Observing winter from a distance…
Index
| Date | Peak | Height | PF | Location | WCP | MAP |
| 21.10.23 | Vardehornet | 600m | 60m | Ørsta/Volda, Norway | WCP | MAP |
| 21.10.23 | Melshornet | 809m | 567m | Ørsta, Norway | WCP | MAP |
Saturday: The last part of this week was mostly about checking the mailboxes on mountain tops, making sure they were tight and OK, as well as checking the visitor registers. Today, I needed a break from this and decided to check out the Liaskaret side of the Melshornet mountain – where I had never been before.
I parked the car next to the small hill Haukåsen and headed up to the Liaskaret farm.
The locals were curious about our presence…
I was wondering if anyone had skied down Saudehornet recently…
Then we followed the tractor road eastbound.
I realized soon that we were going in the wrong direction, but instead of going back, I chose to try our luck off-trail.
It was a bit steep here and there, but we found an OK route up.
A few minutes later, we had a good view towards the Hovden airport.
We still had a long way to go, so we’d better move on…
I’m always looking for paths that I haven’t walked before and found one near Stavtjørna.
Eventually, we reached Vardehornet and Melshornet didn’t seem that far away anymore…
I decided to go for the “gully route” in center of the below picture.
And then we reached the top of Melshornet, with the awesome Ørsta view.
Winter was coming for sure. I wasn’t mentally ready for it yet, but it did help to be up here during snowfall just 2 weeks earlier.
I mean, I do enjoy the skiing and the sunny winter days. But I’m a bit fed up with the storms, shoveling snow, driving to Sogndal in bad driving conditions, etc. I do understand those who choose to spend the winter months somewhere in southern Europe…
In my parts of the country, winter is effectively October to April, that’s 6-7 months! In the north, winter is longer. By winter, I effectively mean when you shouldn’t drive with summer tires. We don’t really get the big snowfalls in December and January anymore. Winter comes in full in the February – March timeframe. We go skiing (Randonnée) throughout May and come June, we put our skis away for a few months, even if there is snow from 1000m and upwards in June.
Until it’s all white, I make sure to capture and enjoy the contrasts…
We took the normal route down from Melshornet and followed the road from Dinglavatnet for a little while.
This road wouldn’t take us back to Liaskaret, so I had to figure out the best combination of forest paths to get us there. I also came across a few more paths that I didn’t know about.
When we got back to the car, I figured we could also visit Haukåsen.
We followed a path up to the top and another named hump was in the bag!
A superb round-trip hike!
Trip statistics: 17km, 1100 vertical meters, 4h:30m
Pictures (Canon EOS RP/Iphone 13 Pro Max) from the hike:
