Today’s walk was to turn into another fabulous day in the mountains.
Had we stayed the night at Langavatn we would have taken the path that went north towards the fjord and then ran broadly parallel with it. However we’d dropped down to Blåfjellenden hut, and were off the ‘official’ Rundt walk, if such a thing exists. So the plan was to take the route north back onto the ‘official’ route and stay in the Flørli region that night.
The first stage of the walk was to retrace our steps a couple of kilometres to another steel bridge that crossed the river and took us north up the Nordana valley. This involved a short steep climb and then a lovely gentle valley walk beside the river and then the lake (Jomfruvatnet). Leaving the lake behind the path climbed again out of this catchment area and dropped us down into a new one, home to a multitude of enlarged natural lakes all providing water for the Hydro station at Florli. The water level was quite low on these lakes and the combination of the light brown bedrock and the vivid blue sky made us forget we were in Norway – we could have been in Spain!
The path descended reasonably gently, certainly without any issues to the Tverrvatnet lake and onto a dirt road that took us round to the edge of the Stora Flørvatnet lake.
Here we were faced with a choice. Do we camp wild, or drop down to the Flørli hut (Flørlistolen hut is a pre-book locked one, so this was off the cards. Florli had some attractions namely the thousands of steps (4444) that were built for the hydro workers to get them up from the fjord side.
We could drop down to the hut and then the following morning climb up the steps to resume our walk.
Or we could find somewhere to camp. Looking at the map at this point the path dropped some 350 metres to the locked Flørlistolen hut and then climbed a similar height, the two sections of the path making a V. In between the V was a gently sloping area which looking across seemed to offer a reasonable opportunity to put up a tent.
We chose to camp around the time our German/Moroccan friends caught us up. They told us of the trials and tribulations we’d missed on the north side of the fjord. They toddled off so after following the path down for a while and crossing the Florliaa river, we left the path behind and followed a contour across the slope until we found a suitable site for the tent.
In doing so, we’d found heaven! We were alone by a slab of rock that quite possibly no one had camped by ever before. We had views down and across the fjord, the sky was blue, and the gentle breeze was keeping the mosquitos at bay. We pitched the tent, pulled out our sleeping bags and sat on or in them as we cooked dinner and then watched the sun gently go down in a blaze of colour. All that was missing was a fine bottle of red!
As the evening drew to a close and the light failed, the breeze dropped and the Mozzies arrived, but judicial use of Avon Skin So Soft and snuggling deeper into our sleeping bags meant we could stay out longer, and reflect on today’s 15km walk and plan for tomorrow. We had originally planned to stick to the map’s suggestion and go from Flørli to Skåpet Hutte but as Skåpet was another locked hut, we decided to carry on to Fossmark, where the map indicated there was a campsite.