Memorable hike – for good and bad!
Index
| Date | Peak | Height | PF | Location | WCP/FP | MAP |
| 11.10.25 | Stedjeåsen | 625m | 123m | Sogndal, Norway | WCP | MAP |
Saturday: I didn’t feel a whole lot better this morning, but at least the body seemed willing to go on a hike. I asked Anne if she wanted to join me in trying to get up to Stedjeåsen from the Rubbeskallen tunnel. She immediately said yes.
I had tried once before but didn’t find the way up. Anne had tried once before, and she had lost track of the route also. But perhaps if we joined forces…
We started out on the fjord side of the closed tunnel.
The route was marked with red/orange paint and signposted “Sylfeststigen”. The path was enough to follow.
Seven years had passed since I attempted this route for the first time. The overall terrain was familiar, but not the details. All I remembered was where I gave up and turned around.
One thing was for sure – if we lost the path, we would not attempt to “try our luck”. This is serious terrain.
We passed a point that was slightly exposed, and I remembered passing the same point in 2018.
Then we got out “in the open” and I couldn’t remember this part.
The path took us to the ruins of an old, leased smallholding. Maybe this was where Sylfest lived?
We moved on. The path was still fairly easy to follow but I knew that this was not where I was hiking back in 2018.
Next, we arrived at a boulder field that looked very familiar. The boulder rose towards the cliffs above and I recognized this as the place where I could not find the onward route. But the route is better marked now. However, the route guided us to the same cliff where I turned around, and I couldn’t understand how we could advance.
Then a “magic stairway” opened up in front of us. Wow! I had assumed that “Sylfeststigen” was the name of the route up the forest. But of course – this very part was “Sylfeststigen” – the “Sylfest stairway”.
The lower part was nature’s own creation but in the upper part, it seemed that Sylfest had helped out a little. It would have been extremely awkward to get up without the extra stone steps.
That was just awesome!
We assumed there would not be any further hurdles on our way across Stedjeåsen.
After a while, this route joined one of the regular trails and when we got to the top, things weren’t exactly the same.
A fallen tree here, a fallen tree there. Last week’s storm “Amy” had left some footprints for sure.
Anne didn’t like that her forest was messed up.
We would now follow the normal route back down, assuming an easy hike down the forest.
When we got to the end of the meadow, we were … flabbergasted!
This was a disaster zone. I saw forests after the hurricane “Dagmar”, but this was way worse. It was impossible to convey the damage just through pictures.
It took us a long time to get through this havoc.
At times, I almost wondered if there was an end to this…
One thing was for sure – this route will never be the same…
When we reached “Dagsturhytta” we could see that people with chainsaws had been up here and so we assumed the rest of the route down would be OK.
That was not the case…
Eventually, we got back to Anne’s place. The trip had lasted for almost 3,5 hours! Now we had to get our bikes. We parked on the far side of the Stedje tunnel and walked back to Rubbeskallen.
I brought my bike back to my car, while Anne biked home (she has an E-bike)
Back at Anne’s place – around 4pm, I felt like a wreck. I just wanted to call it a day and go to sleep. But we were going to a concert at 6pm and then for a dinner with friends afterwards. I just had to steel myself for a long evening.
Fortunately, I got one hour of rest, which did wonders. Then I was ready to go to the concert with the local group “Folk Flest”. Storsalen in Sogndal kulturhus was packed.
Afterwards, we went over to La Pergola and enjoyed a nice dinner with our friends Kjersti, Eli-Helga and Terje.
Trip statistics: 4km on bike, 6,9km on foot, 700 (est.) vertical meters, 3h:25m
