Even though I haven’t climbed properly for a fair while I still identify myself as a climber. Aimi and I enjoy trips like this where we can randomly clamber over rocks. The ones we found today are part of a huge rock slide and a UNESCO Global Geopark. Apparently it’s one of the largest scree slopes in the world at over 100 meters thick. Not wide… THICK.
While I read the information placard, Aimi rolled her eyes and wandered off. ( The rock is rare on earth but the same as the moon’s bright bits, Anorthosite! ) She found her own placard at the start of a Via Ferrata tour of the boulder field. We had thought to bring our kit, but information on where to go was limited and left it behind in the end. But presented with the opportunity there was no way we could ignore climbing on these rocks.
Some of them were the size of a small house. And, knowing gravity as intimately as we all do, these house sized blocks don’t place themselves calmly at the foot of the mountain after years of careful descent. It’s quite a scary thought that they spend millennia as part of the mountain and then one day, decide to jump off and end up at the bottom. It could happen to any of the rocks above us, at any time….
Today we drove from our cabin near Stavanger to the valley where Ben & Becki are to be married tomorrow. Only stopping for fuel and a cinnamon roll, my knee was glad of a day sitting down after all the walking. However Aimi got itchy about getting out for a walk when we arrived. After solving the riddle about how to enter the hotel, we ended up going for a short walk into the woods and failing to find the castle ruins. We did, however, walk along the back of a firing range… I just pretended I didn’t know what it was, till we had passed by, to keep Aimi calm. It must be where the cross country skiers do their shooting. We also found a ski jumping training center with ramps from small, all the way up to terrifying.
As soon as we returned to the hotel from our short walk, we had a message from the guys that they finished helping set up the venue and were planning a walk. This was too much for me, so I dropped Aimi off and went to catch up on a bit of work for a couple hours. It sounded like a nice hike to a small waterfall and the weather held out till we were in the shop later getting dinner provisions. Then it abruptly started hailing marble sized lumps of ice. Perfectly suitable for the BBQ we had planned.
That evening, after Dave had re-cut the pre-cut hot dog rolls and we had filled ourselves with salad and cremated sausages, we enjoyed a game of trivia. In Norwegian. With a few beers and some optimistic pronunciations of an unknown language we were all rolling around laughing.
