Finishing Strandadalen…
Index
| Date | Peak | Height | PF | Location | MAP |
| 08.07.23 | Svartetindane | 1310m | 125m | Stranda, Norway | MAP |
Saturday: The time had finally come to visit Svartetindane above Emdalen and Strandadalen. This was the only pf100 top on both sides of Strandadalen valley that I still hadn’t been to.
I had been to Emdalen before, though. In 2006, I had the great pleasure to hike across Emdalstindane together with Svein, Torill and Einar. A truly memorable hike!
There is a mountain road from Emdalen and all the way up to the dam (approx. 750m) in Emdalsdalen, but this road is not open to the public. That’s a shame. The general trend is that roads like these are accessible to the public, for a fee.
There is no parking in Emdalen either. The only option is to park by a bus-stop along the main road. I wasn’t really keen on that, and I drove up to one of the farms and asked for permission to park there. It normally helps to ask nicely, and permission was granted.
On our way up the mountain road, we ran into a small herd of goats. Their first instinct was to run against us. But when they were only a few meters away, they got second thoughts (it looked like a small panic), turned around and disappeared. I was like … “what was THAT all about?”
The 3,3 km up to the dam got less boring thanks to the view towards Emdalshornet.
Here and there, we left the new road and followed the old tractor road.
When we got to the dam, I had to make a decision whether we should head straight up to the ridge and attempt an ascent along the north ridge – where success didn’t seem obvious – or play it safe and pass the mountain completely and ascend via the south ridge . Which looked like a walk in the park.
Now I remembered why I had been putting off a visit to this mountain. It’s a huge PILE of rock…
I was quite confident that the north ridge would offer obstacles that we might not be able to negotiate, but now I could see that there was a route over to the east flank from the north ridge. In other words, if the north ridge was a no-go, we wouldn’t have to descend far in order to get to the east flank.
Eventually we got on the north ridge and now I actually got my hopes up!
But my optimism didn’t last long when we were staring straight into a gap.
We could have tried to bypass this gap in the mountainside, but I decided to not waste more time and sat course for the east flank. After crossing a snow field (with hard snow) that was much steeper than it seems on the below picture, we were on the east flank and had an easy route up the mountain.
Eventually, we got on the south ridge and the summit was just a short hike away…
On the top, I noticed that there was another top 130m to the north. This top was seemingly lower, but I had to visit it, just to be on the safe side. Karma – and her bowl of water – had to stay put while daddy was hiking/scrambling the north top…
I was now surrounded by tops, and I had been to the majority of them. I’ve done all the pf100 tops along the coastline, from Sogn og Fjordane and up to Romsdalsfjorden. But I hadn’t completed Ørsta and Stranda municipalities yet. The majority of those tops are not suited for dogs…
As it had been some time since I was in this part of the Ørsta mountains, getting so close to some of the major mountains sent a stream of good memories through my head.
Like Smørskredtindane. My ascent on snow and in fog up to Store Smørskredtind and the wonderful ski-trip to Nordre Smørskredtind together with Svein Myhre.
And the wonderful hike across Store and Litle Skruven together with Anne…
It was time to get down and we headed down the east flank. When we got to the point where we came in from the north ridge, we (naturally) just kept on going downhill and ended up in Emdalsdalen close to where we ascended.
Now that Svartetindane was “in the bag” and the weather was glorious, the mountain road was way less boring going down…
Trip statistics: 13,1km, 1050 vertical meters, 3h:59m
Pictures (Canon EOS RP/Iphone 13 Pro Max) from the hike:
