Tom and Tinas Travels: A Norwegian Roadtrip - Day 4

About 20 miles north of Mo i Rana is a park called Saltfjellet-Svartisen National Park. (Don't ask me, because I simply no idea why the Norwegians insist on making names and words with all these silly consonants in them. They probably think we're vowel crazy I suppose. :) ) Svartisen is the name of a couple of glaciers located in the park meaning black ice because of how old and dark the ice is in the glacier. Tina and I decided (well ... Tina went along with it anyway) that we were going to hike to the foot of one of the glaciers which is about 7 km one way. So far so good.

On the way to the park we stopped a couple of times to enjoy some of the scenery.

And then we got to the park itself, only to find out that you can't drive into the park because its outside of tourist season. Ends up tourist season is only mid-June to end of August. This was later confirmed in town when we found out that the only places you could convert US$ to Norwegian Crowns was at a bank or at the tourist info center ... but only during the tourist season. After that, you're on your own.

So a chained off road never slowed us down. It just added 3 km more walking in each direction.


Tina's Always Game for More Walking

So we're walking down the road towards the real park and took these pics.

Tina Loved This Mushroom

Part of the Glacier We're Heading Towards

And then, after 3 km, we reached the main park.

Sign With About a 10 to 1 count of Consonants to Vowels

The Lake at the Base of the Glacier

According to the signs, what looks like falls at the far end of the lake are still part of the glacier. So we were closer than we thought. Might as well set off and get to the far side of the lake.

Wellllll ... until we got about 100 yards up the real trail and came across this.

A Bit of a Muddy Trail

Now, I personally had no problem tromping through that crap ... and Tina wasn't exactly whining ... because she would be really mad if I put on a public blog that she was whining. But the fact that it took her 20 minutes to move over the next 10 feet told me that she probably wasn't too terribly excited to continue on.

So it was back off that trail, trying to find another trail perhaps a bit farther up.

A Brave Trail Guide

But that trail didn't work any better so we decided to head even farther up and blaze our own trail across the unfrozen tundra.

The Unfrozen Norwegian Tundra

Once again, I had fun trudging across it, but Tina wasn't going for it. Plus having soaked both of our feet by then, we decided that going to a glacier when it's not tourist season probably wasn't going to work for us.

But at least we got a good joint picture out of it.