From Thursday 22nd to Saturday 24th of March we did our third student organized field trip. As most of the people from our class planned longer trips Laura and I decided to do a trip on ourselves to Ljosland. Our aim for this trip was to sleep in a tent for two days in a row. As usual we printed out a map from norgeskart.no and packed our big backpack with all our equipment needed for staying outdoors for two days. We started driving from Kristiansand in the morning that we arrived at Ljosland Skicenter around midday. Ljosland skicenter is a good starting point for downhill skiing and cross-country skiing. The area was a quite hilly, so we had a lot of up- and downhill on our trip. Furthermore, there were mostly mountains and a few lakes around, but you hardly saw trees.
Our first day was a real “blue bird skiing day” which means we had a blue sky and a lot of sun. As I was a bit ill the day before we started our trip I wasn`t in my best health conditions and felt a little bit battered and weak on my legs. Because of this we decided to not go on unprepared slopes and do less kilometres. So, we went some kilometres further of Lakkenstova and did around nine kilometres on Thursday. The snow was really soft that even the waxing didn`t help to give the skis more grip. The only thing which would have made the skiing easier in this snow would have been klister. As we haven`t had klister our skis were quite slippery, and the skiing was more exhausting than usual. Especially for going uphill we always had to use the fishbone technique. As the weather was still really nice after we built up our tent we decided to go for a little hike up a peak to watch the sunset. The view from the mountain was amazing. We looked over flat areas which had formations which looked like they were “out of this world” because the snow was formed randomly by the wind. The night wasn`t really cold therefor we slept quite good in our tent.
The next morning when we went out of our tent the weather changed a lot. The view was really bad that you could only see two meters away combined with wind and a kind of mixture between rain and snow. Now we were really happy that we decided to stay with the track because in this bad condition it would have been really hard to navigate through unknown and unprepared area. As we still haven`t had klister our skis still were really slippery. Due to these conditions we wanted to go back to Ljosland skicenter as soon as possible and without any detouring. It was really difficult to ski through this weather as you hardly see anything, so you didn`t know what to expect next on the track. Sometimes it was even hard to follow the marks of the track. Furthermore, the clothes got quite wet because of the snow-rain. We protected our backpack with the raincape that our equipment in the backpack stayed dry. After 15 kilometers we arrived close to Ljosland and decided to put up our tent there. It was still quite early around half past three in the afternoon. The rest of the day we spent in the tent playing card games and reading. The atmosphere in the tent was quite cosy. Moreover, we tried out different possibilities how to get our clothes try again. For example, I sat on them, put them in the sleeping bag or put them in a drybag and put the drybag between my legs. While I was sleeping all my wet/moist clothes were in my sleeping bag and the clothes which still were most wet I left in the drybag between my legs. The next day you could wear all the clothes again. The clothes from the drybag weren`t completely dry but they were good to wear again. But compared to the other nights I slept in a tent the bottom of my sleeping bag and the top of my foam mat got really wet and I think it was because of the condensation of the tent which got probably worse because of the wet clothes in our tent.
After packing everything together we finished our last kilometre back to the car quite fast. All in all, it was a great experience and it showed me again how fast the weather can change especially in mountain areas. It also was great to try out the equipment in wet conditions.