Some photos from New Year’s ski promenade with friends. We were lucky – clear sky and -12 °C gave perfect conditions for some outdoor BBQ at Stora Stenen. And when the wind increased we went inside the wooden cabin of this public recreation area and fired the oven.
Have a Happy New Year 2022 all together!
Why, oh why was the forecast of Yr right? Already a week ago it forecasted a period of thaw and heavy rainfall. And Wednesday it started to rain. Just now I’m listening to another cloudburst bucketing down on the roof.
The snow is gone and the ways and small streets are very icy. When it continues raining like this even the ice may have thawed and washed away soon.
It looks almost like autumn but with a huge difference: It’s dark. The photos above I made at lunch break on my last working day this year.
It’s a pity! Just today my wife Annika will arrive so that we can spend Christmas time together. It would have been lovely with a lot of snow but even though it shall be colder again soon it does not look like we get some.
On Tuesday we got some snow in Tromsø. On Wednesday it already has melted away. But last night a bit of snow arrived.
Today I chose a shorter tour from my book “På tur in Tromsø” (On tour in Tromsø) because I just wanted an easy hike, not a full-grown mountain tour. The weather agreed with me.
By the sea only a bit of wet snow and sleet covered the ground but already 50 meter higher the gravel path was covered with 10 cm of snow. Deep tyre tracks were carved in the snow. This part of the tour was very easy. Just follow the road up until you reach the radio unit on the Tønsnesvarden (281 m) and try not to slip, because under the snow there are some icy patches.
This summit has a big radio station on its top. Even in the increasing snow fall is was quite visible. Now I walked through 20 cm of snow. After an hour I arrived at the radio station, where I met the creator of the deep tyre tracks: A six-wheeled ATV.
It wasn’t cold but a windy. It snowed more and more and the wet snow glued itself to my jacket. On my way back I left the main road and followed a small path on my digital map on my iPhone. I stopped in a forest of birches with thin and long stems. I loved the motive, but my Nikon camera gave up in this wet weather. The lens was fogged up in the inside and in the dense and wet snowfall I didn’t dare to change lens. One photo worked out ok anyhow:
Soon I realised that some of the paths drawn on the map did not exist in reality (at least not in winter) while others that exist were not part of the map. So I went cross-county through pathless terrain, partly dens forest, partly wetlands with many small streams to cross. It took only 15 minutes until I reached the other gravel road leading down again. Now the iPhone was in charge for making pictures.
I followed the path down. With each metre altitude I lost there was less snow on the ground and the snow fall became more and more sleet. When I arrived at my car my anorak was soaking wet. Having seat warmers in a car is a great feature after such a tour.
For the records: 6.5 km, round 300 metres in altitude. Temperature round 0°C.
When I show pictures of mountain tours and hilly hikes it is easy to forgot, that Norway has not only mountains but the sea, too. This is an iPhone snapshot I took from some metres from my parked car. What you cannot see is the mountains of the island Kvaløya, 3.8 km away. They are hidden in the snow clouds.
What do you do with photos taken with a fogged up lens? You start to experiment. I mean, the photo is spoiled anyhow. But the result of today’s experimentation turned out nice in my opinion.
+1 °C, grey and hazy with some rainy showers. I ignore the weather and go out for a longer walk. Time to put a black and white film in the iPhone.
Just nine days after the last snow warning that brought up to a metre snow in Västernorrland another snow warning was issued for today. And it has been snowing (and still is) and blowing since early morning. Time for a ski tour through the forest between two meetings …
Why I have time for a ski tour when working? Because as an employee of the Norwegian Polar Institute you have the right to two paid hours of training/sport/outdoor activities each week. One of the advantages of being employed there!
I went Spåret – “the track”, a circular route just 500 metres from here. It’s 3½ km long and leads through forests, over rock and along some swamps. Now with half a metre of snow you only see the the forest. Anything else is covered by white snow. And so is the small boggy pond: You should know where the planks cross it because under the snow there is still liquid mud.
This time the plank bridge was easy to find, because I could see the ski tracks that Annika and I left last weekend, when we skied Spåret the first time. I continued through the forest. I have jogged and promenaded this track many times, otherwise I hardly would have found the way.
Skiing was quite exhausting because my skis sank down at least 20 cm with each step, sometimes even knee deep. Will I come back in time to participate the next meeting? I guess I have to ski faster and take less photos. The last one I took was when I crossed Södra Obbolavägen, our only road to “civilisation”.
To make it short: I arrived in time.
Some hours later I had a special after work activity: clearing a roof of snow. Most roofs had been blown free but there was one large snowdrift on the roof of our main house that I shovelled away while standing on the old metal ladder.
The ladder stands still there. Probably I’ll have to do some more shovelling tomorrow again. While I write this blog entry a huge snowdrifts starts to cover the bottom part of my home office window. What a pity, that it probably will rain on Saturday. One of the few disadvantages when living directly by the coast where it uses to be warmer than in the inland.
It’s -18 °C and the sun is shining. 60–70 of powder snow cover the ground. We ski through the wintry forest following a narrow trail that other skiers have carved into the snow. We cross a snow mobile track that in turn crosses a snow covered bog. We enter another snowy forest.
It’s only a day trip and soon we arrive at the forest cabin which is open. We are alone and make a small fire in the oven while I try to take pictures of the Siberian jays but they are shy.
I just love Lapland in winter!
But …
This is not Lapland. It’s the Västermark nature reserve and this is just 77 km away from home. Annika and I went there last Sunday to enjoy the great winter weather and so we made our first little backcountry ski tour together this winter. More to come …
| English | German | Swedish |
|---|---|---|
| Siberian jay | Unglückshäher | Lavskrika |
If the landscape is dull and grey – photograph in black and white!
This article is part of the series “2020-10: New in Tromsø”.
Days grow shorter and shorter in Tromsø so I took a small outside promenade in my lunch break to catch a bit of daylight. Tromsø is so beautiful with 10 cm of fresh snow that had fallen since yesterday.
I’m not sure if the snow will stay for longer or melt away soon but it doesn’t matter for me. That’s because on Sunday I’ll take the airplane home to Obbola in Sweden and will stay there the rest of the year.
But that’s another story that will be told on Sunday when I’ll spend many hours in Oslo Gardermoen and Stockholm Arlanda waiting for the connection flights.
This article is part of the series “2020-10: New in Tromsø”.
Though Saturday I went to the Norwegian Polar Institute yesterday to get a handover from a former colleague. I went however not the direct way (20 minutes) but a long detour (90 minutes) to catch some air and some light before being in the office until dark.
Just some photos taken with my mobile.
It’s nice to go lightweight and taking pictures with the iPhone. While the photos are impressive considering the size of the lens and sensor, the quality is of course long from that of my Nikon. So next time I’ll carry more weight but probably I’ll be more content with the image quality afterwards.
This article is part of the series “2020-10: New in Tromsø”.
Perhaps you saw the photos that I took on my way to work five weeks ago. The sky was blue, it was quite warm and the sun was shining.
![[preview]](https://way-up-north.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/preview-1.jpg)
Today it was completely different. For the first it was dark. Dark on my way to work and dark again on my way back. Sunrise was at 8:33 and sunset already at 14:21.
Then it was quite windy and very rainy the whole day. Sometimes it just rained a bit, sometime it was bucketing down huge amounts.
Here are some photos from my way to work. Taken with my iPhone and black-and-white again.
The way back was more exciting. When I went round the Framsenteret – the marina to my left – I first thought I was totally lost in the dark. I didn’t know that there was a huge artificial lake to the right. I never saw it before. Carefully I tested with my rubber boot, it was 25 cm deep. Then I realised that this was no lake but the parking place. It was completely flooded. Did it really rain so much? Apparently.
I continued stomping through huge water puddles. My outfit: rubber boots – rain pants — waterproof parka – reflective vest to be seen by others – headlamp (in one of the parka pockets)
Then I realised that even the sea water level was exceptionally high. Would I be able to go back the very same gravel path you can see on the second photo? That path lies quite low and in the morning I could see a chain of seaweed lying on the side facing land. When I arrived, the way was completely gone. I could only see the water of the sea up to the site fence.
To make a long story short: I continued the path. Mostly it was 30 cm of sea water covering the gravel. That still worked with my rubber boots, but it shouldn’t have been more. I was really glad to have a bright LED lamp. Probably I wouldn’t have dared without it. And not it beacme clear that there will come a day where this part of my favourite way to work will be impassable without offshore survival equipment.
Tromsø is located at the latitude of 69° 39′ N, almost 350 km north from the polar circle. That means, that the days not only get shorter and shorter but that there’ll be a time where the sun doesn’t rise and set at all. This time is quite near: In three weeks it will be the last time you’ll be able to see the sun and then again in January.
To illustrate this I made some charts. The y axis of each chart shows the dates from 1 January (top) to 31 December (bottom). Each row shows the solar altitude for that day by color.
From left to right: München, Germany – Obbola, Sweden (my home) – Tromsø, Norway (my current workplace)
Sun | Sun (golden hour) | civil twilight | nautical twilight | astronomical twilight | deep night
These are the main differences:
München has sun each day, but a real dark night, too.
In Obbola in Northern Sweden there’s always at least 4 hours of sun (if the clouds allow it) but it hardly gets dark in summer.
Tromsø has the most extreme changes of sun altitude during the year: Round seven weeks of polar night in winter and almost ten weeks of polar days with midnight sun between May and July.
So there’s much to experience here. The next experience will be the technique sea kayak course this weekend. Probably with a lot of rain at 3 °C and on Saturday even gusty winds round 14 m/s.