Juledagstur til Durmålstinden (25.12.2012)
| Start point | Kattfjordeidet bru |
|---|---|
| Characteristic | Hike |
| Duration | 4h 30min |
| Distance | 9.0km |
| Map |
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| Ascents | Durmålsfjellet (921m) | 25.12.2012 |
|---|
Oh, bummer. Already 6.30am on Christmas Day. I so wanted to sleep for longer but deep down knew I was going to have to drag myself out of bed if I wanted to have any chance of collecting my friends for a trip to Durmålstinden at 9.00. I didn't honestly feel in the mood for hiking at that point, but trips always seem to start off this way at this time of year. Fortunately I didn't have the guts to send my friend an sms with an excuse for not going out and at 8.45 I left home and drove to the Coop on Stakkevollan to meet with Aline and her boyfriend Christian. We drove to Kattfjord and were at the parkeringsplass within about 1/2 hour.
The only disappointment was that as we approached the mountain, it was becoming increasingly cloudy and it looked like the chances of a nice mountain view were disappearing as we looked up at the mountain. I suggested an alternative short trip up to Tverrfjellet, right opposite Durmålstinden. All of us were feeling less than enthusiastic about bothering to go all the way up Durmålstinden if there was not going to be anything to see. So it was decided. We would toss a coin to decide which mountain to head up. Heads for Durmålstinden, tails for Tverrfjellet. Christian was handed the responsibility of tossing. It ended up being heads. I sensed that the outcome was not embraced by any of us!
Having now decided we were going to Durmålstinden as originally planned, there was now the small challenge of getting ourselves outside of the car and into the fresh -9C air. By the time we'd finished dithering around it was already past 10.00. But we were on our way, and that was already an accomplishment! I had a good idea of where the route was supposed to go, basically following the northeastern ridge to the summit. First we had to cross a relatively flat area of frozen myr and up through the forest. The trees were leaveless and sparse, so that was no problem. The river flowing down towards Kattfjorddalen was quite impressively frozen, with some interesting blue ice bumps where it had flowed over some rock and boulders. But after having crossed the river a little way up the valley, the clouds showed some sign of parting and giving way to blue sky. All of a sudden our optimism was elevated :-) Maybe we would be fortunate enough to get some good views after all!
It was relatively steep ground on solid hard snow which we had to ascend to get to point 595m on the ridge. Unfortunately we only had 2 pairs of crampons between the three of us. I decided to put mine on at this point, but Aline wanted to wait since there were still plenty of rocks around to walk and scramble on if the snow got too icy. Christian's boots were not very stiff, so he struggled to keep up for a while. Somehow we made it up though, at least to 595m, and the gradient flattened out for a while and it became easier at least for Aline and Christian. The wind speed picked up a bit now, so we paused only a few minutes to appreciate the really nice views to the south toward Malangen and especially on the north side of Kattfjord, which was crammed with the familiar chain of elegant peaks - Middagstinden at the western end, Skitntinden, Djeveltanna and Storsteinnestindan at the eastern end. We all realised then that we would absolutely have regretted only going for a walk up Tverrfjellet if the coin had not landed on the heads - especially now that the sky had dramatically changed from overcast to virtually cloud-free!
From there all we had left was the final part of the ridge to get to the summit. It looked more or less the same steepness as what we had come across on our way up the lower part of the ridge. We could also see some rocks as well, so it seemed that it shouldn't be any more difficult to go up without crampons than what we had already been on. About halfway up Christian decided to give the crampons a go because it was proving too difficult to walk in his boots on the hard snow. Aline was more or less coping with a hand from me every now and then. Again, not ideal but it worked without anyone feeling too insecure. But it was so cold though! Both Aline and I had really stinging cheeks and it wasn't all that comfortable. Fortunately I had a fleece buff I could pull over my face but Aline didn't. Well anyway, after the pain of the cold temperatures and slight struggling to walk up the ridge (it wasn't actually all bad because there were patches of soft snow interspersed with the hard snow), we finally got to the top after 2.5 hours and were rewarded with brilliant views in all directions.
What a way to spend Christmas Day! Turned out that all the effort of dragging myself out of bed earlier in the morning didn't turn out to be such a bad choice after all :-) And with an almost-full moon proudly beaming down at us, it felt like one of those days you could just stand around and gaze at the views indefinitely. We probably would have done if we hadn't been cruelly tortured by the freezing cold wind. After some photos, we didn't hang around for longer and started on our way back down again, undertaken with a bit of care and some bum-sliding by Aline. We were treated not only to a wonderfully-coloured orange and purple sky above Durmålstinden to look back across to but also the amusement of watching headlights make their way rather speedily down Tverrfjellet on the other side of the valley. We figured they must have belonged to skiers - which was really quite surprising since the snow everywhere had seemed so hard!
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