The Troll's Tongue
Twelve hours earlier, I had my first peanut butter and jelly sandwich. After my 6th peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the day, all I wanted was warm food. It could have been anything, but all I was able to get at 11:00pm in Odda, Norway was a cup of instant Mr. Lee noodles from a gas station. It didn't really matter that the most nutritious part of that meal was the salt; the cup of noodles was hot and it didn't taste like peanut butter or jelly.
At 9:30am on June 14th, Julia and I started a hike to see Trolltunga, which translates to "Troll's Tongue" in english. Trolltunga is a rock cliff that juts out of a side of mountain about 700 meters above a lake. With its placement, most of the lake is behind it along with a series of mountains, so the view from Trolltunga is stunning. It's one of the most beautiful landscapes that I've seen.
The hike to Trolltunga and back is about 13.6 miles, with an elevation gain of about 2,950 feet. The first 1km is rough as it's all uphill for several hundred meters. There used to be a funicular that took people up to the first crest, but it closed in 2010. Nonetheless, people still decided that it was a good idea to hike Trolltunga. A number of people choose to hike to Trolltunga, camp, and then hike back, while others decide to just do the whole hike in one day. Julia and I decided to do the whole hike in one day as we haven't hiked out with camping gear before.
Food-wise, Julia and I we were well-prepared. We estimated that we'd each eat a PB&J sandwich every 2 hours and that we'd take about 12 hours to do the hike, so we packed 12 sandwiches. For good measure, we also packed 6 cliff bars, 2 sleeves of Shot Blocks (like energy gels, but in a gummy candy form), 2 sandwich bags full of travel mix, a bar of chocolate from Seattle Chocolates, and a can of delicious sardines (I recently discovered that sardines are amazing). Julia also bought a camel pack and her fantastic back pack was designed to hold one and a run a tube through it. What was great about the hike is that if you run out of water, you fill up your bottle from the many streams of water that you hike along or cross.
Expectation-wise, Julia and I were NOT prepared. That hike was #$@#! tough! We were expecting a struggle in the beginning as most of the elevation gain was packed into the first 2.5 miles, but we also thought that it'd be a nice walk in the woods after that. That's what the elevation map seemed to say. At least, that's what we assumed. We didn't expect as much snow as we hiked through nor the roughness of the terrain. That all said, IT WAS A GORGEOUS HIKE. Here's some pictures from the day. You'll notice after we got to Trolltunga, pictures dropped off precipitously; we were pretty tired by that point.
