Day 70 – to Innerdalen

I left a sleeping Rindal and drove twenty minutes or so to a trail access point for the Trollheimen mountains. Rindal had been a good overnight stay, despite its youths disturbing the peace one their incredibly noisy trail motorcycles until after midnight. The Thai food hut had been a pleasant surprise, and was really good.

The Trollheimen mountains are known for their dramatic scenery. Though not a National Park, it is a landscape conservation area. To the east are gentle foothills, to the west inaccessible jagged peaks well beyond most mountaineers. It’s a glacier shaped landscape, with farming in its valleys, and settlements dating back to the Stone Age.

I’m going to be around these mountains all week, though my introduction to them was on a drizzly overcast morning in wetlands, with the peaks barely visible. I took an off-piste return from the path I had headed out on.. not that there was much difference. It meant a kilometres walk back on the gravel road. The only car I saw pulled over for a chat. It was a hydroelectric worker and his 95 year old father. He told me he wasn’t working, ‘just looking’. His father had worked on the dam further up the road when it was constructed 65 years ago. They were the second people who told me what a rough summer it had been in central Norway, with record amounts of rain, and temperatures never reaching 20C.

I drove south on roads with wonderful scenic vistas as the cloud cleared. Though only 80 kilometres or so, the route involved taking a ferry at Kvanne. They run every half hour, but I arrived at lunch break, so took my own also.

My destination was Innerdalen, spoken of by Norwegian Tourism as the country’s most beautiful mountain valley. Their promotion, not that it needs it, clearly works, as the car park at the head of the road was busy. Further north, in the more wild valleys it’s possible to drive further up the valleys, but since 2010, it is not allowed to drive up the track to the huts in 5 kilometres. It’s the weekend of course, and the car park is busy with hikers from cities of the south. It’s even a possibility for a long weekend visit from Oslo, 5 hours drive away. The visitors in cars had generally arrived on Friday and stayed in the huts higher up the valley. By 6 pm almost all had gone. There were two other campervans, both solo travelling women, who it was good to chat to. A Dutch woman, with her three noisy Siberian huskies in a self converted, but not by her, Renault, which had a surprising lack of luxury to it; portable gas stove, and unable to store much power. The other woman was an Austrian in a hired pop top Opel Crosscamp, away for 4 weeks, and was today at the end, driving all the way back to Germany tomorrow. The van looked a bit cheap and nasty to me, as a lot of hire vans are, but I kept my thoughts to myself..

I arrived in good time for a hike up the Grasdalen valley. The route crosses two fast-flowing rivers, one a tributary of the other, before it climbs to the ruin of a shepherd’s cottage, last occupied in 1856. Its worth thinking how life must have been then, with the long dark winters when most likely they were completely isolated and needed to be self sufficient.

My timing was almost perfect to get back to the van for the deciding game from Lahore. I say almost, because it would have been impolite to break off my conversation with the Dutch lady to say the cricket was starting. I doubt she would have understood me anyway.