There and back again

Not a story about Hobbits, but a reflection of our day’s hillwalking. As promised it was bright and quite pleasant when we woke, and we decided to go up Høgdebrotet (2226 metres). The map had a good looking path going up to about 1400 metres, and then it looked a reasonable slope to the summit. This didn’t really tell the whole story; the path deteriorated to a boggy mess once we had crossed a big river and then disappeared as a stream coming down from the snow had to be crossed. It proved problematic, so we followed wee paths as they tried to get through the dwarf willow. It was also still and there were masses of black flies, mosquitoes and sundry other insects trying to eat us. As we hadn’t seen insects till this point we didn’t have any repellent with us, so got badly bitten on our shoulders. My arms and legs which were bare were untouched. We tossed a coin to decide if we should continue and by a 2 to 1 majority continuing won. Eventually the vegetation got less as did the insects, so by the time we got to 1600 metres it was quite pleasant again. We saw a Golden Plover chick and then made a poor decision to go up stony ground to the summit rather than on a large snow slope. The stony ground turned out to be large boulders and feeling like Frodo and Sam on Mount Doom we struggled to the top. Luckily the cloud hadn’t come in so we had good views of glaciers and snowy hills along with showers on many neighbouring hills. The blip is of the hills just south of us from just below the summit. We went back down the snow, saw a mother and baby Reindeer and then it rained most of the rest of way back to the van. The insects were appalling, the ground sodden and we got back thoroughly fed up. In retrospect it was good trip, but the last 2 hours were hell. We stayed in a campsite to get a nice shower and escape the rain and insects.