“Wait a minute!” – I hear you cry. What happened to day 6? Well as you can see from the last post one of our party, Will, had to go home so we took him to the ferry at Svensby and said our goodbyes. Will would be missed – as well as being a thoroughly nice chap he was without doubt the most experienced mountaineer of our group, and his wise caution often tempered our ignorant enthusiasm. He is also annoyingly fit so could be relied upon to always be in high spirits and up for the most challenging ascents. As the weather was distinctly average we didn’t hurry back to our cottage to get the skis, and instead went to the Magic Mountain Lodge for a reindeer kebab and another look at the guide book, and then spent the rest of the day trying to stave off cabin fever in our cottage. So apologies for this blog jumping around.
Day 8, our last full day in Lyngen, and the weather was again pretty poor, with low visibility and strong winds. We decided to give our local mountain, Rundfjellnasen, a try in the morning, taking advantage of a brief clear spell. This is the mountain on which we had a midnight ascent earlier in the week. However on this occasion after a couple of hours of climbing the wind picked up, visibility dropped to just a few metres, and snow started to fall, whipping up the side of the mountain from the sea. We turned back, enjoying the fresh snow on the descent, and glad to drop to better visibility. It’s so frustrating – the weather changes so quickly, and it’s bad enough that you can’t just tough it out and wait for it to clear.
After waiting in the cottage for another clear spell I decided to take the car to take some photographs of the stunning and unique Norwegian coastline, and Nick and Iain decided to give Rundfjellnasen another attempt. The weather at sea level was glorious, with the tops of the mountains flitting in and out of cloud. Annoyingly for me the other two were blessed with good luck and their third ascent of Rundfjellnasen was in wonderful clear weather.
Despite the ever sunny skies we called it a day and went to bed – sadly this was our last day of skiing in Lyngen and we faced an early drive the following morning back to Tromso.