I found very little info on the couloir other than the youtube video but it turns out that it’s pretty easy to find. Driving from Leknes to Henningsvær, you can find it just outside of Henningsvær in an area which is popular amongst climbers in the summer and looks like this:

The couloir is a little bit further on from where I’m taking the picture and easy to see.

Unfortunately we didn’t find the couloir in good condition. It looked amazing but when we got on it, the rain affected snow was in clear evidence with light fluffy powder on top. There was lots of sluff in the couloir where it had purged which made for pockets of avy debris and exposed, icy rain affected snow.

The gradient on the lower part of the couloir is never more than 40 degrees, so we knew that section of the couloir was skiable in those conditions and hoped that it might get better as we climbed. There is a big fallen boulder in the middle of the couloir (the crux) which is easy to pass both up and down. We had crampons and two ice ixes for the climb which were definitely needed  for this section in the condition we found it.

The snow just above the crux was also very hard and icy and it would definitely be wise to board this section with both ice axes to arrest any fall or loss of control or just simply down climb.

Once passed the crux, the couloir gradually steepens to around 45 degrees and up to around 50 degrees as you start to top out (all gradients were checked with the inclinomoter). The condition of the couloir didn’t improve as we climbed and we were unsure whether it was skiable. Having had a serious fall on ice before, this is not somewhere I like to be, so we decided at the worst we would climb to the top, enjoy the clouds and then downclimb.

Just as we were nearing the top (probably 50m below the top), I released a slab avalanche on 50 degrees. It wasn’t particularly big (crown of around 30cm) but big enough to take us both off the face and start falling down the couloir. I managed to self arrest around 50m from the crown and Luca fell around 100m toma-hawking and finally coming to a stop.

As soon as I got on that section of snow, I just knew it was going to go and then it did. It all happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to shout “Avalanche”. Then I got snow in my mouth and down my wind pipe and was struggling for breath when I finally managed to stop.

Luckily, nothing more than a slightly twisted knee for me and a bruised elbow for Luca. And then a hasty retreat down the couloir.

So, the long and short of it is that this beautiful couloir is not in coniditon at the moment due to all the rain last week. And a word of warning….. While we were down climbing, it started snowing heavily. All the snow from the side walls sluffs into the couloir. We were protected under the rock at the crux but there was surprisingly large amounts and they came much quicker than I would have ever thought.

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21

Luca, a friend from Chamonix, has come up for a few days to check out Norway and Lofoten for the first time. The weather has been more than a bit frustrating since his arrival and everything we have tried to do has ended up in complete white-out at the summit in strong winds and snow, hoping for a weather window.

We went up Stornappstind yesterday to ski the South Couloir. I skied this last year for the first time solo (here are more details on how to get there and specifics on the couloir.)

The weather had been shifting all day and it looked like nothing was going to happen. Hoping things had settled down a bit and would  improve, we went for it. Of course that never happened and we ended up waiting on the summit in a complete white out with strong winds and snow for about 1.5 hrs unsure if we had found the entrance to the couloir. Finally a window of sorts presented itself and we could see the entrance (indeed where we thought it was) and dropped in.

And well worth the wait it was too! The conditions in the couloir were fantastic. Really cohesive snow and things seemed to be really well bonded. You could ski it pretty fast.

Luca finally managed to get his first line. Let’s hope for a few more in the coming days.

The couloir is protected from the current wind so there is no windslab. But as a result, it does have wind transported snow in there. I couldn’t see any signs of instability but it is something to bear in mind.

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20.

Today was going to be a solo day and given the new snow I wanted to do something that was conservative and chose Hustinden which is a 5 minute drive from the house in Napp. Ski-in, ski out (well, almost).

You have to drive to Nappskaret car park which is the same car park to go up Stornappstind. You’ll see it as soon as you arrive. This tour seems like a really good tour on those days you’re not sure of the snow pack as you’re nice and safe on the ridge the whole way, so if anything goes, it should go below you.

I had to cross a small river at the start which was easy and then skinned up the first section which is around 30 degrees and then it gets steeper to around 38 degrees (checked on inclinometer) and then mellows back down. Once I get to the steeper section, I boot packed up.

The whole trip is around 700m vertical gain from the car park. It took me about 2 hrs up and down which was a bit slow going. The wind was blowing almost perpendicular to the ridge, so there was a lot of deep wind transported snow on the leeward side, the side I boot packed up but more importantly also the side I boarded down The snow was just below my knee for most of the way. Nice powder.

The snow seemed really cohesive on the lower angle stuff but as I gained elevation and started to climb up the steepest section towards the top (42 to 45 degrees, one section of 48 degrees for 10m (checked with inclinometer)), the snow was drier and I didn’t have a great feeling about it. I dug down to the old rain affected layer which was about 30cm below the new snow and it just seemed a little too light and fluffy for my liking. I could easily just wipe it off the rain affected layer. It just didn’t feel good enough which might have something to do with being solo.  Either way, I decided to turn about 50m below the summit and get out of there.

Being solo and having doubts is an endless battle. Are your doubts genuine or because you are alone. Very often it’s hard to tell the difference, I find. Wind, bad visibility and cold only add to the internal struggles ;).

The snow behaved normally but as the terrain was steeper, I was easily going through to the rain affected snow beneath which is food for thought for steep skiing later in the week.

So the trip achieved what I set out to do. Get some safe, powder turns and check out how things are shaping up. Hopefully, a little bit wiser this week. Things definitely need to bond a bit more on the higher elevations where the snow is drier.

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18

Considering we’ve now had two days of new snow (around 20cm accumulated) on top of a hard rained on layer, we wanted to just take a nice cruisy tour today and see what the lay of the land was. So we headed over to Middagstinden on Flagstad island. This picture is taken from Ramberg.

This tour is the epitomy of cruise. I’m guessing it’s around 30 degrees and perfect for some nice big turns. Unfortunately, it is on the short side at around 550m vertical gain, so we were up in around an hour and down again in a few minutes. But they were a very fun few minutes!

The tour starts at Bergland where you can park the car. The snow cover left a little bit to be desired on the way up.

We ended up boot packing the whole way up even though you could have skinned after the  initial first few hundred metres. The rain layer was still there but the new snow seems to have bonded well to it and should only get better over the next couple of days.

Once we reached the top, it is basically just one big snow field at around 30 degrees. I had a good old charge. Conditions were really good but the hard rain affected layer is lurking if you make too big turns.

Nice family friendly tour.

Luca is arriving tomorrow, so excited to see what mischief we can get up to!

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17

As last year, the first tour of the Lofoten trip was to be Stornappstind (click here on how to get their, route finding e.t.c). It has been raining here recently, so I was anticipating a bit of dust on boiler plate and decided to take the ice axe with me just in case. How many times have I left it behind only to get myself in a spot of bother….? Enough to now take it with me. And I was very pleased with that decision.

There is still snow cover all the way from the car park to the top. Not that we got to the top. That’s where the boiler plate comes in….. This picture is very deceiving:

I could lie and say it was “epic”, as so many seem to do who stand on one or two planks. But it wasn’t to be honest! I gave up skinning up on my splitboard and started to book pack. I hardly made a dent in the snow with my hard boots to be honest but made quick progress with the ice axe. Angelita carried on up on skis for a while before she couldn’t go anymore and started sliding back down the way she came.

Angelita skinning up Stornappstind

So we had no choice but to put the planks on there and ski back down around 100m for the summit. The ski down was surprisingly good to be honest. Much better than I’d been expecting, so a good day out in the end. Just great to be in Lofoten again anyway. The views are always stunning and the pace of life perfect compared to the usual rat race.

With the conditions as they are locally, things just cannot get colder. If it gets cold, it will put a stop to any hopes of skiing anything steeper. A few road trips look like they are on the cards ;).

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16

Ristinden and its shoulder

And unfortunately that is going to be how it remains until I’m next in Lofoten this time next year. For some reason I didn’t feel quite right about this one beforehand, some of it being irrational and due to the fact that I was going to solo this and some of it perhaps not.

The snow was again on the sparse side on the start of the climb up and again I didn’t use skins.

The intended climb up in red and the same ski down

There was a lot of water coming down the mountain in the form of streams and there were a few marked on the map for this mountain, so I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary other than, yes, the snow was melting. There was a fair bit of sluff and pin wheel activity too.

I took this one late in the day (16.30), reasoning that the south facing climb and ski would be softer and in the process of refreezing by the time I got to it. Which it was but the face was in a lot worse shape than I thought.

This face starts out mellow and gets progressively steeper. It’s 40 degrees (measured with inclinometer) half way up the face and still had a fair amount of steepness to go maxing out where you enter the south face from the shoulder (I’m guessing that must be 50 degrees). I didn’t get any further than half-way up the face. At that point, I was confronted with some big fissures in the snow pack, just waiting for more heat (or weight) to set them off.

Nasty cracks in the snow pack

More big, nasty cracks in the snowpack

Not a nice feeling……. That was my cue to bin the route and head back down. So this will be another mountain for another day. This route has had its day for this season.

Temperatures are unseasonably warm for this time of year, not only in Lofoten but all over Norway, so take extra special care and enjoy the remainder of your season.

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This little mountain is right on the doorstep to Leknes and you can see it from the parking lot of the shopping centre. It’s pretty much West-North-West facing. The couloir on Bulitinden originally caught my eye and I tried to get up there with Angelita the previous day but we chose an inefficient route with lots of bushwhacking through thick trees. When we got to the face, it hadn’t quite thawed AND I started climing the wrong couloir!

So back to the drawing board….. and up Guratinden first instead. Way better route and it starts close to the road to Sennesvik and you can come back out to the same place to pick the car up too. Sweet!

Bulitinden & Guratinden from left to right

I took this one solo and bootpacked up the couloir due to the spring corn but you can probably skin up with better snow earlier in the year. Once you’re out, you’ve gained around 400m, so most of the climb is already done. Then it’s just a traverse over to Bulitinden. I didn’t get the skins out once for this trip. Guratinden was a bit patchy on the snow front to be honest. Although, I have to say, if this mountain had more snow on it and it was earlier in the season, I would have felt very exposed on the top and probably not made a bee-line for it’s summit. Moss bed surface and a big open expanse of convex snow.

Backside of Guratinden. Nice run down to Sennesvik...?

Look down to Sennesvik between Gura- and Bulitinden

It’s straight-forward to get across to Bulitinden from Guratinden. Finding the couloir entrance on Bulitinden, on the other hand, wasn’t. There are three possible entrances (only two of which went) and there is a big roll-over and the mountain just falls away. I knew the couloir went from the summit but you always have your doubts and I didn’t fancy getting cliffed-out. Luckily, I had the option of calling a friend, in this case, Angelita! Unfortunately for me, she couldn’t see me through the binoculars, so I took the plunge and got it right (take the entrance from the summit). The couloir was steeper than I thought, around 45 degrees and around 250m long, west facing and nice and soft snow in the evening sun.

Looking back up the couloir on Bulitinden

Views from Bulitind looking west

Views from Bulitind looking west

There’s not a lot of skiing to be had on this to be honest but the weather was great and it was just great to be out. Once you come out of the couloir, you want to try and stay in the most immediate little valley and ski down as far as you can (no real obvious way to describe it). There was a fair amount of bushwhaking the way I went but I followed one of the streams and came out at a wide path which took me all the way back to where the car was parked. No fuss at all.

The whole tour took 2.5hrs (incl. 30mins break) and was around 650m vertical gain. With more snow, you could probably speed up the exit some too.

Nice tour and it you don’t like the couloir on Bulitinden, you can just ski down from the col.

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South Couloir, Stornappstind

I saw the obvious south couloir yesterday and decided a quick solo trip was in order today. It’s about 250 to 300m long and a sustained 40 degrees (maybe a bit more) for the duration. I thought bootpacking up the couloir was probably the best option as I wasn’t sure how obvious it would be to find the entrance if I went up the normal route on the west face. We certainly didn’t come across it when we went up there yesterday and I didn’t fancy the pfaff of trying to find it anyway (although looking at the above picture, it looks easy to find after all). And it’s always good to climb what you’re going to ski in my opinion if you can. By the way, the couloir entrance is lower down than the summit.

Needless to say, I got the whole palette of weather; from sun to cload and sleet to rain and then back to sun again. It’s proabably not a bad thing that the mountains are on the smaller side here, as the weather is so unstable sometimes that you don’t want to be commited on anything big.

Views towards Flakstad before bootpacking up the couloir

When the sun did decide to make an appearance, it was 12.00 and I was half-way up the couloir. South facing, hot and feeling quite exposed. There was a good amount of snow in the couloir and the snow seemed nicely cohesive but I couldn’t bannish that feeling of unease. Either way, I made it to the top and was rewarded with some lovely views.

In the couloir

More nice views from the top of the couloir towards Skottind and Napp harbour

More nice views

The couloir was in good condition despite my earlier unease. Although the bootpack up felt like a small eternity, definitely a nice descent. Tired now. This little bootpack kicked my arse. 900m bootpacks at altitude used to be all part of the fun. I find that hard to imagine this year on that evidence

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This was my first outing on the snowboard in Lofoten and what a day it was too! The weather wasn’t particularly nice. It was blowing a gale. It had rained a few days previously, so the snow wasn’t particularly great. But Angelita’s parents’ house is at the foot of this moutain, you’re surrounded by the sea (at least once you get to the summit) and you’ve got the whole mountain (and all the other mountains within view) to yourself.

I know so little about these mountains; that combined with its far-flung northerly location (above the Arctic Circle) and the feeling that lots of these faces have been deprived the tickling sensation of skis and you just want to get after it…..like a kid in a sweetshop! None of the peaks are particularly high (around 700m to 1000m for the most part). But that just means you can ski two in a day! And it doesn’t get dark until around 22.00, so you can ski one in the morning, cruise Leknes in the car with the tunes banging like a proper townie and then go and ski another line later when you get bored. Leknes definitely does not have the feeling of being a ski town, so you’re never going to be fighting for lines in this part of Lofoten.

There’s nothing particularly special about this route…apart from the fact that you are skiing in Lofoten!! A nice short ski tour and a nice pitch on the way down (parts of it in the mid to high 30 degrees). According to my watch, the trip up was 750m and we were up and down again in around 2hrs. Just in time before it started to lash it down.

West Face of Stornappstind

If you drive west from Napp for a couple of km, you come to Nappskaret car park which is where the tour starts. Once you’ve located the summit from the car park, it’s really straight forward route finding to the summit. You can either ski the South face or the West face which is what we did.

Stortinden: looking towards Flakstad

We managed to get the skis on from the car and skin most of the way. The snow was pretty hard and frozen when we got onto the West face proper and without ski crampons, we boot packed the last few hundred metres to….almost the summit. We turned round about 20m from the summit as it was turning into boiler plate ice from the ridiculously strong winds and I started to slip backwards and couldn’t kick in any steps.

Angelita book packing up...

Good ski down and all the way back to the car. Nice first tour to get a feel for conditions.

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Lofoten is at a latitude of 68 degrees. Basically way up there past the Arctic Circle (66 degrees 33′) which means it’s dark all winter and light all summer (give or take a few lumens ;)). And despite it’s latitude actually relatively mild due to the coastal currents (most notably the Gulf Stream) which means there’s no snow in the summer. Booo! But gorgeous all the same. I went up there with my girlfriend, Angelita, for our annual pilgrimage back to her home village of Napp for a few days.

Views from Angelita's childhood home in Napp

I’m yet to ski there but that didn’t mean I couldn’t scope out a few lines for some future projects! Hopefully, we’ll get back there next March/April when the days are long enough for some skiing.

Midnight Sun

The mountains are by no means the biggest in the world. Things of interest seem to start around 500m, with the tallest mountain reaching 1,161m (Higravstinden). But you ski down to sea level most of the time, so the vertical gain is respectable by most people’s standards. And they come in all shapes and sizes, nice wedge mountains, steep couloirs and lots of gentle terrain too. Now, I haven’t skied here yet, so I’m not sure what the conditions are like but there is lots of lovely, greasy, grass (prime base for avalanches) and the weather can be very unstable, with fairly big temperature swings, so you have to choose your time wisely and then still rely on luck. But there are some really cool lines to ski. I didn’t manage to get  a picture of Stor Nappstind but there is a beautiful line on the East face of this for those that venture that way. I did get some other project lines though….

Couloir Central!! Go to Eggum. I'll see you there!

The two summits in this picture are Mustaren (405m) and Middagsheia (570m). Endless ribs and couloirs. I won’t know for sure how many go until they are filled with snow but it looked very promising. Really easy access too. The car park is about 1km away and then an easy skin round and along the lake (there is a lake at the foot of these. Beware.)

Jellvollstinden (746m) or the Organ as I called it. Stacks upon stacks of rock.

The ridge tops out at this peak (Jellvollstinden). The picture doesn’t really do the lines justice. A real beauty. It reminded me of an organ, with small peaks stacked on top of each other, reaching upwards.

So no skiing but lots of walking and I managed to get a few nice shots to share…….

Taken from Mærvoll on the way to Unstad looking at Huslikollen

From Nappsskardet looking west towards Flakstad again.

Taken from Nappsskardet looking west towards Flakstad

Looking south west to Helligberget from Unstad

Nature's own infinity pool

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