Day 69. Royrvik to Viermahytta
Posted by: James on March 10, 2009Distance 29km | Time 7hrs | Ascent 200m | Descent 190m
The advantage of staying in a guest house is it very quick to get going after breakfast. This guest house also served breakfast at 0700 after we and the other two guests requested it. We were therefore ready to go at 0800.
It was a mild overcast grey day just below zero degrees. Snow was sliding of the roofs in Royrvik in metre thick avalanches. A car or human would be damaged by these cascades.
Andre was back on the Norge Paa Langs trip again and caught up the last two days with the help of a van. We set off up a snow covered road for a couple of km to the north and then took a smaller road for 14 km to Namsvatnet. Here there was a parking place for hikers going into Borgefjell National Park.
The ski up the road was fast. The snow was hard packed and my skis flew over the surface. On the few uphill sections they wanted to slide back so I had to work hard with my arms. Andre with his ski skins on and sledge was soon far behind.
I passed a few farms en route. Some were very well kept and others looked like the parents had passed on and the kids didn’t want to farm so mothballed the place. The latter farms could have done with a coat of paint to protect the wooden buildings.
The forest along this road stretch was mostly spruce with some birch. Frozen tarns dotted the forest. I passed one old farm where there was and old couple cutting wood with a saw and splitting device on the back of a tractor. They had cut a vast pile and were obviously going to sell it.
At Namsvatnet parking place there was a small information room attached to the side of a cabin to rent owned by Royrvik mountain committee. This committee looked after the mountainous region in the area, issued hunting and fishing licenses, made sure no one infringed regulations and also rented out some cabins, of which Viermahytta was one.
I waited for Andre here and chatted with the committee employee who policed the area. Some Lapps appeared and were going to Viermahytta vicinity to clear his cabin roof from snow. They would make tracks for us now which was great as the hydro power snow depth measures had to change plans.
When Andre came we set off soon after. The route was well used by various scooters across to an area with a a few cabins called Sandvika. It then followed the north shore of Namsvatnet lake occasionally in spruce forest and occasionally on the lake itself. The scooter tracks stopped a few km from Viermahytta at Bustadslatten.
We followed some ski tracks for another km until we came to a lonely ice fisher. He had spent the last 9 days staying in a nearby cabin and coming down to the lake to sit on his stool and hoist small roye fish out of the small hole. He liked the peace and quiet to unwind from his job as a psychologist.
Just beyond him we picked up the Lapps scooter tracks again. The Lapps have permission to drive scooters in National Parks in connection with their reindeer herding. His reindeer were down on the coast near Steinskjer but would return in the spring to their summer pastures. Occasionally they misuse this permission to go illegal hunting but generally they are responsible.
We chatted with them for a good half hour when they returned from clearing their cabin roofs. They claimed March was the most snow rich month and it was better to clear it now as if it got too deep and then rained the snow would act as a sponge and the weight would be enormous on the roof timbers.
Soon after them we arrived at the small simple Viermahytta. It had a stove, gas and 6 beds. It would be easy to heat it up. I got the stove going while Andre collected snow. It was about 1600 now and we could look forward to a warm cosy hut for the evening.
I wrote the blog and then cooked a dried meal and mash potato for supper. Andre had some cognac and we polished that off in the evening as we chatted in front of the fire. Tomorrow we would go into Borgefjell for a day or 2 before going our own ways again.
It had been a pretty easy day. Although I covered a good distance it was largely flat so quite fast. The weather was not unkind but being grey and overcast cut out and view of the mountains in Borgefjell. The cabin was a nice finish to an easy and somewhat uninteresting day.