Håkøya

On Sunday afternoon we went for a walk on the island of Håkøya, close to Tromsø. Håkøya can be reached by a bridge, and from the bridge you have a nice view into the very clear water - we saw many starfish! In the other photo you can see my project of last weekend - I crocheted a hat for Paul! Nicole taught me to crochet while we were in Mexico, and now that I've gotten over my "crochet-is-for-grandma's" attitude, it's been lots of fun, and I'm very proud of my first hat :)

A boat passed by in the distance, and created large ripples in the water. They lasted for a long time...

We walked along the shore for a while. The beach consists of rocks with lots of seaweed on them, and when the tide comes up they are covered in water. This shallow layer of water freezes, and when the tide recedes, the layer of ice ends up on top of the rocks. It creates a very cool layer of sea ice, which behaves quite different from "normal" ice. For example it can flex a lot more, and it breaks up in different ways. See the photos below...

Some of the rocks are covered with lots of barnacles, I had some fun taking macro photos of them. In the other photo you can see the bridge to Håkøya in the distance.

There was also a stream entering the sea, and that created all kinds of different sorts of ice. It was beautiful! There were many bubbles frozen into the ice, and in other parts the ice almost looked like a painting with flower patterns.

Here Paul is holding up a piece of ice to the sky, so you can see the bubble pattern better. He thought it would make a good speech bubble ;) 

The views from the beach were really nice. The water was very calm so the reflections were beautiful. 

These photos were taken around sunset, at about 18:00. It's so nice to have longer days! After the clocks change on Sunday, sunset will be at 19:40 and it will still be light for about an hour after that - great!!

Just a few photos...

On Saturday we walked around the centre of Tromsø for a bit. These kids were completely fascinated by the pigeons eating some bread! They were trying to come closer and closer without scaring the birds, their concentration was fun to watch! The second photo is taken from the top of the main square. It was snowing quite heavily while in the background the sun was shining on the mountains, very pretty. 

 

We've been having LOTS of snow lately! Here you can see what Paul's bike looks like now... completely covered in snow :)  

Today we went for a walk around the beach on Håkøya, an island near Tromsø. I took a lot of photos, and I was planning to put them here tonight, but it has gotten a bit late now, I need my sleep ;) I hope to add them tomorrow, though I also have an essay to write for my Norwegian class (I feel like being back at primary school, the essay has to be about my family!). 

Kjølen and Skogsfjordvatnet

Last Saturday it was quite a sunny day, and Paul skied up Stor-Kjølen. This is a mountain on Kvaløya that overlooks Tromsø. It's 790 m high and has some kind of radar dome on top. 

There were quite a few people around the "football", some of them skied up from the road to Skullsfjord the way he did, and some took a gentler, more circuitous route from the main road along the coast. Here you can see the building at the top:

And this is the view from the top towards Tromsø island:

On Sunday the weather was quite bad with temperatures above zero and rain! We decided to go for a drive anyway, and drove to Ringvassøya, an island near Tromsø. At some point the road climbs up, and almost immediately the rain turned into snow and the landscape was much prettier. We had a nice view over Skogfjordsvatnet, it's a massive lake - more than 10 km long and about 2 km wide. It's frozen and covered in snow, a perfect flat white area, you can see it in the panorama image below. Paul climbed in a tree to take that photo! He also managed to loose his glasses in the tree, so we had to go back there to find them. They are the exact same colour as the branches, so it was very hard to see, but we did find them back fortunately. 

  

We drove down to the lake, and decided to walk to one of the islands in it. How often can you walk to an island? ;) Here we started walking on Skogfjordsvatnet. The sun tried to come out for a while, but it didn't really succeed unfortunately...

We saw a family coming back from a skitrip, it was impressive seeing these tiny figures in the distance.... Paul took this nice panorama where you can see them:

The sky was about the same colour as the snow, and it was hard to see any contrast. In the photos below we are actually standing in front of the island, behind us is a hill covered in snow. You can't see it though! It's like a perfect studio background, completely white :-) Good for portraits!

To our surprise, most of the island was free of snow, and had mosses and small plants growing on it. It smelt like summer!! It didn't look like it though, there was still a lot of ice/snow around.

 

On the way back, we stopped at the fjord. The water was like glass, and I tried to get a photo of that. But boys being boys, Paul felt the urgent need to keep throwing rocks in the water ;) I gave up trying to stop him and just took photos of him skipping stones - have to try it again in sunny weather, as the result is quite nice!

The weather has gotten a lot worse, today we had very strong wind and a lot of rain. Fortunately the rain turned into snow this evening. On our trip on Sunday I saw the first signs of spring (new twigs on some trees), I was hoping for Spring to come early but I guess not ;) 

More Aurora

We were hoping to go out to take more photos of the northern lights later this week, but just before 23:00 tonight we got a call from Sevim: active aurora! We looked out of the window and we saw a very bright display, even in the south. We quickly decided to drive somewhere, hoping the aurora wouldn't disappear in the mean time ;)

We drove towards Store Blåmannen, a large mountain which I call the Matterhorn of Tromsø ;) (it looks a bit similar). We found a place to take photos, but of course the lights were most active while I was still setting up my tripod and camera, there was hardly anything left by the time I was ready ;) It was still very pretty though. The moon was nearly full and very bright.

After a while we started to get very cold (it was quite windy which made it feel cold) and the activity of the northern lights didn't seem to increase, so we decided to go home. While we walked back to the car, suddenly the sky was filled with green beams, it was beautiful!! Of course it was decreasing again by the time I got my tripod and camera set up once more, but I still got some nice photos of the more active display:

Now it's 2 in the morning, and I should really get some sleep! So this is all for now. I still hope we can go another time later in the week, if the weather stays good!

Rødtinden

Today I tried my new randonnée skis outside of a ski area for the first time. I wanted to start with something easy, so I picked a small (500 m) mountain about 15 minutes drive from my flat in Tromsø called Rødtinden. Navigationaly it was a very simple trip; I could see the cairn on the top from behind my steering wheel in the car park at the bottom and headed straight for it - absolutely no faffing with the map required!

I was completely blown away by how well the full-sized climbing skins on my new skis worked compared with the small ones on my old skis. I could just march straight up the 30 degree slope, instead of tediously having to traverse (tack) up it as I would have had to with my old fjellskis. I made a bee line for the summit and was there in under an hour, so quick that I went a bit further to another nearby peak a few tens of meters higher. I took these panoramas while lying behind a rock to get out of the wind (it was blowing a hoolie up there even though it was calm at the bottom). On the way up I was thinking that with my new skis I could have carried a light paraglider up without much difficulty, but today it was far too windy to have been able to take off safely. One step at a time...

The descent was great to start off with, there was about an inch of powder on top of some smooth, hard-packed snow. It was as if an easy blue run had been smeared out over the whole mountainside. But, within 15 minutes I was down to the tree line and had to start slaloming around the spindly birches that cover everything below about 300 m around here. This was pretty tedious, so I think next time I'll try to find a less tree infested route. 

Randonnée skis

After two days of looking around ski shops I finally bought a new pair of skis on Friday afternoon. Shortly after we arrived in Norway, we bought fjellskis, which are good for skiing up gentle slopes but are less good for going up steeper or icy slopes. The skis I bought on Friday are more suitable for that kind of thing, and behave like downhill ("real") skis on the way down. It was hard to choose between heavy skis (good for going down) and light skis (easy to go up), but I finally decided on a pair of Völkl Snow Eagle skis with really light Dynafit bindings. Today I went to a small local ski slope (Tromsø Alpinsenter) to get used to them before trying them in the wilds ;) I was a bit worried that the fat skis (good for powder) would be difficult to use on piste, but actually they were just as easy to use as downhill skis. Hanneke came as well and rented some skis from the centre. 

The centre is quite small, just three anchor lifts, the highest of which goes up to 600m. However, you can ski right back down to sea level, the views are fantastic and there are no queues! The last time either of us did any downhill skiing was more than two years ago, and in the mean time we did a lot of cross-country skiing, so it took a while to readjust to alpine skiing. The first run was much more scary than it ought to have been! We went straight to the top of quite a steep run, as we used to be able to ski down a slope like that quite happily, but it took a while to regain faith in the control you have over downhill skis compared to our cross-country skis. Hanneke was nearly ready to give up downhill skiing forever after the first slope! 

Below is a panorama from the top of the 600m lift. This picture is all Hanneke has seen of this view, as she spent all day on the kiddie slope trying to get comfortable again. 

 

I really enjoyed skiing on groomed pistes again and think I will be back here more often! Tomorrow though I plan to try my new skis in their proper environment so will try to climb some nearby mountain without any lifts ;) 

Northern Lights from Kvaløyvågen

Last night the northern light forecast was really good, AND it was a perfectly clear night! So we decided to drive to Kvaløyvågen, a small village north of Tromsø from where we thought we'd have good views to the north without any city lights. It takes about 45 minutes to drive there, and we already saw the northern lights while driving. We drove to the end of the road, and continued on snowshoes. There were no lights there, but the moon was shining brightly - luckily to the south though! When we first got there, the northern lights were out, but very subtle.  Below you can see the moonlit landscape... it was beautiful!

After a while, the aurora became more active and much brighter. It was so beautiful! The views over the fjord were amazing, with the northern lights reflecting in the water. The circle in the second photo started out really big and quickly became smaller and smaller - a fantastic sight!

 

We finally made it back home at half past 1 in the morning... very tired! More active northern lights are expected next week, so I hope we get another chance to go out and take photos!

Sun, snow & skiing

Last weekend was really sunny, and on Saturday we decided to go skiing on Kvaløya (the island just west of Tromsø), with Sevim and her boyfriend. There were lots of people out enjoying the day, especially since it was the first nice day since we got half a metre of snow. And the snow was fantastic! We had a short break at a wooden "lavo" that had some deck chairs...

The sun was so strong we could sit outside in the warmth and were in danger of getting mildly sunburnt. Now that we had a Norwegian with us, we had to dig a snow bench before we were allowed to eat our lunch. Now we are experts in the technique, and learnt that you can use your ski's to sit on as well! After lunch we kept climbing, and the views kept getting better :)

We then enjoyed a very fun descent, we took our skins off (off the skis, we're not reptiles!) and practiced Telemark turns in the soft snow. 

The following day was even sunnier, so we couldn't resist going skiing again. We went to Kvaløya again, so we could maximise our sunshine intake - it has south facing slopes unobstructed by other tall mountains that might cause nasty shadows ;) This time we went to a different area though. We found another wooden lavo here too... 

This panorama shows the mountains behind Tromsø (the largest is Tromsdalstinden). On the right you can see the island of Hakøya, connected by a bridge. The ship in the middle is the Lance, which spends every winter here in Eidkjosen. All the tracks you see in the foreground are snow scooter tracks, this area seemed to be a playground for them!

This area is quite windy and after all the fresh snow, we found some very nice snow formations, like the "wave" in the photo below. The photo on the right is taken on top of the "mountain", it's called Sjurfjellet and it's 161 m high - I felt like a lazy Sunday so we didn't climb any "real" mountains this time ;) The views were really nice, but it was extremely windy there.

Here you can see Paul all wrapped up and protected from the wind, just before we started our descent. The clouds were beautiful, I wish I had brought my wide angle lens!

We ended our little trip at the church on the bottom of the slope. On both sides of the entrance, they had bouquets of roses frozen into blocks of ice - quite cool! I had never seen this before. They were melting and the roses were only half inside the ice block by the time we got there, but it still looked really nice.

Let's hope for the same weather for next weekend :) In the mean time we are giving our muscles a much needed rest!