Three mountains
Oh. My. Gosh. I think this was my new mantra as I kept repeating those three words over and over again as we drove into Rondane national park. After eating lunch at our cabin we hopped into the car, and made our way to the entrance into the national park. 50nkr was spent to open the barrier and we rolled in. The gravel road took us upwards past a number of summer cabins. We were already at 1100 meters above sea level and seeing these mountain peaks for the first time as we crested a small hill was truly breath-taking. Even after consuming hours of YouTube videos and looking at hundreds of other peoples’ photos, I wasn’t prepared for just how spectacular this view was going to be. “Oh my gosh” I repeated to Dom as he filmed away on his phone. We had driven two kilometers from our cabin and still had a kilometer to the carpark but I asked Dom if we should just stop there and then to take photos. We carried on in awe arriving a few minutes later at a rather large but fairly empty car park on the plains. I’m guessing in the summer it must get crowded there as there were “No parking” signs the last one hundred meters along the gravel road.
We jumped out the car, put our wellies on and loaded up our camera bags and walked about 30 meters to the end of the carpark and set up our tripods. For views from a carpark, this was something else. The base of the righthand mountain, Storronden (2138m), is roughly six kilometers away along the gravel road. It’s barricaded to stop tourists driving further but in the summer months the Norwegian tourist board runs a hostel at the base of the mountain beside a lake called Rondvatnet. They also provide bicycles that anyone can loan so as to make the journey there a little quicker. Of course you might be unlucky and have no bike available but it’s a nice touch of them. As we stood here a number of workers were packing up the bikes for the end of the season, so if we had wanted to, it wasn't possible to use them. Which was a shame as there is a waterfall on the left-hand side of the lake that I had earmarked as a potential location to set up our cameras. Next time though….
We were happily snapping away this section of the mountain range - Rondslottet (2178m, the tallest mountain in Rondane) is on the left covered in clouds with Vinjerond (2044m) in the middle just to the right of Rondslottet. The clouds were rushing by providing nice light and shadows across the mountains, or covering all peaks for a few minutes only to reveal them again after a short while. We hadn’t moved a stone’s throw from the car and we were committing countless images to our memory cards and our own physical internal memories when I turned around and saw something quite special in the direction we had come from. But that’s for the next story….
Three mountains
Oh. My. Gosh. I think this was my new mantra as I kept repeating those three words over and over again as we drove into Rondane national park. After eating lunch at our cabin we hopped into the car, and made our way to the entrance into the national park. 50nkr was spent to open the barrier and we rolled in. The gravel road took us upwards past a number of summer cabins. We were already at 1100 meters above sea level and seeing these mountain peaks for the first time as we crested a small hill was truly breath-taking. Even after consuming hours of YouTube videos and looking at hundreds of other peoples’ photos, I wasn’t prepared for just how spectacular this view was going to be. “Oh my gosh” I repeated to Dom as he filmed away on his phone. We had driven two kilometers from our cabin and still had a kilometer to the carpark but I asked Dom if we should just stop there and then to take photos. We carried on in awe arriving a few minutes later at a rather large but fairly empty car park on the plains. I’m guessing in the summer it must get crowded there as there were “No parking” signs the last one hundred meters along the gravel road.
We jumped out the car, put our wellies on and loaded up our camera bags and walked about 30 meters to the end of the carpark and set up our tripods. For views from a carpark, this was something else. The base of the righthand mountain, Storronden (2138m), is roughly six kilometers away along the gravel road. It’s barricaded to stop tourists driving further but in the summer months the Norwegian tourist board runs a hostel at the base of the mountain beside a lake called Rondvatnet. They also provide bicycles that anyone can loan so as to make the journey there a little quicker. Of course you might be unlucky and have no bike available but it’s a nice touch of them. As we stood here a number of workers were packing up the bikes for the end of the season, so if we had wanted to, it wasn't possible to use them. Which was a shame as there is a waterfall on the left-hand side of the lake that I had earmarked as a potential location to set up our cameras. Next time though….
We were happily snapping away this section of the mountain range - Rondslottet (2178m, the tallest mountain in Rondane) is on the left covered in clouds with Vinjerond (2044m) in the middle just to the right of Rondslottet. The clouds were rushing by providing nice light and shadows across the mountains, or covering all peaks for a few minutes only to reveal them again after a short while. We hadn’t moved a stone’s throw from the car and we were committing countless images to our memory cards and our own physical internal memories when I turned around and saw something quite special in the direction we had come from. But that’s for the next story….