Jostedalsbreen

I woke up on the bottom bunk of an absurdly tiny cabin with bright Robin’s egg blue walls and the sound of rain outside. It took me a moment to place myself – I was in the cabin we’d rented so cheaply the night before when we came to this valley after spending the day in the Jotunheimen Mountains.  Paul woke up too and we had breakfast and tea, washing our breakfast dishes in the odd outdoor kitchen that the campground provided. The cabin was cute but so small and chilly that there was no pleasure in staying there longer than necessary so we moved quickly and were on the road again by 7:30.  The day’s first goal was to see the stave church in Lom.  We arrived in Lom by 8:00 intent on first finding the fabled mini-bank which turned out to be on an outside wall so that we could use it even though it was a Sunday!  We thankfully got our money and looked around for a bakeri to spend some of it on.  I saw a sign for one by the river so we parked and walked over.  The hours on the door said that the bakeri did not open until 9:00 but someone inside saw us and waved us in. We opened the door and were hit by a wall of bakery scents – cinnamon, vanilla, baking bread, cardamom, apples, and cloves. This was very welcome as the morning was rainy and damp. We ordered coffee and apple muffins and took them to a table by a large window overlooking the river. Lom’s river was noisy and fierce, a full river crashing downhill with such force that the bakeri window was often splashed with spray as if we were on a boat looking through a porthole.  After our coffee and a muffins Paul went to check the hours that the stave church was open while I continued to stare, mesmerized, at the cloudy silver-green-blue water of the roaring glacier melt river. When he came back, reporting that the church had just opened, we gathered up our stuff and went to see it.

The town was almost deserted on the rainy Sunday morning.  But as we walked nearer a large tour bus pulled up and 50 or so people began to pile out. At this point in our trip we were beginning to feel as beleaguered by tour buses as we were by the lack of ATMs and so we growled a bit as we rushed to pay our tickets in order to see the small church in silence for a moment or two.  But they were such nice tourists! — a group of retired Belgians. The church staff gave the group a guided tour in English with a Flemish interpreter. The Norwegian tour guide was cute as beans and the Belgian interpreter was a pretty young blond. They flirted subtly throughout the tour which was apt because one of the cool things we learned was that when an archeological dig was done underneath the church foundation they found a runic love letter carved on a wooden spindle which was carbon dated to the 1100s or earlier. A guy loved a girl and wanted her to marry him but was concerned that maybe she would choose his rival instead – and no one knows what her answer was.

After Lom we drove towards the Jostedalsbreen glacier. We were making good time until we came to the high country where we chose to turn off of the mildly adequate paved road onto a narrow dirt road for 24 kilometers as we crossed another batch of stunning tundra and bare rock.  We saw a sign warning RVs, trucks and buses not to take our road and figured we would only have to maneuver around other cars.  The views were great but after tour bus number 6 came barreling along our Belgian tour bus detente ended and hostilities were again declared.  When the road got to the edge of the high country there was a dramatic view of large mountains in the distance on the other side of a deep valley. The far mountains rose up too high and dark to seem real, while the valley that fell off at our feet was very deep and unusually broad with waterfalls that were incredibly thin and long. Glaciers were sprinkled over the mountain peaks glowing an unearthly light blue. Suddenly I understood those exaggerated oil mountainscapes that are in the European section of Art Museums.

By the time we got to the valley floor it was rather late in the afternoon.  We drove to the information center of Loen, one of the towns reported to have hiking trail access to the Jostedalsbreen glacier but, because it was Sunday, it was closed. There was a confusing map posted on a kiosk that we stared at for awhile wondering how we were supposed to get from where we were to where we were trying to go. The guidebook rather despised Olden’s glacier access point as the place where all the tour buses went to drop off their cargo, but it did sound like we could at least figure out where that point was (tour buses being large and hard to miss). So we got back in the car and headed off to find some tour buses at Olden.  The glacial valley at the foot of the Olden arm of the Jostedalsbreen glacier was one of the prettiest lake-farmland-mountain landscapes we’d yet seen.  It was a quiet landscape and the farms and small settlements we drove by didn’t seem to have much going on other than the daily needs of farms and shops.  We could hardly believe that there was a huge tourist attraction so close by.  Perhaps it was the water that made it seem so peaceful – that surreally lustrous green-blue of glacial runoff.  Suddenly Paul swerved into a campground parking lot. Here was where he wanted to camp! “In a tent?” “Yes!” “Its going to be really cold you know like we are going to a glacier and I am already wearing gloves.”

We set up our tent and went in search of the trail head which wasn’t hard to find. It was a 15-20 minute walk up to the glacier with a large waterfall at one point.  The somewhat rainy day had turned beautifully sunny and the sky was blue for the evening.  We had wonderful weather to see the ice, and, just as nice, most of the tourists had left by the time we arrived making for a quiet walk up and back.  Unfortunately by August the glacier has melted back as far as it’s planning to for the year so the end of the trail was too far away from the glacier itself to get us very excited. We had enough time in our trip left that we could have taken a day and walked up to where the glacier was spread over whole mountain valleys but decided not to. Even if there was much more to see we were satisfied with what we got. We went back to the campground and slept well in our long underwear, wool caps, gloves, thick sleeping bags and socks.