Saturday, August 22, 2009

butterblock mountain

Last weekend J and I went off for another little hike in our local area. We didn't leave home until 4pm but with the light still lasting well into the night up here in the arctic, we figured we would be alright. We headed out towards our local surf beach and stopped at a lake along the way. From there we began to climb and climb and climb. This is a shot from about half way up the mountain, looking back down towards the road, the lake where we started and our home fjord in the background.
From here you could see what looked like the remains of an old glacier high up in the surrounding mountains.
While we had a map and thought the path seemed obvious (see dirt track in first pic), once we approached the top, paths went off in multiple directions. After a while we realised that they were all probably just little paths carved upon the mountain by multiple little sheep feet. We eventually found the lake on top of the mountain that the map told us we were aiming for, but we did not appear to have come by the traditional route of course. This didn't really matter as the end point was the same. From the top of this butter block mountain, we could look out to where our fjord, Kaldfjord, meets a neighbouring fjord, Vengsøyfjord, and both flow out to the sea. On this day the meeting was blessed by a rainbow.
On the way back down we tried to follow the map indicated path and passed above our local surf beach. Once again, no surf to be seen.
We did see a little family of quail like birds though and that was really nice. Mina, who likes to think of herself as a great bird hunter was perhaps the most excited, although luckily for the birds she was on a lead at that stage so all potential for feathered heartattacks was fortunately avoided. It was a lovely little walk, even if J and I were both feeling rather drained on the haul up! I hope we can do it again before we are snowed out by the winter, but this weekend I am heading back to the walk from the last post to see if I can't find some patches of ripe and ready to pick blueberries :) xxx

1 comment:

DrK said...

what a spectacular place you have moved to! amazing.