Self-organized ski trip

18.02.20 – 20.02.20

My groupmates were Jasmine, Ho and Stefan.

We had to plan the entire trip from scratch, the only conditions we had to meet were that we sleep at least for two nights and that we use our skies.

For planning we decided to meet up as a group. We used maps from DNT to find a good route. Our plan was to move from one DNT hut to the next. On the map we could see the distances between each hut, so we decided to do our trip next to Hovden, because the distances between the huts didn’t seemed to long and it’s good reachable by the public bus.

We used norgeskart.no to print out the maps. After we put the maps together, Jasmine created the route cards for our trip. The route cards contain all important information’s about time management, orienteering and alternative routes if something goes wrong.

We decided to have dinner together as a group, we bought groceries for tacos, vegetable stir-fry, and pasta with tomato sauce. Besides the personal equipment and food, we had to split up the food for the dinner, 2x Trangia’s, 1x tarp, 1x 4-person tent and 1x Ski wax/Klister. We tried to split the weight equal, so everyone’s backpack has about the same weight.

We started our trip on Tuesday morning. We all met at Hokus Pokus and walked together to the public bus. While being on the bus towards Hovden, we talked with other groups that went on the same bus, looked at our route cards again and noticed that the first day is to much for us, so we decided to do our trip the other way around, because the distance to the first hut was shorter.
At Berdalen we got out of the bus and waxed our skis. Our goal was to reach the first DNT hut before sunset. We started directly by going uphill. After following the road for 1km we found the trail that was leading towards Berdalsblu, the place where the hut is located. Luckily there was a trail made by a snowmobile and other cross-country skiers, we followed the trail and the signs for the first few kilometres. At one point the trails separated, so we had to get our map and compass out. Neither way had pointed directly in the right direction, we took the path that looked easier to ski. The trail was most of the time uphill which was quite tiring, we put more wax on because we didn’t need to slide on the skies. I had the map around my neck, but I found out that it is difficult to locate the position in an area with snow, regular paths or rivers were covered. We kept following the trail. At around 6 pm it was dark outside, and we still had not reached our destination. It started to snow and wind, no one of the group wanted to sleep outside in a tent, so we took our headtorches out and kept skiing. Ho and Stefan forgot their headtorches, I went in the front to search for a way and Jasmine went with her headtorch in the back, so everyone had a bit of light to ski. After quite some time skiing in the dark, Ho searched our location on google maps and we saw that we are not too far away from the hut, we used our last energy resources to get to the hut and were more than happy that we finally reached the DNT cabin. The hut was already warm, and we had to share it with three polite Norwegian ladies. We cooked our dinner, melted snow and went directly to sleep.

The next day, Jasmine and I caught a cold and we all decided to stay at the hut, also because the weather forecast was predicting bad weather in our region. Instead of moving to the next hut we started skiing on the mountain behind our hut. On this day we had perfect conditions, the sun was shining and because it snowed in the last night, we had fresh powder snow. The snow was even deep enough to jump of the roof of our hut. The mountain was the perfect spot to train our off-piste skills. We went up the mountain multiple times, at the end of the day, we definitely had a few kilometres of distance. To end the second day, we took our shovels and built a bench to watch the sunset. We happened to meet Tim who went to the same hut with a group of schoolkids on the same day. We spoke with him about the conditions and, he told us it is better to go back on the next day. We followed his advice and decided to go back on the next day. We packed most of our stuff before we went to bed, so we were ready to leave.

On the third day we cleaned the rest of the DNT hut, prepared the fireplace and melted some snow for the next visitors, then we grabbed our skies and headed back.
We already knew the way, so we didn’t had to use the map again, we could just follow the track, it was still visible. It turned out that the way back was way faster than we expected because it was only downhill. Only in the end it was difficult, the snow was wet, and it was hard to turn the skis. We made it down in about half the time we needed to go up. We were so quick that we could catch the bus towards Hovden, were we sat down in a café and bought some snacks from the supermarket until we went on the bus back to Kristiansand.