Eight months
and roughly 200 000 metres of vert have passed since the last blog post- I don’t think
I’ll bother trying to summarise the interim period suffice to say it featured
plenty of enjoyable days in the hills.
This past
weekend the Tromsø skimo crew organized a gathering in Lyngen and Micke and I
decided to crash the party and represent the Narvik contingent. The drive up to
Lyngseidet takes about four hours and passes through some pretty mountains, so we figured we ought to break up the drive and go ski something.
The
something we settled on was Øksehogget. A pretty little couloir on the north
side of peak 1381 just south of Lemmetfjell. It received quite a bit of media attention a few years ago when it was voted the raddest couloir in Norway by Fri Flyt magazine, beating Gagnesaksla (near Narvik). I’ll
admit that I was kind of sceptical of it really being that
good. I figured the voting process had somehow been skewed by the hordes of
Finnish freeriders who migrate to Tamok every spring. I was happily surprised
when it first came into view.
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| Øksehogget. It's a pretty one. |
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| Micke the alpine ninja enroute to Øksehogget |
The entrance was easy to find, and there were 5 old pieces of cord around the anchor which meant we didn’t even have to leave any ourselves. A 20 metre rap followed by a belayed ski cut took way longer than it should have and provided a great example of how little of my skiing has involved ropes in recent years and how efficiency in rope handling really does require at least some occasssional practice. The line itself is a sustained 40-45 in the upper 300 metres of vert, where it averages 5 metres in width and slackens off to the high 30s for the lower 200 metres where it is around 10 metres wide.
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| photo from Micke |
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| Photo from Micke |
The route we followed wasn't exactly as outlined below, we ended up heading to the pass just north of point 1291. The quickest and most direct route is definitely heading straight up the western shoulder, but the advantage of wrapping around from the north is that you get some good visuals on the line and some info on the conditions before you rap in.
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| A rough version of our route:
The next two days in Lyngen were great fun: filled with quality skiing with a big group of friendly folks from Tromsø. After some technique drills on the ski slopes on Saturday morning we headed to Rørnestinden for a handful of laps on the upper slope in some magical late afternoon light.
On Sunday we drove north to Koppangen and headed up Tafeltind. Conditions were terriffic given that it's been a week since the last snowfall, and I also got a nice overview of the terrain which will be invaluable in planning the next attempt at the "Lyngen på langs" traverse. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.
 
Gang skinning up to Tafeltind
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