Blåtinden

Another ti-på-topp tur on a warm Sunday, this time we chose a proper mountain, 1180 m high. Blåtinden, or better known as the 'sovende soldat', the sleeping soldier, at the southern end of Lavangsdalen about 30 km SE of Tromsø. There were very few people here and most of them were going down when we went up, so we had the top for ourselves. Blåtinden is one of the mountains with a nearly flat top plateau, a relatively common but not well understood landscape feature that I am interested in. This particular plateau is virtually parallel to the bedding/layering in the quartzitic rocks, there is little evidence of glacial erosion, and the stones appear to be more or less in situ.

A common 'bad' habit many geologists have is to pick up interesting rocks. On the way up we saw some very rounded out of place looking rocks that I picked up and the top plateau is littered with flat quartzite rocks that would be perfect as stepping stones in the garden. So we both filled up our backpacks with quite a few kilo's of rocks and the walk down the mountain took therefore nearly as long as the walk up. Good exercise I guess ;-)

Blåtinden looks like a sleeping soldier when approached from the south

Looking W over Balsjorden

Halfway

Stony top plateau

View W: low hanging clouds over Lyngen

Large cairn on the top

Looking NE

Gjømmerdalen

Late night trip to Movikhammeren

It was such a beautiful warm evening that we decided to do another ti-på-topp walk. We started around 21 h from Kroken on the mainland and got back to the car around midnight. A beautiful short walk, very quiet, beautiful colours; we spent nearly an hour on the 'top' having a late dinner and enjoying the view and midnight sun. On the way back we watched a dipper in one of the lakes on the plateau, I don't think we have seen one here before.

Looking back to Tromsø; it is nice to be able to get into the mountains so close to town 

Rundfjellet 

Nearly a sunset, in a few days the sun will go down again

Skjelnanvatnet, the lake where we saw the dipper

Another warm weekend on Divielva

Five beginners gathered for a weekend of river paddling on Divielva. It turned out to be one of the warmest weekends this summer, with 29 degrees C on Saturday and 24 C on Sunday. 

weather forecast!

We were of course all dressed up in drysuits, which were way too warm, so every now and again we just had to go swimming to cool down and combined this with some rope and rescue practise. We tried both the river kayaks borrowed from the club and our packrafts. A very relaxed and fun weekend.

our campsite

swimming and rope throwing

Tony having fun in his packraft

going down some small rapids one by one

Grønnlibruna by bike

In Norway there are a number of incentives to help encourage people to be more active and get outside. In Tromsø we have the cycle to work, ti-på-topp (ten mountain tops), ti-på-skjæret (ten islands, for those that prefer seakayaking), orienteering and probably several other incentives. I guess these are the Norwegian variations of the 'wandelvierdaagse' (4 days walking), 'fietsvierdaagse' (4 days cycling), 'zwemvierdaagse' (4 days swimming) that are popular in The Netherlands. A couple of weeks ago we stumbled on a ti-på-topp box on top of Nordtinden and, as we stay in Tromsø this summer, we decided to buy the pack with maps and descriptions and see how far we get this year. There are actually 15 tops, 5 easy walks, 5 medium and 5 proper mountains. Saturday we decided to try to cycle one of the easy ti-på-topp walks, Grønnlibruna, to make it a nice roundtrip. We first cycled to Straumsbukta, found some good tracks to cycle up Grønnlibruna (with some pushing on the steeper parts for me), down to Håkøybotn and back home. First mountain bike trip here, we should do this more often.

Tisnes

Halfway, nice track for cycling

Top of Grønnlibruna