We touched down at Tromso mid-afternoon on Saturday. Stein-Are, the son of the owner of the place we are staying, met us at the airport then kindly showed us the way to a supermarket. Food shopping in a foreign country when hungry and dazed from lack of sleep is not ideal. We ended up with a trolley half-full of Norwegian snacks and hardly any fruit and veg.
We left Tromso in the wet and dark and drove for a couple of hours to Skibotn. At Strandbu Camping, Stein-Are's dad met us and showed us the cabin. It's perfect: warm (with a wood-burning stove!) and has a good shower. No freezer compartment to the fridge though, so Nick buried 2kg of frozen chicken in the snow at the side of the cabin.
Woke on Sunday morning to find a magpie trying to dig out the bag of frozen chicken from the snow. The view from the cabin's porch is out over Skibotn river as it bends towards Lyngen Fjord. It's amazingly still and quiet here after London.
After breakfast we drove north up Lyngen Fjord, scouting for ice. Turning right at Birtavarre into a valley away from the fjord, we soon saw a couple of fine-looking icefalls on the right.
We tried out the snowshoes for first time on the walk to the route. Easy.
The climb we chose (the longer one to the right in the above photo) turned out to be a 240m WI3/4, of 5 pitches. Both of us found it easy climbing technically but it was hard work. I'm not as fit as I could be, and Nick, though fit, wasn't feeling 100% well. By the time we abseiled off (5 abolokovs) and got back to the car, Nick was feeling completely drained.
Arriving back at the cabin we had a visit from Stein-Are's dad and his daughter. I like him - keen-eyed and quick to smile. The purpose of their visit was to put us in touch with a local ice climber who works in the Town Hall 25km south of Skibotn. They rang him and sorted out a meeting for the next morning. Very kind!
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