The lodge had 2 new guests, Jenny and Chris, a couple from Aberdeen who we had a good chat with over breakfast before deciding what we’d do that day.
Michael, our host, told us about a huge canyon, the largest in Europe in fact, that was about an hour’s drive away and then a hike in to see it. So we gave that a go…
The drive was again spectacular, passing over creeks and rivers, huge mountains we snaked our way up lined by pine trees either side. The last 4kms or so was on dirt roads, going up and up and up.
The trail we were to be hiking wasn’t what you’d call well marked… in fact the only hint we were at the right part was another solitary car parked there. The footprints in the snow gave us an idea we were hopefully on the right track so we begun.
Over the next 4hrs or so, we hiked up and down the hills – over rocks, through streams, half of the ground was now snow and the streams were probably 2/3rds iced over. It was absolutely picturesque hiking through the Norwegian wilderness albeit we kind of wished we’d had better footwear. Nikes just don’t cut it, so we had a few slip-and-slides in the snow but for the most part – we did pretty well.
Also wouldn’t have minded if it had been a few degrees warmer. The car said 2 degrees and we hiked a fair bit higher, and combining windchill, both of us had scarves strapped around our faces to keep the wind/cold out.
The two highlights of the hike were a reasonably large stream which had mostly frozen over, which we were supposed to cross, but there was no way of doing that except walking through it. Our footwear didn’t allow for that, so we had to take the even longer way around. But the stream turned into a waterfall which was cascading off a large cliff face with snow & ice all around and then falling into more snow and ice. It looked fantastic how the ice at the bottom slowly was making it’s way up the mountain and soon it’d be all frozen.
The other highlight was of course the canyon itself. It’s enormous! The sun was low in the sky so it cast enormous shadows from one side of the canyon to the other, so the photos don’t do it justice and it’s hard to get a sense of size… but it was pretty incredible.
The hike in all was about 4hrs and 14km all up. A solid day’s walking!
We went back to our cabin, had a couple of drinks before dinner and a bit of a relax. Dinner was a surprise – we had talked about what the locals ate and Michael had prepared us the local delicacy, reindeer stew! And… it was delicious! Quite similar to venison in taste and texture… Felt bad for poor Rudolph, but oh well!
A quick check on the Lights to see if they were out and they were! We quickly go and get rugged up, grab the camera gear and out onto the observation deck again. For the 3rd night in a row, it was an amazing show we saw. Our last night in Alta and the Lights were possibly the brightest we’d seen and lasted for almost 2hrs. It was a fantastic way to finish our time in Alta – highly recommend coming here if you’re searching for the Northern Lights… great town and great opportunities to see them.
We said our goodbyes as we had a very early start as we are off to Oslo for a night…
PS On advice from Michael, I changed my camera to shoot in RAW mode which means the images are better captured, but I can’t get them onto my iPad so for the next few days, there’s not many photos to be shown but will try and fix that later.
