Steindalsbreen Glacier Hike Part 1

Today we woke up to what sounded like strong wind! Last night we both got woken to by the rain and the wind, the wind was so loud, but it didn’t rock the van very much with was odd. But we woke up and were both like if it is crazy wind today we are not doing this hike! It is way too long to fight the wind!

So we got out of bed and I stepped outside to see what it was like…and it was barely windy! It sounded so loud in the van! Outside it was a light breeze! Though it was cloudy with lots of low clouds covering the mountains. We decided to have breakfast and get ready and drive to the trailhead and then make our decision.

Well the trailhead was not windy at all! So off we went to hike to Steindalsbreen Glacier! The trail up was steep for the first kilometer or so and then evened out. Or was still lots of low clouds so you couldn’t see all the mountains, but it was along the glacial river so that was nice. The water was gorgeous! Plus there were lots of signs mentioning places such as “the resting place” - a place people usually rest of the way to the glacier. Or the birthing rock - a rock where a lady gave birth in the 1800’s. Or my favorite the rolling hill - where people would roll firewood down the hill. It was fun trying to guess what the next place would be!

And those little green lichen apparently flower? I’ve never seen that before! And we found a Ruby Tiger Moth caterpillar right after our one break and on the way back it had traveled over to the rocks where we took another break! It was close by, but still interesting it was in the same area.

The whole way up was pretty nice. You go along the river until you get to this wide open glacial valley that was very nice. I have more photos of that in the next post. But up near the glacier you have to hike up these giant moraines (giant mounds of rocks) to get to the lake at the bottom of it. You apparently could walk up to the glacier on the side (it looked like people had), but it was all on loose gravel that was pretty steep and the glacier was covered in some rock/dirt on the sides so we wouldn’t want to get too close anyways as we didn’t know where exactly was glacier. We were the only ones up there when we were there and it was so gorgeous!! Lovely blues! But very cold and I immediately put on all my layers and then was nice and warm. But we had decided to eat lunch there and taking your hands out of your gloves to eat your sandwich? Not the best idea! We ate quickly and then moved on as our hands were ice cubes and we were getting cold (we had already had a long break there so that was fine). If you zoom in on the photo after the second panorama you can see Raymond sitting in the beach. And the next photo he snuck of me taking photos!Read more