Sunnmøre

26 – 31 August 2022

Almost as soon as I returned to Flatland from an unhappy return to Edinburgh, I was on my way back to Norway.

Back in 2020, I had planned a wildcamping excursion to Sunnmøre, the gateway to the best of the fjords. Unfortunately, my intended departure date was less than a week after Covid infection rates in the Netherlands swelled above Norway’s threshold. I was forced to cancel the trip, but ended up with a KLM voucher for the costs. The voucher expired in January, so I arbitrarily booked flights for summer. KLM does not fly north of Trondheim (and was then not partnered with SAS), so it was the perfect excuse to revive the initial plan.

I had managed to visit Ålesund in the interim as part of a Covid-era Christmas trip. Perhaps unsurprisingly, winter in the fjords featured perpetual torrential rain and rising Covid cases. I accomplished very little, particularly in the fjells. Unfortunately, this trip would fare only marginally better.

26 – 30 August 2022

From the start, the signs were not in my favour. Because I had arbitrarily booked dates due to the expiring voucher, my planning timeline was thrown off. I had a loose itinerary outlined from my previous trip, and the idea was that I would flesh that plan out whilst in Edinburgh. When my trip to Scotland was turned on its head, I struggled to find the motivation to formalize those loose ideas and the plan was left as a general outline.

Things did not improve as I got underway. A dreary weather forecast proved to be more optimistic than reality. I spent much of the first half of the hiking period holed up in my tent reading and therefore covered only a fraction of the intended distance. Instead of making a nice loop across both sides of the fjord, I ended up doing an alarmingly short out-and-back on the western side.

The weather finally clears as I exit the fjells

The weather finally cleared on my last morning.

Views from around my final campsite

30 – 31 August 2022

Leaving the fjells behind, I descended back to Barstadvik where I caught the bus. I dropped my pack at the AirBnB, laid my soaked gear out to dry, and headed for Aksla: the classic Alesund viewpoint. After cooking a semi-proper dinner, I headed back to Aksla to enjoy the sunset. In hindsight, I should have headed to Sukkertoppen in the afternoon instead of Aksla. The sunset views were everything I had hoped for and went a long way toward balancing the disappointment of the fjells.

Sunnmøre Alps, finally bathed in superb lighting – where was this during my hike?

The classic view of Ålesund from Aksla

It was not the trip I had hoped for, but the final evening in Alesund really rescued the trip. Looking back, this outing hardly matched some of my other solo-exploits, but I still have favourable memories. I can blame the shortcomings on the weather and bad luck, and not without justification. Ultimately though, disappointments in Scotland led directly to a lack of planning on my part. It would be more accurate to say that the poor weather saved me from feeling remorse for not accomplishing my mountain goals.