Norefjell

Oslo is a fairly flat city, so I've been itching to find some large Norwegian mountains. This weekend I finally got my chance. It’s extremely fun to plan excursions like this, especially getting out of your comfort zone and throwing yourself into a new area to figure stuff out. I did some research on buses that went up into the mountains to the northwest of Oslo, and one of the cheaper ones was a 1.5 hour line that went to a ski area in a mountain range called Norefjell, which means "narrow mountain". So I woke up at 6am on Saturday and packed my backpack full with hiking gear, grabbed my skis, and took the T-bane into Oslo central station. I’ve never really gone to a big bus station before, so figuring out the different lines and such was a little confusing (especially since most of the signs are in Norwegian). After a confusing encounter with my bus driver who didn't speak english I settled into a seat and we drove off. The whole bus was filled with skiers, snowboarders, and cross country skiers already in all of their gear to save space on the bus.

It was fun to see a new part of Oslo as we drove out of the city to the west, crossing over mountains and valleys. The weather that day said it would be cloudy, so most of the trip I was looking up the mountains and hoping as the morning past the fog that seemed to settle on the upper half of the mountains would dissipate. Eventually we crossed a fjord called

and came to the base of the axis road, which was pretty similar to Killington but a bit smaller and more rustic. As we climbed up the switchbacks to the ski center we entered reached the level of the fog, so I was pretty pissed that I wasted $40 for a bus ticket for zero views. After about five minutes though I noticed in front of us the buildings began to have a sunny, reflective glow on them. We soon emerged out of the fog and it seemed like a foot of snow had just appeared on everything around us.

I got out with all the skiers and quickly began to throw on my gear. The time was about 11, and the bus was scheduled to leave at 3:30 to head back to Oslo so I didn't have much time to do some hiking. I also had a very small sense of my surroundings, having only been able to look at the satellite view of a google map of the area. I decided to just kinda bushwhack up to what seemed like the top of the ski area through the woods, and after about 30 minutes of hard climbing reached the highest lift area. The snow became kind of patchy, so I had to take off my skis and throw them on my backpack. I must have gotten some weird looks from all the people getting off the lift. The tops of the mountains looked really similar to those in the White Mountains. There was brown squishy moss covering almost everything, so crushing it with every step probably wouldn’t have made the environmentalists back home very friendly. But there were paths of snow mazing around the summit, so I followed these to the top and took some awesome pictures.

There was another higher summit about a mile to the northwest, so I put my skies back on and glided down the ridge. My wax had been completely scraped off because the snow was pretty much straight ice, so I just decided to skate ski since I had my skate poles anyways.

Back at the top of the other mountain I picked out two hikers, so I tried to catch up to them cause they seemed going in my same direction. Turned out they were in their downhill ski gear so it was really easy to catch up with them. They were two Norwegians who were hiking up so they could backcountry ski down the entire mountain.

I reached the top and took a ton of pictures, and mostly just basked in the blasting wind that was coming up from the north side of the mountain. I brought a ton of layers so I decided to just sit on the summit and eat my lunch, nice and warm in my puff jacket and ski glasses which protected me from the w

ind. I think most people would be really uncomfortable in those conditions, but for some reason I love just being blasted by the cold, sitting atop a conquered mountain. Maybe I’ve just taught my body to ignore the cold after having spent the past three weeks walking around Oslo underdressed all the time. Eventually I realized I was running out of time to make it back to the bus so I strapped on my skis and pretty much slid/fell on my ass all the way down the mountain, which really fucking hurt. Made me wish I had some edges on my skis to work with :)

Here's a youtube video of what it kind of looked like, if there was just a bit more snow.