slogen

Things always have to end, as this trip is about to. After spending 5 days touring from the boat we moved into this incredible place, Villa Norangdal , Before coming here I checked it out on the website and loved what it promised. I was even more blown away by the reality of it. A hotel that was popular a hundred years ago and visited by famous people, Coco Chanel for example. It was sold from the family and fell into ruin and then 10 years ago, Iris, managed to buy it back into her family.  Since then she has re-done the whole place and in a unique style. Each room is filled with antiques from the a decade in the 1900-2000’s.  Somehow Iris has collected furniture and appliances that match that decade and styled up each room.  Chris and I are in the 1960’s room and Marylin Monroe is on  the wall and  great plastic furniture to sit on.

Anyhow this incredible place sits at the foot of some great ski touring, so for the first two days here we skinned up from the hotel, skied some great things and then slid back down and into the hot tub followed by some great food.

For our last day we decided to  tour to the local summit of Slogen.  This summit is pretty jagged and wild looking, I had spotted it on our first day here and pointed to it and wondered if we could ski it.  It is also  the name of one of the beers that we have enjoyed while in Norway. It seemed apt to finish our trip on this summit.

On the maps it looked like a 10km tour to the summit, which we felt might be far. But once we started touring and realized how awesome the vistas were  the distance flew by.

From this angle Slogen looked impossible, but as we toured around it finally unveiled itself. 

It was pretty clear by this point why it was such a classic run for the area. There was signs of lots of tracks, many of them Nordic skiers.. Seriously though can you imagine crosscountry skiing up and down this thing?

Skinning up the ridge and looking down the 2000ft east facing run was exciting. The final 600ft was a great boot pack up a nice snowy ridge, and the views off the summit and into the fjord were breathtaking. Especially while enjoying a Slogen Ale on its namesake.

This was such a perfect place to finish our trip.   Our whole crew made it to the summit and we all celebrated our great trip. Anthony Bonello, Jeff Thomas, Chris Rubens, Andreas Fransson our guide Oscar Almgren and his girlfriend Hedda Breien.

Thankfully for the beers we stayed on the summit for awhile and finally started shredding down. Some pretty decent turns were had, some of the best of the trip.Chris Shredding. Andreas shredding… And me shredding (Chris took this one)

What a finale! thanks Salomon free ski for this awesome trip.

I currently use the Suunto Ambit to track my adventures. Its their GPS watch, and I have to say its pretty amazing to esily transfer the info onto google earth and then have lines from all my adventures. For this trip I will be able to see all the places we went and great runs we experienced.. here is todays move  http://www.movescount.com/moves/move12078911 check it out