Scot Jim Chalmers has finished his mammoth traverse of Norway so Dave Hewitt updates us on the final challenging sections of his journey.
After the recent rather claustrophobic accounts of serial Ben Cleuching, it's time for something at the opposite extreme - the fourth and final chapter of Jim Chalmers' massive trek, on ski and on foot, from Lindesnes at the southern tip of Norway to the Nordkapp in the far north. You'll recall that Jim set off as far back as 9 February and that, apart from a brief interlude at the end of May, he had been making steady progress ever since.
The end finally came on 15 September, when he reached Knivskjellodden, most northerly point of both Norway and Europe. The Nordkapp itself had been visited the day before and the mood was mainly one of relief, the last couple of weeks having been "a fight to finish at all because of dreadful weather". A whole day had latterly been lost to the intended schedule, and from Alta (two weeks from the finish) Jim reported having only two "reasonable" days. The weather in his part of the world often seemed to be the flipside of that experienced here: better when we were having such a relentlessly wet late spring / early summer, then poor once our anticyclone finally arrived around the start of August. I guess there's only room for one anticyclone at a time in the northern part of Europe.
Gales and heavy rain were the main problems, and it was more than just an unpleasant backdrop. "On one occasion," Jim writes, "I was well down into hypothermia before I realised what was happening and took action. On another, we lost our tent to wind. I think only [his wife] Anne's presence with a car made a successful conclusion feasible. On most days after Skaidi, my plan was to reach a road every evening and spend it with Anne in a campsite hut or hotel. On one night, that would require a detour of 5km or 6km out and 5km or 6km back, so we agreed that Anne would try to join me if she could find a way past some very big cliffs. She did and we met up after the usual mix-up about rendezvous.
"It had been a foul day and got worse as we tried to pitch the tent. The wind swung through nearly 90 degrees, and our poorly protected site became exposed. We tried to unpitch the tent to move to a better site and in the process the wind broke two of our three poles. It was half an hour before sunset, but luckily at these latitudes twilight is still long, so we fled down the cliff path in gathering gloom to where Anne had left the car. Without it we would have been stranded, trying to shelter in a storm in a collapsed tent, not knowing of an escape route closer than 20km. I'm not sure my attempt would have survived that, even if we had."
(Not enough is written about the dangers of extreme wet/windy weather. The narratives of epics in the Greater Ranges tend to skew the perception of what leads to hypothermia, and for all that severe "winter" weather is undoubtedly a cause, in Scotland - and, it would appear, in Scandinavia - snow or ice doesn't need to be in the equation at all. Driving rain is exceptionally chilling, and the two occasions when I've known myself to start chittering with early-stage hypothermia have both been in precisely this kind of weather - once on Ben Nevis, once - incongruously - on Meikle Bin in the Campsies, a Christmas morning excursion when I felt distinctly relieved that the treeline was so high and the summit so low. Any longer spent out in the horizontal downpour would have had serious consequences.)
Anyway, although Jim and Anne survived the various late-stage perils, he writes that he was "not sorry to finish now. Conditions up here have been just too bad during the last phase. Before that, they were generally superb, at least for most of the summer."
The day that the long-sought Nordkapp finally arrived was, ironically as is the way with these things, "fairly fine - a cold northeast wind and a little flurry of snow to remind me that winter is just around the corner here."
The last few weeks had seen Jim walk past ("but not over") Finland's highest mountain, Haltiatunturi at 1328m, near-as-damnit the height of Ben Nevis. Finland has "an area getting on for the size of the Lake District in its northwest corner, and Finns trek up to Haltiatunturi in substantial numbers. Not as many as Ben Nevis, but quite a few every day in the summer. Unfortunately, Finland's highest point is a subsidiary summit of a mountain whose highest summit, six metres higher, lies entirely in Norway. But no one is interested in that!"
A visit was also made to the Reisadalen gorge, "a very spectacular place with some extremely spectacular waterfalls. I reckon the rock climbing on the gorge walls must be superb and the waterfalls in winter must make ice climbs of world standard. But, of course, no one has ever heard of the place."
Then out to Finnmarksvidda. "In Norwegian, a vidda is an elevated but generally flat area. Hardangarvidda in the south and Finnmarksvidda in the north. A bit like Moine Mhor. But Finnmarksvidda is about 350km across both east to west and north to south - the equivalent of a substantial part of the size of the whole of Scotland.
"In the south, Finnmarksvidda is mostly covered by birch wood, open woodland of spindly trees. The vidda surface rises in altitude towards the coast in the north and the tree-line falls, so further north the vidda is mostly bare moorland with rolling hills about 100m high. Not inspiring walking, really, but apparently the cross-country skiing is superb."
While resting for a couple of days at Alta before the final push, Jim contributed some feedback to my previous piece on his expedition. "You mentioned how much northing I had had to do between Lindesnes and the Nordkapp. Take a look at how much easting I have had to do, too. I started at 7 degrees E and will finish at 26 degrees E, a difference of 190 of longitude - equivalent to well over a time zone. While longitude degrees are nowhere near so many kilometres as latitude so far north, they probably average about 40%, so my northings are equivalent to about 1500km and my eastings 900km. Sometimes, and especially during the last few weeks, I have felt that I just walk east and not north."
Perhaps linear expeditions habitually include a sidestep such as this. My own Scottish watershed trip in 1987 - much shorter than Jim's effort and a far less serious undertaking - went from the Scotland/England border to Cape Wrath, a south-north route by any definition. But the geological (or, more strictly, orographical) demands of the route meant that it included a stretch of well over a week, from Lagganside westward to the edge of Knoydart, when no more than five miles of northward progress was made. Jim's similar diversion might not be pure coincidence. Whether a route is entirely fixed, as in my case, or partially "free" as in Jim's, the faults and massifs of the landscape will inevitably have their say, dragging the best direction of travel into some curious - and, at times, diversionary - corners.
Overall, Jim reckons his trip involved around 3100km in distance - just under 2000 miles - with 54,000m of ascent. He gives his daily averages as "just over 20km [distance] and 300 metres climbed for all active days. If I include rest days, they're a good bit lower. My walking averages are slightly higher than my skiing ones. Most people, including me beforehand, would expect the opposite."
As to the overall effort involved, he writes, "my impression is that my distance total is a good bit more than that of folk who do all the Munros in one walk, but the height total isn't much more - ie I climb many fewer metres per kilometre than Munrobaggers or when you did your watershed walk. That makes sense, for I have mostly been walking through passes, not over summits."
Jim didn't have the required figures to hand when suggesting this, and the Munros comparison appears to show that, overall, he covered more distance with between a third and half the ascent. Hamish Brown, on his 1974 Munros walk, covered 1639 miles (around 2640km) with 449,000 feet of ascent (around 136,850m). Chris Townsend - who included the subsidiary Tops in his 1996 Munros effort - covered 1770 miles (2850km) with 575,000 feet of ascent (175,250m). Charlie Campbell, running, cycling and swimming round all the Munros (ignoring subsidiary Tops) in 48 days 12 hours in 2000, did an overall 2650km and a honed-down 125,000m of ascent on what was close to being an optimum route.
For the record, my own much more modest watershed effort required around 1350km and 100,000m of ascent in 80 days. All of which indicates, I suppose, the extent to which Jim was "travelling" rather than bagging - although still with a huge amount of up and downhill work factored in. His ascent percentages will, for instance, be substantially more than someone doing a standard travelling route such as the West Highland Way, the Pennine Way or Lands End to John O'Groats.
The main thing, of course, is that he enjoyed it - which he certainly did. "The Trip [his upper case] has been a fantastic experience. On one day, I walked for several hours straight towards a rainbow. But I never seemed to reach the pot of gold. Or did I? Nordkapp was my rainbow and I had my pot of gold with me most of the time."
As a footnote - hopefully of amusement to Jim Chalmers and indeed to everyone with an interest in Norwegian mountains, I should mention a list compiled by Petter Bjorstad. This details the top 105 Norwegian peaks ordered by "primary factor" - aka "drop" in British listings - and extending from 2469m Galdhopiggen (2440m all-round drop) to 1849m Kaldfonna in position 105, still with 610m or 2000ft of drop. The list can be found at www.ii.uib.no/~petter/mountains/norway_finest.html
Thanks to Andy Martin in the US and the relative hill yahoogroup for tipping me off about this.
Dave Hewitt
10/10/2002
You can contact Dave at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
