) I was excited about going on trips with OSI Fjell, but then I realized that there were not so many people actually organizing trips, so I decided to organize some of my own! For my first mountain adventure, I found a route on ut.no (the trip planner for DNT, which is the big wilderness touring association in Norway) that looked like it would be only the really fun parts of mountain hiking. We would camp between two mountains, hiking up one of them on Saturday and the other on Sunday. What could be more perfect?
On Friday afternoon, our group drove out to Jotunheimen. The group

that came with me included 3 Norwegians, 2 Germans, a girl from the UK that I have spent a bit of time with already, and me! Luckily, two of the group members had cars, so we didn't need to mess with public transportation on this trip.
Because of the traffic leaving Oslo (everyone, it seems, was headed to their cabin or to the mountains for the weekend), we didn't end up getting to the place we intended to start until the sun had already started setting, so we just set up our tents close to the parking lot and worked on getting a good nights sleep for the next day of hiking! It was actually pretty incredible that the two cars found each other since cell service stopped and it was dark by the time we found a parking place off the side of the road, but it all worked out!
On Saturday morning, we had oatmeal and coffee before heading up to Rasletind. The hiking was lovely, with a few hops across streams, some marshy ground and some boulder fields. The summit experience, however, left something to be desired. When we got to

the top, we signed our names in the book, but it was really foggy and windy, so we couldn't see anything, and we just huddled behind a rock eating a little bit of chocolate before heading back down. We took a slightly different route down than we had taken up since we had a good amount of time left in the day. Our route down included a slide down a relatively steep snowfield, which was incredibly fun, and brought back memories for me of self arresting down snowfields in the ANWR. The route down was also filled with berry picking and slightly sketchy descents off boulders.
When we got into camp, I made the group a big pot of peanut sauce rice and veggies. It was such a fun luxury to be able to have trail food that included a full kilo of carrots, 2 red onions, a head of broccoli and chickpeas. It seemed like everyone really enjoyed my gado gado sauce (thanks widji!) and it all got eaten really quickly.
After dinner, we all sat in the biggest tent to keep warm and talked for several hours, mostly about the different holidays that get celebrated in our respective home countries and food, which was pleasant. However, my friend Katie and I felt like we needed to do a little more walking and stretching outside before we could sleep, so we wandered around the area near our tent for a while, talking and

hoping the clouds would clear enough to see stars (they didn't, but that was fine, still a super pleasant stroll) before getting back into the tent to go to sleep.
On Sunday morning, we ate breakfast and packed up the cars before setting out to try to get to the summit of Tjønnholstiden. When we woke up, it was too foggy to see the mountains around us, but that all cleared up by the time we started hiking. This hike was a little longer, but the weather was also nicer once we got going.
Most of the rivers that we had to cross over the weekend were achievable by doing some rock hopping (ignoring all of the great risk management strategies I've learned at Widji), but there was a big one in the main valley we crossed where that was not possible, so we found a shallow part where the river bed was covered with small rocks and took off our boots to walk across the river (I realized that I actually really prefer the wet boot policy strategy, walking with bare

feet over even smooth small rocks is more painful than having wet boots for a bit). The ascent was pretty steep, and my calves got pretty sore, but the views around the valley were incredible the entire time. The surrounding mountains were really steep and impressive and full of glaciers and sparkling melt streams. With my new found glaciology knowledge, I could see the line between the accumulation and ablation zones of the glaciers, which was really fun.
Near the end of our ascent, some of us chose to go up a snow field, and others chose some surrounding boulders, but 2 members of the group chose not to continue going up. This wasn't communicated especially well, so those of us that had continued just went to an intermediate summit type place (not the summit we had aimed for) where we had a good view of the nearby glacier and the rest of the valley before heading back down. I think some people were disappointed that we didn't reach the actual summit, but it was getting late in the day and we didn't have the full group together any more. Personally, the whole day was so beautiful that I did not feel deprived in any way by not summiting.
I got to do some really incredible snow field walking on the descent. The snow was soft and I felt really safe going across a pretty large snowfield that let me avoid a big boulder field section. As I was

walking across the snowfield, I realized that I was following hoof prints! I'm not entirely sure what kind of ungulate had walked across the same snowfield I was walking across, but it was a really cool thing to think about. I love following ungulates around the mountains.
Getting down the mountain was much faster than getting up, and our journey was punctuated by the a second crossing of the river we took our boots off for and some members of the group occasionally stopping to climb big boulders.
When we made it back to the parking lot, everyone was really tired, but also seemed really happy with the weekend. I know I was. I could easily spend weeks in Jotunheimen, but a weekend was a great start.