Skitour to Lordehytta

In early November winter comes and goes to Geilo. Snow makes it harder to bike on the trails, but you still don’t have enough snow for off-piste skiing. It’s time to do off season compromises to get outdoors. I would call them snowshoeing and tour skiing. Fatbiking with skating on a lake was a nice one as well. But this Tuesday we decided to do an overnight trip to Lordehytta. It is located at Hallingskarvet at about 1600 meters altitude. Village in Geilo is at 700 meters so even if it was raining here it would be snowing up there.

We drove by car to Haugastøl train station and parked there. It’s about 25km from Geilo. Then we walked for a bit and started to follow the marked summer track up to Lordehytta. We should have followed the road that goes up to the cabins here as far as you get and after struggling an hour at the summer track, we got back to the road. Then at the top we started to follow the summer track again. The track is marked to the Stones By red painting and once it was so little snow, you could still see the marks. We thought that the winter track would pass some lakes that might not be frozen enough yet.

I had to put my skins right away to the skies, because the terrain was very variable and uphill all the way. I have a pair of old Åsnes skies with telemark bindings and old leather telemark boots. If you don’t count some blisters in your feet, those work ok. In Geilo it is also possible to rent tour skies from Geilo Skishop (http://www.geiloskishop.no) at Dr. Holmes hotel.

After two hours we hadn’t got very far away and my boyfriend Antti asked if we were ever going to reach the cabin. Pretty good question in Nowember, when you get darkness around 5.30 pm. We had started to ski at 12, so there wasn’t too much time for the darkness to come and we had never been at Lordehytta before.

We decided to keep going. If we wouldn’t make it to the cabin, then it would be a night outdoors. We would have had enough warm sleeping bags, but not a tent with us. At Visit Norway’s websites they say that walking to Lordehytte from Haugastøl takes about 3,5 hours and the distance is 12 kilometers. With heave back bags and some problems with my bindings to hold at shoes, it took us 6,5 hours to ski to Lordehytte. At the top it started to wind hard and it was white out. We were lucky to find the roof of the cabin just following gps at the end. Opening the cabin door was quite a relief, once with that wind you wouldn’t like to sleep outside without any shelter. There was even fire wood, so we warmed up the cabin a bit before getting to sleep.

The next morning the weather had got even worse. You couldn’t see more than in the evening, but the following day there would be a real storm. Even the Norwegians where reporting of dangerous hard wind. I can tell you that if Norwegians tell that, it’s a crazy wind. Today while I’m writing this blog at home the weather forecast for Lordehytte says 22 meters in a second wind. In a Norwegian way, that is called a little storm. I wonder how hard the wind has to be to call it big storm in Norway.

We started to ski down from the Lordehytte and I thought that this would be a piece of cake. Downhill is always better for me than uphill. Well the hill that seemed to be uphill the day before, wasn’t all the way downhill this morning. And the snow was stucking at the bottom of your skins. Once we took the skins of it was still stucking at the wax base. New snow close to zero degrees is the worse. There’s only one way to deal with it. Never stand still at the snow with your skies.

In times it was a nice feeling of downhill. There’s still a lot of stones and you could see grey spots on the snow. The snow had just covered the stones a bit. After coming down some hundred meters the wind calmed down. It took us again 5 hours. More than we thought. While driving back to Geilo it started to rain. It felt good that we had seen the real winter and snow on the mountains. Hope for it to get here as well.