She's got her head in the clouds!

Towards the end of our winding, rock-riddled ascent, an unspoken agreement was made. Every twenty feet or so there would be a short mandatory break from hoisting and heaving ourselves upwards to lean exhaustedly against the nearest boulder or tree. Young clouds raced by us and around the 2 million-year-old fjords, independent of the more mature condensations far above to whom we owed the steady down-pour. At the beginning of the climb, every new and interesting flower received adulations of intense study and a "head-shot" with Nicholai's camera. I wanted to look them up afterwards so that my guide wouldn't need to enter the rain and a forever warped thereafter.


After three hours without sight of our evening's shelter, however, the flowers all started to look essentially the same and all too dribbling with wetness to be of importance. Nicholai's great find in the water-proof jacket department of the Salvation Army in Bergen turned out not to be so water-proof or great. His two cotton hoodies didn't serve him so well underneath it, either. So, by the time we spotted the two little huts "Flatbrehytta"(from a sharp bend at the end of a gruelling incline and the entrance to a hidden glacier valley) he could hardly contain his excitement; neither could I.

We were both soaked to the skin and frozen to the bone. My hands were still semi-operable, but lighting a fire took real doing. With numb and shaky hands, it was difficult to gage my grip on the matches, so I kept either dropping them or snapping them in half as I scratched them to life. Eventually, however, the virtues of a candle, dry birch-bark, and splintered logs redeemed our deadened fingers and toes with a toasty fire in the stove.

The hut was as charmingly rustic as one could desire. It was equipt with

net-fulls of well-travelled chopped wood, containers

of sugar, instant coffee, plates and mugs, utensils, and other cookware for the mini wood stove. The huts were said to sleep 18 but seemed much more compact than such a boast would insinuate. No

one was there, and I hoped that we would see nightfall without any other arrivals. It would have been quite cramped considering the bad weather and our wet clothes occupying all the other fireside seating. The hut next to the one where we warmed-up and slept was probably half of the size and constructed of piled stones -definitely from the immediate landscape. (There is a picture on this post of me standing in front of it with the elusive "Flatbreen" glacier in the backdrop). The bunks within it hinged out from the walls. For some sick reason, I fantasized a lot as a kid of sleeping on a wooden-board like one of those. If it had a taller door, I'm sure an ogre or troll would have taken up residence. That evening, as our soaking clothes quietly dried, candles flickered, rain turned to snow, and the glacier behind us sat reminiscing back to its mountain-slaking glory days.

When we woke up the following morning,

the mountains had changed aspect. They were now snow-capped. There was also a dense, intermittent "fog" (which was actually a series of clouds engulfing our altitude). The glacier, which we had planned to visit, was no longer locatable. We walked in the direction we had seen it the day before, but the cloud bank left us stupified....either that or the "glacier" had actually been the ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN!

For moments of zen: a secluded out house in a rock-garden of mammoth proportions........Soon before I wiped out.....

The idea of looking for the glacier as the snow covered the trail and the mist did our eyes seemed overwhelmingly silly. So, we turned back to the hut. How wild that such an immense thing could so easily disappear into a cloud! And if a huge glacier could vanish, two little people would be majorly screwed. We saw a different "tounge" of glacier from a different place that we drove to on our way back to Bergen.

The different grasses, mosses, mushrooms, flowers, and trees that grew were diverse and lovely. Ferns were dying back with the approach of winter. Some were already blood red, but many in the process of losing their green had turned butter-yellow. They speckled the slopes along with yellow aster tripolium, blue harebells (campanula rotundifolia)baby birches, and bilberry bushes. Birches and Spruces stuck with their own. Often, pure stands of each would be arbitered by the trail through the woods towards the bottom of the mountains.

The surrounding countryside of Fjaerland, Norway consisted of pasture with grazing animals, old barns, bales of covered hay, and humble houses.

What a truly stunning place! Too bad it doesn't exist.

P.S. Apologies for the small size of the images, couldn't figure it out this time. They are all at Nicholai's photo posting on Flickr, though. But, be warned: I just went to it and there are way too many of just me. Should have brought my own camera, I suppose....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23001798@N05/sets/72157607566074010/show/