The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  The trails are marked by volunteers, and for obvious reasons their efforts are concentrated on the most popular tracks; in the more remote and less-travelled wilderness of the south-western vidda, the wanderer must place a greater reliance on a combination of waymarks, maps, compass and GPS finders. Finally, however, I spotted my next T, slashed across a triangular slab of rock that had slid from the top of its cairn and come to rest at a slight angle to the track. I set it back up on top and walked on.

  After descending from the plateau the track wound slowly down into the wide open spaces of Dyredokk, covered in huge rafts of smokey-white arctic cotton grass. The terrain was boggy and marshy, although somehow the track always just managed to find the firm ground. At the far end of Dyredokk I encountered a stream in full spate that was impossible to ford, and had to make a detour of about a kilometre before reaching a wide, shallow crossing that I could wade across ankle deep, my boots tied together by the laces around my neck, my trousers rolled up, the ice-cold water biting and nipping at my ankles.

  For the next two hours I had the DNT cabin at Hellevassbu in view as the track twisted west around the foot of Simletind and slowly approached it. There was a bridge across the Nekko, the river that links upper and lower lake Hellevatnet, and the last stretch of the track to the self-service cabin followed the eastern shore of the upper Hellevatnet. Only now did I find the leisure to enjoy the unobtrusively lovely flowers that murmured alongside the track, the white mountain avens with their mustard yellow hearts, the lemon yellow flowers of the alpine cinquefoil and the pale purple spikes of milkvetch. The hardiness of these tiny forms of life is breathtaking. The lichen that one sees everywhere on the vidda, sometimes in the form of a flat, velvety growth clinging to the surfaces of rocks and bare mountainsides, sometimes growing close to the ground like tiny, perfectly formed trees, are the staple diet of the vast herds of reindeer that wander the vidda and without which they could not survive. The cost of their power to endure everything from drought to frost, from freezing, whirling snowstorms to summer heatwaves, is an infinitesimally slow rate of growth, in some cases as little as a tenth of a millimetre per year.

  The lakeside DNT cabin at Hellevassbu, with Simletind in the background.

  Walkers who want to use the facilities are allowed, for a small fee, to pitch a tent close to one of the DNT cabins, although as I came to the cabin itself there were no tents nor any others signs of life. July and August are the favoured months for walking in the mountains; September was late. The weather was still settled, however, the temperature warm and the sky blue, with no indication of a change on the way, and after a brief rest on a plank bench supported by two round stones and a trip down to the stream to fill my water bottles I shouldered my rucksack and continued northwards along the track, following a sign for Litlos and keeping my eyes open for the split in the route that would take me west towards Middalsbu. My plan was to pitch the tent shortly after the split. It turned out to be further than I had imagined, and it was approaching seven by the time I joined the track going west towards Middalsbu, the site of another DNT cabin and the end of the second side of my triangular walk.

  The terrain changed character as the path ran between the steep west side of a mountain and a lake called Vassdalsvatnet. It was closer to the water than the mountainside, grassy and soft and a pleasure to walk along, for my feet were feeling tender after the rather stony surfaces of much of the route so far; but it was narrow and for the next hour I scanned the landscape in search of a suitable place to camp but failed to spot one. By about nine o’clock it was getting dark. A strong wind had risen and I decided to camp along the track itself, feeling fairly confident that no one else would come by at that time of night. The wind continued to rise, pulling and tugging at the canvas for most of the night. I didn’t get much sleep and after waking for about the fourth time and noticing that it was light outside I decided to break camp early.

  I followed the track as it continued to head west, passing high above the watery region around Vassdalsegga before heading down into the Middalen valley, at the foot of which was the Middalsbu cabin. As at Hellevassbu, there was no sign that anyone had spent the night there, and after another brief rest I walked on.

  Within a couple of hours the track was once again below the treeline and I was walking through landscape much less stern and forbidding than on the previous two days. After crossing a farm lane at the northern end of Valldalsvatnet, an enormous lake, the map showed a continuation of the path down its eastern side, to a point about halfway down it where the river Kvesso flowed into it from the east. I must have spent fifteen minutes trying to find this path but saw no red ‘T’s anywhere. The very fact that this was the easiest terrain so far made my failure to pick up the next section of the walk particularly unnerving. In the end, I decided to continue in the direction shown by the dotted line on my map, but without the reassurance of the red lettering to guide my way. So I crossed the farm lane and set off south, picking my way along the rocky boulders of the inclined bank of Valldalsvatnet.

  I walked on, all the time keeping my eyes peeled for the T that would confirm I was on the right track. It never came. Instead, the side of the lake banked ever more steeply. It dropped straight into the deep, dark water, and in mortal fear of losing my balance from the cursed weight of that rucksack and rolling helplessly down into the water I presently adopted a strategy of clambering in simian or crab-like manner from rock to rock on all fours. Any glance ahead only confirmed that there was no relief to come; the dizzying band of grey rock continued round every bend in the shoreline, as far as the eye could see. Why the hell hadn’t they marked the track?

  At times, in a stolen glance upwards, towards the dense line of dwarf birch that followed the outline of the lake, I saw what looked like a suitable patch of ground on which to pitch a tent for the night; but on closer inspection these areas turned out to be either too short, or too narrow, or too sloping. Finally, high up on the bank, some two or three metres below the wall of trees, I found somewhere.

  I swung the rucksack off my shoulder, and within ten minutes the tent was up and I was lying on my back alongside it. The sun had slipped behind the mountains in the west, and though the sky was still high and blue the strong wind that had risen in the afternoon seemed suddenly much colder. My head was resting on the rucksack and I stared up into the sky in vacant exhaustion. Clouds formed and dispersed with a dizzying rapidity. With what seemed to me a peculiar and malevolent creativity, the wind ripped them into pieces and flung the fragments into the furthest corners of the sky. Every shattered wisp of cloud, even the tiniest, took on recognisable shape. I saw a lamb up there, a bus, a hearse, an open newspaper with a turning page. I saw the face of my dead brother, a rocking horse, a toothbrush, a hedgehog. It was unbraining, intolerable. I stood up and crawled inside the tent, zipped it closed behind me.

  When I felt sufficiently composed I rigged up the stove in the storage space between the outer and inner tents, out of the way of the wind. As the wind bucked and snapped at the canvas I felt glad of the extra space, for the only time on that trip glad that I had chosen to take the biggest tent. I had brought a packet of bacon and I fried every rasher in it, washing it down with three cups of coffee. There was an element of compulsion about it, no doubt. What Norwegians call trøstespising, eating to mask your distress.

  The work of tearing up the clouds seemed to have exhausted the wind and by eight o’clock the canvas had stopped flapping. Brimming with optimism from the bacon and the coffee, I decided it would be a good idea to undertake a modest exploration of my surroundings. Unzipping the outer tent I poked my head out and looked up. In the east I saw Orion taking his first giant step into the sky above the lake. I strolled a couple of metres up behind the tent, stepping over the black ruins of a campfire a previous tenant of the site must have built, and slipped, high-stepping over gorse and scrub, between the slender trunks of two birch trees. Starlight can be remarkably bright in the mountains, and e
ven through the canopy of trees there was enough of it to make out the narrow, twisting outline of a well-defined dirt track running at my feet. On the other side of it a solitary stone stood looking up at me, impishly displaying the enormous ‘T’ outlined on its chest.

  Aha.

  I had been walking parallel to the marked track. Throughout the afternoon’s travails I had probably never been more than ten metres away from it. Had I extended my initial search at the top of the lake by a mere ten paces, I would have found it. The prospect of yet another day clambering and crawling along those brutal rocks had already started weighing on my mind. Now, feeling as though God had taken pity on me, I walked back to the tent, pulled off my boots and slipped into my sleeping bag in a state of relieved elation. Wrapping my scarf around my neck and pulling a woollen hat down over my ears, I zipped it up and within seconds was sleeping like a stone.

  At eight o’clock next morning I set out in bright sunlight. For the first half hour the track, though muddy, was all downhill as it passed through a spacious wood of deciduous trees, mainly oak and birch. Presently the track slipped down closer to the water’s edge and entered a series of fields that were lush with long green grass, and boggy, so that by the time I reached the other side and clambered over a stile onto a hard-surfaced brown track my boots were soaked. But at least it was still all downhill.

  At a bridge on the left-hand side of the lane, where the Kvesso joined Valldalsvatnet, a wooden fingerpost directed me to cross the water by a small humped wooden bridge. I rested for a few minutes on a grassy slope overlooking the river, munching an apple and a handful of nuts. Then it was on with the rucksack and up again.

  The onward path rose steeply, spiralling ceaselessly as it looped around the trees of a spacious pine forest. Very soon I was stopping after every ten paces to rest in breathless exhaustion, bending double, both hands resting on my knees. I must have made fifty such timed stops before the terrain gradually levelled out. The pines gave way to a straggling line of mountain birches, and then I was back above the treeline and gazing into a wide, upward-sloping stony valley, the stones almost dazzling in their sun-splashed whiteness. Fifty metres to my left the young Kvesso leaped and danced in its bank on its way down the mountain. Huge jagged peaks looked down on either side. I stood taking in the cold and austere beauty of this view for several minutes. It was as though I couldn’t quite believe my eyes.

  On the climb up, the map had driven me almost to distraction, swinging and swaying idiotically around my neck in its plastic holder and making the walk twice as difficult. Halfway I had stopped, unhooked it from my neck and banished it to the top pocket of the rucksack. Now I sat down on a flat rock, unzipped the top pocket, and unfolding it discovered that I was walking through a valley called Slettedalen. It means something like ‘Desolation Valley’.

  For the next hour I made my way slowly up the rock-strewn floor of the wide valley. With every step I took I was aware of the bleak loveliness of the landscape I was passing through, and of the fact that in some absolute sense I was failing to appreciate something I would probably never be offered the chance to appreciate again. I cursed myself for being old, for having ludicrously overpacked, for failing to understand that a walk through terrain such as this, for an amateur walker such as myself, at my age, was too much and I was going to die. Then, when I got tired of that monologue, I walked over to the river, took off all my clothes, laid them in a pile, then slid down from the bank and submerged myself in the clean and sparkling water.

  Loneliness began to nag at me. Apart from the woman with her blind dog, I had met no one, spoken to no one for three days. The feeling took me by surprise. I had never expected to experience a need for someone else up there. But I did now. I would have given anything to have someone to talk to.

  I talked to myself instead. Fixing my gaze on a rock perhaps a hundred metres further up the track I might say, Now, once you get there, you can stop and have some coffee, I promise. And as I made my way towards the chosen spot I would utter words of encouragement to myself – You’re nearly there, not far now, just keep going, soon there, soon there. Here. Here. Now you can stop and sit down and rest.

  And sitting there, sipping from the little green plastic cup, the hot, oversweet coffee would seem like the most sublime drink imaginable. Looking around at the jagged peaks rising up on either side of the valley, the rushing torrent of the Kvesso the only sound, filling the air, I would imagine myself resting in a shimmering, sun-white paradise. Someone would come along sooner or later. You can’t stay here, she would say. The snow will come any day now, you must walk on. And like Bartleby the Scrivener, the hero of Herman Melville’s strange novella, I would look up at her and reply: I would prefer not to. I would be a man frozen inside his own mistake, unable to go on, unwilling to go back.

  A large snowfield covered the saddle where the valley rose up to meet the mountains. I knew my track crossed it, but the sunlight bouncing off it with such dazzling brilliance made it hard to look at directly. The snowfield seemed to draw me on. Everything in that desolate valley was compelling in the same dangerous, tempting way. Just make it as far as that snowfield. Then you can take off your rucksack and lie down and go to sleep. Don’t worry. Everything will be all right. Seductive and attractive and dangerous thoughts. But then, out of nowhere, and restoring me to my senses, a memory came to me of reading Roald Amundsen’s account of the adventure that had so nearly ended his life when he and his brother spent the Christmas of 1896 attempting to cross the vidda on skis. They had planned to start from a little mountain farm called Mogen, the last outpost of civilisation in the east, and follow a diagonal across to the Hardangerfjord. The trip was no more than a hundred kilometres. Both expert skiers, they had expected to make the crossing in under two days and provisioned themselves accordingly with a few biscuits, chocolate and butter. They didn’t pack a tent, just a sleeping bag each.

  Mountaineering for the sake of it had struck men like Knut Lykken, Slingsby’s Norwegian guide in the Jotunheimen, as a puzzling eccentricity. Similarly, skiing for fun, rather than as a way of getting from A to B across snow-covered terrain, was something upper-class urbanites did that baffled the average Norwegian peasant. The family at Mogen regarded the Amundsen brothers as insane, or suicidal, and probably both, but willingly offered them sleeping space on the floor by the fire on the night of their arrival.

  The weather turned during the night and a raging snowstorm delayed their departure from Mogen for eight days. It also rendered the landscape more or less unrecognisable from their maps once they were able to set out.

  For the next three days it continued to snow heavily, at the same time as the temperature rose from the minus twelve in which they had started out. Sleeping out on the third night, their clothing and sleeping bags soaked through, Amundsen had the bright idea that a swig of kerosene from the lamp might improve his circulation. They had wrapped it along with their provisions in a bag and marked the spot with a ski pole, but in the dark he was unable to locate it. A search of the area in daylight failed to locate it either. They began to fear for their own survival, and pushed on westwards, hoping to reach their destination before nightfall. Once again a blinding snowstorm descended on them. Now on their fifth day out, with their map in sodden tatters and the compass useless without visible reference points, they decided the better option was to turn back and try to return to Mogen, their point of departure. When darkness fell they still had no idea where they were. An icy wind whipped them as they prepared to spend yet another night out in the snow. Amundsen decided to dig a narrow tunnel into the snow, wriggled inside with his sleeping bag and fell asleep. While he was sleeping the temperature rose, and then it fell. The wet snow froze, closing off the entrance to his tunnel. In the middle of the night he woke up. His right hand was over his eyes, palm upward, as though trying to block out light. He couldn’t move it. In terror he realised he was entombed in ice.

  Amundsen began shouting for help, but there was
no hope of being heard. He passed out, and when he came to again he heard the faint sounds of his brother Leon calling his name. Leon, too exhausted to dig a shelter himself, had awoken to find himself alone in the freezing white desert. Feverishly he looked around for any sign of what might have become of his brother. By an extraordinary stroke of luck, a few hairs from Roald’s reindeer-hide sleeping bag were still visible at the site where the entrance to his tunnel had been sealed. Using his bare hands and a ski pole, it took Leon three hours to dig his brother out. Recalling the experience many years later, Amundsen wrote that its dangers and tribulations were the equal of anything he experienced later on his expeditions to the polar regions. The memory of Amundsen’s vivid account of his Poe-like experiences on the Hardangervidda was enough to jolt me out of the wretched mental terrain into which I had wandered.

  For some time before reaching the snowfield I had noticed a pinkish-red staining across the snow. At first I took it to be the site of a killing, somewhere a fox had ended the life of a linnet or a plover. Getting closer, I saw that it was more extensive than that. I wondered briefly whether this was the site of the mass death of a flock of over three hundred reindeer in a lightning storm the previous year. From the point at which the lightning struck, the bolt had run out along the drenched ground and up through their hooves, stopping their hearts and killing them instantly.

  When I eventually stepped onto the snow, however, and was able to examine the markings closely, I discovered with a sense of relief that they weren’t blood at all but the dramatic staining of snow algae.

  After the snowfield the path followed the southern bank of Lake Nupstjørn, where the Kvesso rose, and then turned on up to Nupsredet, the ridge connecting Slettedalen and Nupsdalen. The map showed what looked like a dramatically sharp descent towards the first and smaller of the two lakes in Nupsdalen. Once again I lost the way, and for the next twenty minutes walked back and forth on the cliff top, making a detour to an adjacent height and looking back at where I had come from in hopes of spotting it, but to no avail. According to the map it led more or less straight down the cliff face, but it took a long time before I eventually located it, craning my head over the edge of the bluff and looking sharply down and to the right, and was able cautiously to make my way down. I thanked God the weather was fine, for in even slightly wet conditions so sharp were the angles of the corkscrew descent, so loose and stony the surface, that I would not have fancied my chances of making it on my feet. On my arse, maybe.