Norway: First Impressions and First Huts
- jasey5
- Jun 2
- 6 min read
Hello again! I’m off traveling between finishing up my masters at CU and starting my first job as a firmware engineer for Inovonics. For those of you who have joined my blog for previous adventures, welcome back! But if you’d rather not be on my mailing list, feel free to unsubscribe or send me an email and I’ll take you off (no hard feelings whatsoever). As before, this blog will be a place for me to share a few photos and stories from what is shaping up to be a grand, 10 week adventure. I’m starting off with 3 weeks in Norway, traveling with my parents. Then I’m taking a quick jaunt down to Germany to visit some family friends and am embarking on a big loop around the Adriatic Sea, ending with a trek along the Austrian/Italian border and some time in Zurich visiting a college friend who moved there last year. With that, let’s fly to Norway…
Shortly after landing in Oslo, I discovered the amazing fact that I can kinda, sorta read Norwegian. It turns out Norwegian and English share enough common roots and cross pollination that their word structure is pretty similar and a shockingly large number of words are inteligible provided you don’t get too hung up on the spelling. Strangely enough, being dyslexic and being able to spell the same word 8 different ways was good training for being able to figure out that “nasjonal” is national and “karbohydrat” is carbohydrate etc. I was telling a friend about it and he described it perfectly. You just have to read the vibe of the word. Of course then you run into things like “äpningstider på gaustabanen” and the vibes are no longer strong enough to give me a clue what’s going on. In researching the language, I also discovered that there are actually two written forms of Norwegian. One is called Norsk Bokmål and comes from the era when Norway was ruled by Denmark and is closer to the Danish written language. While the second and less popular, Nynorsk, was created in the 1800s by a linguist to more accurately represent how people actually spoke as well as pull in pieces from older versions of the Norwegian written language that were lost during Danish rule. It seems both are taught in school though Bokmål is much more commonly used.
As my family isn’t big on cities, we didn’t spend long in Oslo, but we enjoyed a few good walks around the city before we skipped town. It’s quite green here, no surprise given it rains a lot, and I really enjoyed how much nature they have built into the city. There are parks everywhere and most of the apartment blocks seem to have inner court yards. We found a river walk with what I believe were baby Bean-Geese (do they like beans as much as I do?) and visited the Opera house which sits right on the water and is designed to look like an iceberg. While we were there, they were in the process of installing an art exhibition of statutes that appeared to be halfway through the glass in the main windows of the building.
We also discovered that many food items we would buy in cans - like beans - in the US, come in small boxes here instead. It makes for highly efficient packing and means you don’t need a can opener!
Our last big adventure in Oslo was visiting a Viking museum and discovering the very cool piece of trivia that Bluetooth (the communication technology) is named after a Viking! Harold Bluetooth was a Viking king who united Denmark and Norway in the 10th century. In 1997 some of the inventors of a communication technology at Intel ran across his story and code named their technology Bluetooth, partly because it would unite different technological platforms like Harold Bluetooth united Denmark and Norway and partly because they liked the rune (viking letters) that Harold Bluetooth used, which is a combination of the Hagall (ᚼ) and Bjarkan (ᛒ) runes - his initials - which gave the technology its logo. Bluetooth was only intended as a code name but the Intel marketing team couldn’t get a different named cleared for launch fast enough and Bluetooth ended up sticking.
After our revelation about Bluetooth, we rented a car and left the city, driving to a region of Norway called Telemark where we made another discovery. As a lot of you know, I Telemark ski. Which is a style of skiing more similar to cross country where your heel is free so you turn by doing lunges and it turns out the style originated in Telemark, Norway! The style started in the 1800s as an adaptation of cross country skiing to allow for more control when skiing downhill but it was mostly forgotten in the skiing world as alpine skiing took off. Then in the 70s in Crested Butte CO, before alpine touring gear became easy to get your hands on, a few guys were trying to figure out how to ski untracked powder. They had leather cross country boots, long skinny skies and 75mm free heel bindings which worked to get them to the powder but didn’t provide an easy way to ski the powder once they got there. As they worked to solve this conundrum, they stumbled on a book about the Telemark skiers from Norway and a photo of one of the pioneers practicing a tele turn. They started adapting their cross country gear and developing the technique, and in the process created a wave of Telemark skiing in the US that eventually caught my parents and myself.
While in Telemark, we started seeing little top-heavy cabins at many of the farms and through a bit of research, learned that they are called Stabbur and are traditional storehouses, many of which were built 100s of years ago. They were used mostly as food storage but also could be additional sleeping quarters or storage for household items and their design is rather genius. They built them sitting up on pillars of rocks to protect the logs from water by allowing air to pass under the building and dry out the boards. Next, the rock pillar foundation makes it difficult for mice to enter the storehouse. Additionally, the staircase stops a few inches from the building to prevent them from just taking the stairs in. It took a little longer to find an answer for why the second story is larger than the first, but we eventually found an explanation. The upper story functionally acts as a roof and eves for the lower story so it protects the walls from rain the same way we build a roof to extend over the walls of a house to protect it. Clearly it works, because there are some very old ones still standing.
Alright, time to get hiking. My dad discovered that Norway has an incredible hut system. There are something like 600 huts across the country. Some function like our huts in Colorado where you bring your own food and start a fire in the wood stove when you arrive. Some are stocked with food you can buy but you have to prepare the food, and some are like the huts in the alps where they are fully staffed and run more like tiny bed and breakfasts. Unfortunately, many are closed currently because of the reindeer calving season, it being low tourist season or being still snowed in. However, through a huge amount of research, my dad managed to figure out the system well enough to find us two huts to test out. The first was an unstaffed hut in some lower mountains near the small town of Tuddal. The cabin can sleep many people but we had it to ourselves for the night. It’s rained quite a bit since we have been here so the walk in was quite soggy and we got caught in a short hail storm, which was actually quite beautiful to watch hitting the surface of a mountain lake. One big difference from our huts in Colorado is it seems to still be common to use candles for light. We didn’t need any as it really doesn’t get all that dark this time of year, but with only a few hours of daylight in the winter I’m sure they burn though them quickly. That being said, open flame in a wooden cabin seems like a questionable idea when we have modern alternatives. They have planned for it however, as each cabin is required to have a secondary building with a heat source in case one cabin catches fire.
After a quick reset stop at an Airbnb, we hiked into a staffed cabin on top of one of the tallest mountains around: Gaustatoppen. Which is a whopping 6,178 feet high but because we are so far north, tree line is below 4000 feet, so it feels very alpine and otherworldly on top of the mountain. There were 6 other guests staying the night with us and we ended up having a lovely dinner conversation talking with couples from Norway, Denmark and Holland. They gave us lots of recommendations on where to check out next so the next post should be full of adventure! See you there!
Links:
Language: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g9jT3eYlpA8&pp=ygUdSGlzdG9yeSBvZiBub3J3ZWdpYW4gbGFuZ3VhZ2U%3D
Bluetooth: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth