Mysusæter in fog
Dom and I had brought up the idea of a trip to Norway almost a year ago, with the planning stepping up a gear around Christmas time in 2024. Dom would drop pins on google maps of places that would be great to visit in Norway, and I contributed here and there. We soon realised that we would need a couple of months just to do the southern half of my neighbouring country to the west! As such, we zeroed in on a smaller area - Rondane national park with more and more pins dropped inside the park boundaries of our shared map. During the coming months we would trawl the internet for images, blogs and YouTube videos about Rondane and then share them with each other over WhatsApp. This soon started to happen so often that my wife would get worried and ask if I had heard from Dom that day, thinking that we might have fallen out if my phone wasn’t plinging enough :D
I should say here that we found a great Norwegian photographer on YouTube by the name of Stig. He has a small channel that is starting to grow but honestly he deserves so much credit and praise from us as he was so helpful. We’d lap up all his videos, especially the ones where he was in Rondane, but also enjoy his videos from other locations just as much. This usually involved a long hike up a mountain to a jaw-dropping view over a fjord. Though how anyone can stand that close to an edge with a drop of hundreds of meter and talk naturally to camera is beyond me. My knees turn to jelly just watching him. We would fire questions to him via YouTube and his website over the months leading up to our trip and Stig would always answer back providing great insight and tips for us. Seriously we couldn’t have done half of what we did without his help. I’ll provide a link to his website here…
…. And to one of his videos that shows off Rondane through the seasons here. Seriously, it needs to be watched and enjoyed for the photos he takes.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwR3Rwc5IKs
It was time to head off to Norway, after months of planning and what felt like years of waiting. But which way should we go??? I decided that instead of driving via Oslo (more road tolls) we would drive a few hours in Sweden before taking a left turn into Norway. We crossed the border without any fuss and after a while we headed in a more northerly direction. Hamar, then Lillehammer (of the winter olympics fame - they were still milking that for all its worth 31 years later) passed us by. Once we had driven through Lillehammer we noticed the scenery started to change. The mountains were becoming more vertical, taller and more impressive. It was also worryingly very green here, with no sign of autumn colours. We commented on this but by the time we got to the small hamlet of Mysusæter where we were staying we didn’t need to be concerned.
So we had arrived at our cabin. Over nine hours of travel. What a wonderful, quirky cabin it was - perfect as a base for us to venture into Rondane. After settling in for the night I woke up early the next morning to be greeted by a cloud inversion in the valley where we had started our ascent to Mysusæter, which is over 1100 meters above sea level. Should I wake Dom up? I recalled he might have said that even if the cabin was on fire he didn’t want to be disturbed so I let him sleep. I tried to get dressed as quietly as possible but all the floorboards creaked and groaned when you put pressure on them. Still he slept. Sadly by the time I headed out to photograph the cloud inversion, rain clouds and fog had swept in “spoiling” the view. This was really the only time it rained on one of us during our time here. We saw plenty of rain but never did we really get wet like I did on the first morning. Still it did provide me with this atmospheric opportunity to shoot a few cabins in Mysusæter. It would have been rude not to. The fog stayed around to provide some amazing conditions at our first photography location, Ulafossen, later on that morning. But that’s for another story….
Mysusæter in fog
Dom and I had brought up the idea of a trip to Norway almost a year ago, with the planning stepping up a gear around Christmas time in 2024. Dom would drop pins on google maps of places that would be great to visit in Norway, and I contributed here and there. We soon realised that we would need a couple of months just to do the southern half of my neighbouring country to the west! As such, we zeroed in on a smaller area - Rondane national park with more and more pins dropped inside the park boundaries of our shared map. During the coming months we would trawl the internet for images, blogs and YouTube videos about Rondane and then share them with each other over WhatsApp. This soon started to happen so often that my wife would get worried and ask if I had heard from Dom that day, thinking that we might have fallen out if my phone wasn’t plinging enough :D
I should say here that we found a great Norwegian photographer on YouTube by the name of Stig. He has a small channel that is starting to grow but honestly he deserves so much credit and praise from us as he was so helpful. We’d lap up all his videos, especially the ones where he was in Rondane, but also enjoy his videos from other locations just as much. This usually involved a long hike up a mountain to a jaw-dropping view over a fjord. Though how anyone can stand that close to an edge with a drop of hundreds of meter and talk naturally to camera is beyond me. My knees turn to jelly just watching him. We would fire questions to him via YouTube and his website over the months leading up to our trip and Stig would always answer back providing great insight and tips for us. Seriously we couldn’t have done half of what we did without his help. I’ll provide a link to his website here…
…. And to one of his videos that shows off Rondane through the seasons here. Seriously, it needs to be watched and enjoyed for the photos he takes.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwR3Rwc5IKs
It was time to head off to Norway, after months of planning and what felt like years of waiting. But which way should we go??? I decided that instead of driving via Oslo (more road tolls) we would drive a few hours in Sweden before taking a left turn into Norway. We crossed the border without any fuss and after a while we headed in a more northerly direction. Hamar, then Lillehammer (of the winter olympics fame - they were still milking that for all its worth 31 years later) passed us by. Once we had driven through Lillehammer we noticed the scenery started to change. The mountains were becoming more vertical, taller and more impressive. It was also worryingly very green here, with no sign of autumn colours. We commented on this but by the time we got to the small hamlet of Mysusæter where we were staying we didn’t need to be concerned.
So we had arrived at our cabin. Over nine hours of travel. What a wonderful, quirky cabin it was - perfect as a base for us to venture into Rondane. After settling in for the night I woke up early the next morning to be greeted by a cloud inversion in the valley where we had started our ascent to Mysusæter, which is over 1100 meters above sea level. Should I wake Dom up? I recalled he might have said that even if the cabin was on fire he didn’t want to be disturbed so I let him sleep. I tried to get dressed as quietly as possible but all the floorboards creaked and groaned when you put pressure on them. Still he slept. Sadly by the time I headed out to photograph the cloud inversion, rain clouds and fog had swept in “spoiling” the view. This was really the only time it rained on one of us during our time here. We saw plenty of rain but never did we really get wet like I did on the first morning. Still it did provide me with this atmospheric opportunity to shoot a few cabins in Mysusæter. It would have been rude not to. The fog stayed around to provide some amazing conditions at our first photography location, Ulafossen, later on that morning. But that’s for another story….