Norway is a hiker's paradise.  One of the least populated nations in Europe, Norway has plenty of room for everyone to enjoy the beautiful scenery.  The rugged landscape features high mountain plateaus cut by deep valleys and ringed by jagged peaks, dramatic fjords, the largest glacier in Europe, beautiful lakes and waterfalls.  Best of all, much of this beautiful scenery can be accessed while enjoying the comforts of the Norwegian hiking hut system.

DNT, Den Norske Turistforening, or the Norwegian Mountain Touring Association, maintains more than 300 mountain huts and lodges in national parks containing over 11,000 miles of trails.  These huts and lodges vary in size and services.  Some are self-service and accessible only with a key borrowed from DNT.  Others are fully staffed and provide hot meals, roaring fireplaces and generous Scandinavian breakfast buffets.  The DNT office in Oslo helped me choose a hiking destination last September that seemed to suit my needs: accessibility by public transportation, beautiful scenery, challenging trails. The little research that I had done in advance steered me in the same direction that DNT led me:  Jotunheimen National Park.

Jotunheimen National Park

Jotunheimen ("Land of the Giants") National Park contains Norway’s highest peaks, Galdhopiggen (8,100 ft) and Glittertind (8,047 ft), and around a hundred other peaks just below the 8,000 foot mark.  The park is about 200 kilometers north of Oslo and encompasses around 3,900 square kilometers in area.  It is a dense collection of snow-capped jagged peaks on a high mountain plateau with many glaciers, lakes and river valleys.  Jotunheimen is also one of Norway’s most popular hiking destinations.  Luckily for me, September is not the most popular time for hiking in Norway, so I was able to enjoy the park without having to deal with crowds.

I was so impatient to get to Jotunheimen that I took the early morning bus out of Oslo instead of waiting for the afternoon bus.  The five hour journey to Gjendesheim (with a change at Fagernes) meant that I would arrive around 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon.   I’m not accustomed to beginning a long hike that late in the day, but I was so eager to explore the park that I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait.  The bus ride was comfortable, but I found it to be pure torture:  the scenery was so beautiful outside the bus window, and the weather so perfect, that my impatience only increased by the minute.  I wanted to be outside on those sunny hillsides ringed by evergreens beside the clear streams.  Instead I was on a bus, waiting.  At a certain point in the journey north from Oslo, the highway climbs onto a mountain plateau where the trees simply vanish.  All around there is nothing but rock and water.  Long thin poles mark both sides of the highway, presumably so that the road can be located in the winter snows.  Although the highway climbs and dips and turns, the rocky, treeless scenery never changes.

I had mixed feelings upon seeing the strange new scenery.  At first I was shocked.  Had I made a mistake?  Did I really want to spend a week hiking without seeing any greenery or trees?  Would it snow?  Where the heck was I?  When the bus dropped me off in the parking lot at Gjendesheim, I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere.  Ahead lay the glittering lake Gjende.  DNT operates a lodge at Gjendesheim and I could have checked in and spent the night there. But it was a beautiful afternoon and I was ready to go, so I decided to push myself and start the trek to the Memurubu hut.  It was summer so I had enough daylight hours (so I thought) to get there before dark.  If I left immediately and hustled I should arrive by 8:30 – 9:00 pm.

The excellent (but expensive) hiking map I had purchased from DNT very clearly marked the park trails and hut locations.  Instead of marking distances on the trails, however, it marked hiking times.    For example, the ridge trail from Gjendesheim to Memurubu is marked as a 6 hour hike.  At first I liked this concept, as I believed I could plan my hikes according to the "official" time estimates.  (I assume DNT provided these estimates).  Then I realized the problem with such a system.  Some people hike faster than others, some people like to stop and smell the roses.  Was this a 6-hour hike, or a 5-hour-plus-rest-stops hike?  If I hustled would I just barely make it, while zooming past the beautiful scenery, or would I have a chance to actually enjoy what I’d traveled so far to see?

Luckily, I had no idea I was biting off more than I could chew.  I had only my own ignorance to blame.  I forgot to factor in the elevation change in the trails and was completely ignorant about the level of difficulty of the Norwegian trails.  This was my first hiking trip (and definitely will not be my last!) in Norway.  The hike from Gjendesheim to Memurubu climbs rapidly from an elevation of about 3,000 feet up to a ridge almost 5,200 feet above Lake Gjende, and eventually (6 hours later?) redescends to the opposite lake shore.  In other words, the trail makes a 2,200 foot elevation gain and 2,200 foot descent.  I was foolish enough to undertake this effort after a 5 hour bus ride, relatively late in the day.  Perhaps that’s why the Norwegians whom I encountered returning to Gjendesheim gave me such wondering looks!         At a certain point I realized I would have to really hustle to make it to the Memurubu hut before nighttime.

Besseggen Ridge

The highlight of this trek is the famous Besseggen Ridge.  Besseggen is a knife edge ridge with staggering views of two glacial lakes:  Lake Bessvatnet, a deep rainwater-fed blue lake hanging over a thousand feet above the sparkling bright green Lake Gjende.  At the top of the ridge a vertical drop plunges 1,200 feet down to Lake Gjende and offers an uninterrupted view west toward a sea of jagged mountain peaks.  The south shore of the lake is a wall of wild and rarely visited peaks.  At the top of Besseggen the panorama is awesome, and a little intimidating.  The two lakes are so close it seems you could reach out and touch them, but it strains the mind to see one sitting so far above the other, and to see such bright and different colors between the two.  Lake Gjende, by the way, is well known by Norwegians as the place where Ibsen’s Peer Gynt fell from the ridge into the lake.

Looking down the trail where it descends to Lake Bessvatnet, still 1,200 feet above Lake Gjende, I gasped.  I am rarely susceptible to vertigo, but I couldn’t help but wonder how I was going to get myself and my pack down that trail.  I had never seen a trail like that in a United States national park.   This was not a user-friendly trail:  one false step and one would tumble headfirst a long distance into an icy cold lake.  And that applied to either direction, as there was a lake below each side of the trail.  I decided to take it slowly but had to chuckle at the audacity of the Norwegians.  There it was: a red trail marker on a rock just ahead, a tiny step or two away from a violent plunge.  The Norwegians were certainly not coddling their national park visitors and the trail markers were clearly not designed to assist anyone in finding the easiest or most direct path.  Later in my Jotunheimen treks I would laugh at the blatantly sadistic nature of these trail markers, as I would come across one painted above my head on a vertical rock face.  What were they thinking?  I eventually grew to love the challenge of these trails and to respect the Norwegians’ hiking philosophy.  Finishing one of these treks was a feat to be proud of.

By the time I made it down to Lake Bessvatnet, it was getting late and I was getting nervous.  The plateau up there (I was still high above Lake Gjende) was incredibly desolate.  As I hurried along thinking of the warm hut that awaited me at the end of my trek, I met a Norwegian couple arriving at the plateau from the opposite direction.  They told me they planned to camp there that night.  I looked around at the bleak rocks everywhere and the now dark glacial lake water, felt a chill wind and noticed that the sky had turned gray.  I did not envy them at all.  I wished them luck and hurried on.  Of course at this point, it was well past 6:00 o’clock in the evening.  I continued up and down along a desolate plateau and passed another dark, icy, but much smaller glacial lake.  Finally, much, much later, Memurubu, a place which I had no idea even existed just 24 hours earlier, was in sight.  Although I didn’t know what awaited me there, the prospect of warmth and food gave me my second wind.  Good thing, too, as the descent from the ridge was not a gentle one. In true Norwegian trail style the trail simply plunged down a rocky slope.  Although I was grateful to not have to climb up that slope I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to descend it with my pack.

My arrival in Memurubu was, to say the least, unexpected.  Apparently the Norwegians are not as foolish as I was, and everyone in the handsome lodge was relaxing by the fireplace or reading in comfortable chairs, having eaten hours ago.  I was sweaty, dirty, cold and starving.    Luckily, they found a bunk bed for me and I even managed to cajole some food from them, for a price. Although I was a little disoriented at first, I finally began to appreciate the comforts of the lodge.  The decor was a warm honey-colored wood with a slightly rustic look.  More importantly, everything one could want was to be found in the lodge: hot showers, a warm fire, comfortable chairs and sofas, hot tea, even candy bars and blister kits at the front desk!  I was beginning to warm up to the Norwegian style of hiking.  Yes the trails were punishing, but look at the reward at the end!  Little did I realize that things could get even better.

My roommate at Memurubu was a gentleman from England who was a veteran hiker in Jotunheimen.  I envied him when he told me that he flew from England to Norway in only 2 hours.  I was in awe when he showed me on my map where he’d hiked that day and where he was planning on hiking the next.  As I was exhausted and my brain was hardly functioning, I barely followed the Norwegian names of the peaks he’d climbed.  He pointed on the map to a peak he’d climbed that day which seemed very far from the hut, and which was clearly in the middle of an area of many glaciers and high peaks.  I tried to imagine what it must be like to master that trail, but in my tired state gave up.  My new friend announced his plans to climb to Glitterheim the next day.  When I found it on the map and realized how far away it was, and how high the climb would be, my mind reeled.  His pack looked like it weighed twice mine.  I noticed his legs were about as thick as the logs the hut was made of and decided I would hike whatever trails he wasn’t going to hike.  I was clearly a novice in the Norwegian hiking world.

While I was at Memurubu I also met two hikers from the Netherlands.  As sometimes happens in one’s travels, it turned out they were following the same route I was now planning to follow.    We were to run into each other several times over the following days.  After studying the map I decided to stay away from the northerly portion of the map my British friend was eagerly plunging into: a vertical wall of jagged rock and ice.  I decided to take the trail over the ridge to a hut at Gjendebu.  Why?  It was heading toward a western exit from the park and seemed like the only logical choice given my time constraints.  I was also intrigued by the prospect of more stunning views of Lake Gjende and by the thought of hiking a portion of the trail called the Bukkelaegret.  I wasn’t sure what the Bukkelaegret was, but everyone spoke animatedly about it, and it seemed to involve a lot of effort and a chain in the rock.  More than that I would have to find out along the way.

Norwegian breakfast buffets are perfect for loading up on calories before a long hike.  When I woke up at Memurubu I sat down to a feast: cereal, oatmeal, eggs, sausages, sliced meats and cheeses, several kinds of bread, butter and jam, several kinds of pickled herring, fresh fruits, strong coffee, juice and more.  I quickly learned a new Norwegian hiking ritual. Immediately after finishing breakfast everyone grabbed a few slices of bread and started making trail sandwiches out of the cold cuts and cheeses.  They put them in cellophane bags and paid at the register, charged per slice of bread.  Ignorant of the "system" I made some mistake for which I got scolded in Norwegian, but eventually succeeded in getting my trail lunch packed (I think I had an odd number of bread slices which wasn’t permitted in their bread-slice calculation system).  Some people even had lightweight thermoses which they filled with strong Norwegian coffee before leaving on their hikes.  I was disappointed I hadn’t learned of this aspect of the Norwegian hiking "style" earlier:  a hot cup of strong coffee on a cold bleak ridge would have been a nice mid-morning treat.

Bukkelaegret

The trail from Memurubu to Gjendebu confirmed my previous observations about the Norwegian trail style: it went straight up.  No switchbacks (I wonder if that word exists in Norwegian!), no following of the contours of the land, just a brutal stab in the air.  I jumped right into it and within a half hour was sitting on a ridge overlooking the Memurubu hut with quite a view of the lake and surrounding peaks.  I was lucky enough to see the ferry arrive at the Memurubu dock.  There is a twice daily ferry between Gjendesheim and Memurubu and even one that continues to Gjendebu.  Somehow it was comforting to know that if I didn’t survive the dreaded "Bukkelaegret" without a sprain or scrape or two, I would at least be able to exit the park without having to retrace my footsteps.

The high ridge between Memurubu and Gjendebu offers some spectacular scenery and views. Atop the plateau there are many picturesque glacial lakes.  The view from the ridge encompasses the wall of peaks south of Lake Gjende and beautiful panoramas of the lake.  For some reason the trail seemed easier than the trail I’d hiked the day before.  Perhaps I was getting used to these crazy trails?  At a certain point I reached a trail junction.  I had one last chance to avoid the dreaded Bukkelaegret and bail out.  If I took the turn-off I would have to hike further along the plateau to reach a valley that would eventually take me down to Gjendebu.  It looked like a long distance and more of the same rocky plateau scenery.  I decided to keep going.  At a few places along the way I ran into the two Dutch guys I’d met at Memurubu.  Of course they never failed to mention the Bukkelaegret, since it was looming over our heads and we were all anticipating it.  At some point they continued ahead of me while I ate or just enjoyed the scenery some more.         Finally the moment I had waited for arrived.  The trail I was following started bearing south toward the lake after having wandered north and away from it for a while.  I could see the lake far below, beyond the crest of the ridge.  Suddenly, there was a wooden signpost on the trail that said "Bukkelaegret." I knew it was time, and yet laughed a little at all the suspense building up to this point.  This thing I had never heard of, (and whose name I couldn’t really pronounce correctly), was now the most important thing in my life at this moment.  Surely whatever it was would be anticlimactic?  Yes and no.  When I saw "it" I was actually pretty excited.  The Bukkelaegret is a steep rock face that descends from the ridge above Lake Gjende straight down to the water level.  It is so steep that chains are embedded in the rock to assist hikers in climbing up or down this cliff.  Luckily, the entire descent does not happen all at once.  In fact, there are actually some tiny switchbacks on gravelly ledges.  And surprisingly, there are small bushes and vegetation on the side of the ridge facing the lake.         My experience of the Bukkelaegret was a positive one.  The hillside was sunny and the lake sparkled below.  Basically I just lowered myself from one resting place to another while pausing every now and then to admire the view.  My pack was behind me and didn’t weigh on me so much, and my knees were grateful for the break on the descent.  I was thrilled to not have to climb up the trail!  The small bushes, wildflowers and greenery were a treat and actually grew thicker the closer I got to the lake.  Instead of hiking along a cool windy and rocky plateau, I was now enjoying a warm sunny rockface above a sparkling lake.  I was glad I hadn’t chickened out.  My new Dutch friends were down by the lake shore relaxing by the water, celebrating their accomplishment and enjoying a snack.  They had found a beautiful spot and gladly shared it with me.  As the hard part of the hike was behind us and I was rapidly falling in love with this spot of greenery by the lake, I stayed while they headed on to the next hut.

Gjendebu

The Gjendebu hut is much more charming than the Memurubu hut.  Perhaps because it is more isolated than the Memurubu hut it receives fewer visitors.  When I arrived I found, in addition to my two Dutch friends, two Norwegian couples and another solo traveler, also Norwegian.  The place was very quiet and drenched with late afternoon sunlight.  After a shower I curled up in a chair with a cup of tea and soaked up the sun coming in through the windows.  The temperature was dropping pretty dramatically outside, and we were anticipating a cold night.  After the sun set we lit a fire and after dinner spent a long time just talking and reading by the fire.         At some point I realized that our Norwegian hut companions were very serious and seasoned hikers.  I felt honored to be in their company and a little proud of myself to have made it to this outpost where these rare creatures could be found.  They had the casual confidence of people who are very experienced and knowledgeable in a field, in this case, hiking.  Several of them were planning ascents of some of the peaks to the south of the lake.  They would not be following trails and would surely encounter ice and snow.  They were all amused to encounter an American in Jotunheimen.  One couple in particular, who had a daughter studying in the United States, couldn’t stop talking about the oddity of my very presence in that hut.  Although we lingered by the fire I would occasionally go outside to admire the stars.  Because the weather was so clear all the stars were out and the view from the lakeshore in the crisp cold air was breathtaking.  Inside the hut the scene by the fireplace was cozy and relaxing.  I have to call this moment Norwegian "hut magic" because it was truly a rare and magical evening.         As there were only 8 of us in the hut that night, breakfast was a much quieter affair than at the Memurubu lodge.  Three of the Norwegians even left before breakfast so as to get a head start on their climbs.  I lingered for a few reasons.  Although I had finally made up my mind as to my next destination, I was reluctant to leave this hut.  The idea of a second night there was so appealing that I was tempted to take a day hike and return for one more night at Gjendebu.  I guess there are some places that just exert some kind of inexplicable pull on us and Gjendebu was a place that appealed to me very much.  I left with much regret.

Fondsbu

My new Dutch friends and I were again heading to the same destination: Fondsbu.  Fondsbu lies at the western end of Lake Bygdin, which is further south and much larger than Lake Gjende.  The trail to Fondsbu from Gjendebu is much gentler than the ones I had already hiked.  In fact, I was surprised to find myself leaving Gjendebu and hiking along a stream in a wooded valley, the Vesladalen.  The trees were small, but the lush greenery and bright blue skies were a welcome change from the endless vistas of barren rock I had encountered the day before.  The Vesladalen climbs gently from Gjendebu up to another high rocky plateau.  Soon the small trees disappear, but the bright, clear stream is a welcome companion on this hike.  On each side of the plateau high peaks loom, but they seem gentler than the ones further north.  Some of them are softened by bits of greenery and look inviting.  In general, the hike is less dramatic than the route from Gjendesheim to Gjendebu.  Eventually, however, the plateau comes to an abrupt end.  After crossing a wooden footbridge above the now roaring stream, I was amazed by the view down to Lake Bygdin.  The plateau drops abruptly nearly 1,000 feet to the lake shore and the stream turns into a dramatic waterfall cascading down the rock face.

Unlike the Bukkelaegret, this trail slices diagonally down the hillside.  As a result, I had views of the lake before me at all times as I headed toward the lake shore.  This descent was unquestionably the highlight of the Gjendebu to Fondsbu trek.  The lake is larger and more impressive than Lake Gjende and at the far western end there is a small town: Eisbugarden.  Down at the lake shore, the trail slogs through boggy, marshy terrain.  It’s tough going - by the time I passed by the houses at the western end of the lake I was up to my shins in mud.         The town of Eidsbugarden is a tiny collection of houses, a sod church, the Fondsbu hut, a hotel and a boat dock.  I didn’t see much more.  About the only excitement in town is a noisy flock of fat white geese that is apparently very well known in the area.  Early in the morning a boat calls at the dock to take passengers across Lake Bygdin to the far eastern end of the lake, a town called Bygdin, with an intermediate stop at Torfinnsbu.  All of these towns are also connected by hiking trails and the same dramatic landscape I had just hiked through.  In fact, a number of interesting trails radiate out from Fondsbu to various locations in the park, and I met some people who were just setting out on their own treks.  The Fondsbu hut seemed like a friendly community center.  Regulars stopped by for drinks and meals and the friendly owner seemed to be a popular figure in the town.

I was reluctant to leave the Fondsbu hut for the Western Fjords, but knew my time was running out.  I had no problem catching a ride to Laerdal, where I hopped on a ferry plying the Sognefjord and Aurlandsfjord.  The scenery was spectacular but I had mixed feelings about cutting short my trek in Jotunheimen. I was restless pacing on the slow moving ferries, watching the mountains glide by, and couldn’t help but wish that I could be up in those mountains instead of standing at a distance watching them.  The beauty of the fjords finally won me over and stopped me from dwelling on Jotunheimen, but I resolved to come back.  The dramatic scenery, the camaraderie and comforts of the huts, and the challenge of the difficult trails had seduced me.

        © 2000 by Robert Cannon