A nice glacier walk!
Index
| Date | Peak | Height | PF | Location | WCP/FP | MAP |
| 08.06.24 | Tuftebreen | 930m | – | Sogndal, Norway | MAP |
Saturday: Today, we would take our visitors Meaghan and Corey to glacier country, more precisely Tuftebreen – a side arm of Jostedalsbreen glacier – the largest glacier in mainland Norway and mainland Europe.
Meaghan (from the U.S.) is the daughter of two friends of Anne and she and Corey (from Australia) was on a European “tour”. Corey had been travelling for 9 months and I can’t even imagine how it will be to “land” after such an experience.
But today they would encounter a real glacier – or part of an icefall – even though the weather was quite mediocre.
We drove to Jostedalen, then up to Bergset, from where we started our hike.
The path is easy to follow and climbs somewhat steeply from 400m elevation and up to ~800m in the valley.
We brought Karma. She has never been on a glacier before, and we weren’t really sure how she would handle it. We would not be putting socks on her (for obvious reasons) and if she looked as if her feet were cold, we could always go down and park her below the glacier.
The plan was anyway to just walk around on the lower part of the glacier. We brought the necessary safety equipment just for show. We would not be entering dangerous territory.
As the glacier is retracting rapidly, the glacier entry point will only get higher and higher. Today, our glacier entry point was ~830m elevation.
It’s been a few years since we did a glacier walk with friends and it was a good opportunity to maintain the practices involving the equipment. Everything from knots to self-rescue from a crevasse on slings.
After traveling the world, Meaghan and Corey seemed quite impressed by being in a totally different world from what they were used to.
When we take friends to a glacier, we typically let them try ice climbing. But we hadn’t brought a long rope for this activity. They seemed to be content by just being on the glacier, though.
And Karma seemed to be doing quite well. She looked constantly confused (why am I here?) but otherwise OK.
After a while, the weather got better. That was a huge bonus!
We hiked up to ~930m elevation before we started descending. We could have gone higher, as the lower part of the glacier was quite friendly. But, they were getting the “gist” of it, as it was…
All in all, I think our friends had a pretty good day on the glacier!
We approached the glacier from the east, and we descended on the west side. This meant that we would have to cross the drain from the river coming out of the glacier. For me, this was just a long step but I had forgotten to take into consideration how scary this can be for people who don’t jump across streams regularly. But everyone got across in the end, safe and sound.
The hike was big fun and everyone was happy!
Trip statistics: 7,6km, 550 vertical meters, 5h:25m
Pictures (Canon EOS RP/ Iphone 13 Pro Max/ Samsung Galaxy) from the trip:
