Along Norwa‡’s wild wesł coasł youll ƒind
long ƒjords, big snow,
small ski areas, ƒew people,
and plenł‡ oƒ łradiłion.
A dense curtain of tumbling flakes pile up quickly on every bodily surface if you pause long enough to catch your breath, which we do often—though with some trepidation. When the snow is this light and deep at tiny Hodlekve ski area in Norway’s Sogndal region you need to keep moving lest some other group of Vikings dart suddenly from the woods to plunder your hard-won line. Right now, however, when the goods are very good indeed, there appears to be no one around. ¶ Such stellar conditions aren’t exactly what we’d expected so close to the notoriously stormy West Coast, a place of generally fluctuating freezing levels and malevolent, often porridge-like precipitation. But Europe’s missing snow had to go somewhere this season, and Scandinavia was where it was falling, particularly the mountains of Norway, frontline defence to marauding North Atlantic storms. The several metres of bounty we’ve discovered at Hodlekve are well-preserved because you have to walk a fair distance to reach them. In fact, you have to walk to most of the runs here, an instant and unexpected charm for THE SNOW SIFTS DOWN AND WE SIFT THROUGH IT.
a Lilliputian hill served by only a single, long platter lift. But the forest we descend through is open and inviting, steepening as we contour further around the slope away from the ski area. We’re more than surprised; there are chutes and gullies, massive pillows and plenty of big hardwood trees. It’s a lot like Japan. ¶ Our forest mission turns into a several-hour tour during which time it never once stops snowing. By the time we work our way down to the band of highway bisecting a snow-choked mountain pass, darkness has settled into the valley like a charcoal fog. Here, the isolation we’ve enjoyed all afternoon evaporates as we converge with other tracks that exit everywhere from the woods like revealed secrets. Our pervious paranoia seems well-founded, as a handful of dedicated skiers we’ve neither seen nor heard in the shroud of the storm mill atop the three-metre ledge of snowplow debris, all chattering about the transformative nature of their descent. The ski area manager waits on the blacktop in his pickup truck with an “I told you so” smile to drive us the half-hour back to Hodlekve. He doesn’t need to ask how it was.
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