The Trollheimen Triangle
Part 4: Trollhetta
We made the 23 km crossing from Trollheimshytta to Jøldalshytta in all-out spring weather. We were ready to sit out a blizzard or ski in the rain, but instead we found ourselves wishing we had brought shorts, t-shirts, and baseball hats -- and more sunscreen. Old SPF 30 isn't quite enough when you are bathed in direct and reflected light all day long. The mountains had been receding into a thick haze over the previous couple of days -- not pollution, but a huge amount of water vapor from the sublimating snow.
Last summer was quite dry with the result that many of Norway's hydro reservoirs are drawn way down or, in this case bottomed out. (One consequence has been astronomically higher prices, and an extra burden during our financially precarious first year in Norway). This dry lake is below us in the background of the first picture.
But the main event for this page is our family ascent of Trollhetta, another of Trollheimen's bigger peaks, although like most winter visitors we chose not to tackle the steep and rocky slopes leading to the main summit, behind us in this picture.
The tourist route takes the long way around to climb relatively gentle slopes, but we realized we could take a more direct route from the hut and bring the mileage down to within Zoe-range.
The summit area is almost level, and might make a nice frisbee ground except that on one side it drops off precipitously into an enormous cirque 1,800 feet below.
In the photo below the girls are standing on the edge of the cliff you can see in the picture above. This is the sort of behavior that sets off major cascades of mommy-hormones, especially when the rock is a bit crumbly, as it was. Nancy says she has talked with other mommies, and they all have the same reaction to kids standing on the edge of precipitious drops: Yipes!
The descent was a delight. Molly's telemark turns seem to get smoother every time we go out....
While Zoe has a 'svært sterk' (extremely strong) snowplow and is already experimenting with unweighting.
The next day we headed home. The womenfolk skied out to a nearby road while Rick did a fast 30 k to fetch the car and drive it around. Monday's newspaper headlines called it 'an Easter to remember'. It certainly was for us!