The weather hasn't really been so awesome for hiking lately, nearly always sort of cloudy and slightly below freezing temperatures in Kiruna. As the nights are still kind of too cold for camping, I planned to do my first winter hike somewhere near the Norwegian coast around Narvik, as the temperatures seem to be more agreeable there. But it kept raining and snowing more or less constantly for 2 weeks, culminating in a huge snow storm on the last weekend in March. While the avalanche warnings reached level 4 for the following days, at least the weather promised to be sunny-ish on the first weekend in April. By then the snow conditions were safer again and I could open the hiking season for this year.

The first bus left Kiruna only at 7 am, and arrived in Narvik about 3 hours later. Sunshine and warm weather greeted me at the coast, making the walk through Narvik a pleasant start of the hike. From the Taraldsvik power station, I followed the well-worn skiing tracks through the forest, passing Førstevannet and continuing nearly until Pumpvatnet. There was quite a lot of new snow sticking to the westward side of all the trees, probably blown there by the strong wind last weekend. The branch-off to Forsnesvatnet and Rombakstøtta was marked with nice wooden signs, but no tracks whatsoever were visible. So I obviously had to make my own track through the deep and heavy snow, checking my mobile's GPS for directions every now and then. The terrain is quite forgiving concerning wayfinding in this area though, neither are there any dangerous cliffs nor are the woods thick enough to get stuck in, so everything went well.

Making my way further and further uphill very slowly, more and more clouds kept coming unfortunately. I felt quite exhausted, fighting my way through the huge amounts of new and untouched snow, but I really wanted to reach the peak today. Don't want to be defeated by a peak as small as this (from a Bavarian point of view).

At about 800-900 meters, I found a nice flat spot sheltered from the wind by a hillside and some huge rocks - a perfect place for my cute little tent. After setting it up and throwing most of my stuff inside, it already was 4 pm. Still enough time to attempt the peak, with some 4 hours left until sunset. So I set off again, against the protest of my already sore legs, to conquer near endless steep snowy slopes for a bit longer. A bit before my campsite I had found the tracks of two skiers - definitely helping with wayfinding and orientation. Seemed like they knew the area well, always finding the flattest patch of snow hidden between rocks in the hillside.

After a very exhausting 1.5 hours, I finally reached the ridge and could for the first time enjoy the view to the north. Well, not really enjoy it actually, the wind was blowing quite strong up here and made it feel very (very) cold. The last part to the summit was quite interesting, involving some exposed positions and easy climbing through snow and rocks, and I was quite happy and proud to reach the top. It was a big effort after all, definitely more exhausting than I had guessed before. The view from up here is really awesome, even though the clouds covered the whole sky by then. At least they were high up so that I wasn't stuck inside them.

The windchill was so cold I could basically watch the water freeze inside my bottle, so I didn't stop very long and didn't take more than a handful of pictures (wanted to keep my fingers). So I soon started the descent, which turned out to be even faster than expected. Due to the steepness and the huge amounts of soft snow, I was more sliding down than actually walking. After just half an hour I reached my tent, leaving me about an hour of sunshine to melt some drinking water and heat up dinner.

With no wind blowing at my spot, the night was only chilly and not super cold as I had expected, and the next morning greeted me with blue skies again. On the whole way down to Narvik, I basically retraced my own footsteps from the day before until I reached the skiing track and eventually the station in Narvik.