Norsk Bremuseum
Although the Norwegian Glacier museum is on the flat floor of Bøyadalen, it is surrounded by steep mountains, some smothered by the tongues and mounds of ice that are part of the mighty Jostedalsbreen, the biggest glacier system in Europe. This is the view up the valley from the roof with a tiny part of Jostedalsbreen in the distance.
Inside there are excellent exhibits on how glaciers form and flow and glacier-related phenomena such as jokulhlaups(an Icelandic word), the enormous floods that happen when a glacial lake drains catastrophically due to geothermal melting or a volcanic eruption. There was a truly impressive 20 minute video of one such event in Iceland in 1996; at its peak, the water flowing due to this event was the about eight times the flow of Niagara Falls. But Zoe's favorite exhibit was about Ötzi, the 5000 year-old ice-mummified man that was discovered melting out of some ice on the Italian-Austrian border. Here she is in front of a reconstruction of him as he might have looked before he died -- of arrow wounds inflcited by other men.
On the drive to the glacier museum we drove up Kjøsnesdalen, then through a couple of Norway's many long mountain tunnels, an experience in and of itself. Ideally, you want to eat carrots for a few weeks before driving these tunnels, the lighting can be really difficult.
The nuseum is just a few kilometers from the head of Fjærlandsfjorden, one of the several arms of Sognefjorden, the longest fjord system in Norway. The day's drive took us to the head of another arm of the fjord, then up the steep and winding Sognefjell Road to where we would begin our hike...