Chapter 12 - Snow Hike to the Arctic Mountain at -18°C

After the amazing experience of Northern lights, today we are going to witness another sensuous adventure. Yes.. we are going to hike a small mountain. What makes this adventure special is the weather. Today is -18 and windy. These weather conditions make the hike more challenging and compelling, for I always love to hike be it in the summer or winter. Yesterday was in fact exhausting and we were tired as we woke up today. We dint get to have a decent breakfast and in the rush, we also missed carrying a few important things we needed for the day.

The place we were going to hike is a Chapter of Kvaloya mountain located at the north edge of Tromso. We had arranged a guide from the Tromso Outdoor tour company. A tour guide for a hike in such weather is essential. And we also need to arrange our hiking accessories like snowshoes, hiking poles etc. the guide had sent us the starting location. We navigated there on time using Google maps and the drive to this start-point by itself was beautiful.

Most of the areas were empty with no houses or shops and no people, just thick layers of snow. We were not able to identify the parking slot at the start point because of the snow. After some time, the guide came with three other people who were going to Hike

with us on this trip. Though I had forgotten my jacket, my guide helped me with one. We all found snowshoes that fit us and we were ready to begin.

The mountain ahead just seems like layers of snow, no trees and bushes. Well, it is not so easy to get used to these snowshoes. Its only after about 100m of walk that you get comfortable with them. And besides, climbing ahead was more difficult because of the cold weather and winds. Also considering that we were on low on energy, we requested our guide to break.

But our guide would just keep promising that it's only a few more metres every time we asked him and finally after 2hrs, we reached the viewpoint. There was a lake on the other side of this mountain. The view was so amazing. We felt lucky to have reached there and we sat there in the midst of the cold winds. After taking photos, we began the downward hike. It was easier this way because the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. But i was dying of thirst and we dint have water. So, finally, I decided to eat some ice. I collected

some ice from some of the leaves and ate them, it did help me recover. It took almost 4 hours to complete this trek. And it was getting dark already. It was an amazing experience but remember to do some preparations and take enough water.

After returning all the accessories, and thanking our guide for motivating us to the limit, we drove to the Tromso city. It took around 45 min to reach the city and it was become completely dark by that time (4pm). We were all starving because of the day's activities. We decided to have some good food. We went to a restaurant called Scandic near the city centre. It wasn't a luxury restaurant. It was a regular Norwegian restaurant. The food was too good but the bill was not. We paid around 15000 INR(for 4 people) just for that decent meal. I believe the restaurant experience in Norway is always very expensive. So usually we don't go for that. A good meal is done, we decided to head back to the room and await the northern lights once again. And tomorrow we are going to do yet another crazy thing. Yes.. we are going to climb up a 100feet frozen waterfall. I will come back with that amazing ice climbing experience on my next Chapter.