On a treeless tundra plateau deep in Norway’s Jotunheimen National Park, we stop before a bouncy suspension bridge over a roaring, snarling whitewater river. I shoot a glance at my 75-year-old mom. In a tone that contains more fatalism than enthusiasm, she reminds me, “I’ve never crossed one of these.”
I nod, and calmly assure her, “You can do this.” But the flushed look on her face tells me she’s not buying that line. I don’t need reminding that I’d planned this weeklong trek and convinced my mom she could handle it. I had even used a couple of words I’ve occasionally called on with her over the nearly three decades of adventures we’ve taken together: “Trust me.”
This week, it seems, I’m putting that trust to the test.
Besseggen Ridge, Jotunheimen.
My confidence is not unfounded. I like to refer to my mom as The World’s Toughest Grandma. She didn’t even start hiking until her late 40s, when I first got her on the trail. After early forays up New Hampshire’s Mt. Monadnock, we moved on to bigger adventures together, ranging from a hut traverse of the Presidential Range to backpacking in the Grand Canyon when she was a spry lass of 62. But she’s never done anything as long or hard as this 60-mile trek. And she’s never been 75 years old on one of our big adventures, either.
It’s the second day of our hut-to-hut journey through Jotunheimen, and we’ve been hiking for five hours across a rugged, Arctic-looking landscape vibrantly colorful with shrubs, mosses, and wildflowers. Cliffs and mountains look like they were chopped from the earth with an axe. Lichen blankets glacial-erratic boulders. It’s beautiful, for sure, but rain, wind, and near-freezing temperatures have also made it a trial; the weather alone would be hard on anyone. Now we’re staring at this raging river spanned by a swaying bridge—which must look like a wobbly slackline to my septuagenarian mother.
Our multi-generation group eyeballs the bridge. In addition to my mom Joanne, the party includes my wife, Penny, our 11-year-old son, Nate, and nine-year-old daughter, Alex, and friends Jeff Wilhelm and his 20-year-old daughter, Jasmine.
Lake Gjende, Jotunheimen N.P., Norway.
Nate, our self-appointed guinea pig, forges across first, stopping midway to deliberately bounce the bridge like a diving board. (Not helping, Nate! I want to yell.) Alex strolls more cautiously across. My mom still looks like she might turn around and march in the other direction, all the way back to Oslo.
I recall another hike when I saw the same expression on her face. On a trip to Yosemite, when she was a youthful 58, she and I stopped at the base of the cable route on Half Dome while she contemplated scaling several hundred feet of dizzyingly steep granite. I told her we could turn back. We sat for half an hour in silence. Then she jumped to her feet: “OK, let’s go.” A little while later, we stood atop Half Dome, a beaming grin of disbelief on my mom’s face.
On this trip, I hope to see that look on my mom’s face again. Now I wonder: Have too many years gone by? Can she still make that leap of faith?
Besseggen Ridge
Jotunheimen—which translates as “Home of the Giants”—contains the highest European mountains north of the Alps, starkly barren peaks rising to more than 8,000 feet. Thick, crack-riddled glaciers pour off them like pancake batter that needs more water. Braided rivers meander down mostly treeless valleys, and reindeer roam wild. But best of all, a trek in Jotunheimen combines pristine wilderness with the most luxurious huts I’ve ever stayed in—many featuring private rooms, hot showers, and restaurant-caliber meals—as well as flexible route options and side trips. It seemed perfect for my kids and mom. I figured, with such decadent huts, how hard can this trip be?
One small wrinkle: Thanks to an unusually cold summer, much of the ground here remains snow-covered in late July. And rather than the average summer highs in the 50s, the forecast calls for days of rain, high temperatures in the 30s, and winds that may explain how people first got the notion that reindeer can fly.
Indeed, we had to implement Plan B yesterday—our trek’s first morning. At Gjendesheim, a hotel masquerading as a hut on the shore of an 11-mile-long finger lake named Gjende, we awoke to the meteorological manifestation of misery: The temperature sat just a few hash marks above freezing, drizzle spat from the sky, fresh snow was visible below the low cloud ceiling on the mountainsides, and the wind blew like April in North Dakota. When we saw the forecast posted in the hut promising more of the same, my mom, kids, and Penny reached a quick consensus that the 30-minute ferry across Gjende to our next hut, Memurubu, looked like a fine alternative to battling the weather. Meanwhile, Jeff, Jasmine, and I pulled on our shells and set out to hike 10 miles to Memurubu via Besseggen Ridge.
Above Olavsbu Hut.
Known as “the most famous hike in Norway,” Besseggen is one of those iconic places that draws a crowd on a nice summer day. In wind-driven, bone-shivering rain and snow, though, we saw almost no one. The three of us constituted the only spots of color on a treeless plateau of rock and tundra freshly painted white. Dressed for winter in multiple layers, gloves, and a wool hat, I had to remind myself that it is the middle of July.
And then came the magic. Four hours into our hike, the clouds lifted like a stage curtain, revealing snowy mountains rolling away to far horizons. Before us, Besseggen Ridge tilted sharply downward and narrowed to a gooseneck land bridge separating the emerald Gjende from another lake, the hypnotically blue Bessvatnet. Green mountains erupted from the water. (Picture the Scottish Highlands flooded, with equally unpronounceable place names.) The seemingly improbable sculpturing of earth and water stirred the same awe I’ve felt in places like Patagonia and Iceland. For a moment, I wished my family were there.
But only for a moment. As we scrambled down several hundred feet of exposed, rain-slick ledges, another image crowded my thoughts: of a family we encountered in the wailing whiteout earlier on Besseggen. Well before catching up to them, we heard the girl, around my daughter’s age, crying and screaming, “Cold! Cold!” She wasn’t just whining; the girl was clearly hypothermic. We persuaded her parents to turn back to Gjendesheim, the fastest retreat off Besseggen.
Now I’m a bit concerned about how my kids and mom will fare in the days ahead, trekking rugged miles over snow-covered ground, fording frigid rivers—some days through hours of the kind of cold rain and wind that suck the life from your body like one of Harry Potter’s dementors. And there won’t be a ferry or shortcut most days.
I chose Jotunheimen looking for the wildest adventure I could take my kids and mom on—and have them like it. But I didn’t expect to be testing their limits.
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Fondsbu Hut
The World’s Toughest Grandma isn’t about to let her grandkids show her up—or perhaps she just realizes that she really has no choice in the matter. So after Nate and Alex cross the suspension bridge, mom steels herself and goes for it. She moves slowly, stepping gingerly to minimize any bouncing. Watching her, I marvel at her ability to go far outside her comfort zone at an age when most people just want to take it easy. This trek may be pushing her limits, but she seems determined to not let it defeat her.
After the bridge, we descend a hillside of boulders and ground-hugging greenery, past jet-engine-loud waterfalls. In a steady shower, we hike beside another long, narrow lake framed by naked hills.
While my mom walks with Penny, I quicken my pace to catch up with Nate and Alex, recalling a family trip we took to the Columbia River Gorge last summer with my mom. At 74, she hiked 12 miles to Tunnel Falls and, the next day, seven miles and 3,000 feet up Dog Mountain. On that trip, my eight-year-old daughter couldn’t keep up with her grandmother. In Jotunheimen, though, Alex’s pace eclipses my mom’s. My mom hasn’t slowed much in a year; Alex has leapt forward. As much as I feel joy and pride at seeing my kids grow more capable, I feel a pang of sympathy for my mother, forced to accept this generational changing of the guard, as inevitable as rivers flowing downhill. The sight of my kids pulling away from my mom has a disorienting effect on me as well: It feels like looking simultaneously in opposite directions, into my own past and future.
I was in my early 20s when I first took my mom on a hike. I was single and steering hard into a lifelong passion for the mountains; she was a middle-aged mother with only two of five children out of college—and a few years younger than I am now. At a time in life when many young adults and their parents spend less time together, growing more distant, my mom and I found something to bring us closer.
Trekking up the Langvatnet valley, Jotunheimen.
At a basic level, two things have made my adventures with my mom possible. The first and most critical is her ability to do something that many people cannot do: step outside her comfort zone. She has been places and done things that, based on her experience prior to the middle of her life, would seem as familiar as Saturn. The second is that, for reasons still inexplicable to me, she has trusted me when I’ve said, “You can do this.”
Over the decades, even after I married, had kids, and moved across the country, we still made time for at least one annual trip. We’d hike and talk about family, books, recipes, and harder subjects, like her wishes for the end of her life. Those times entered a lockbox of memories—which will someday be my most prized legacy from her. And they have inspired me to take my kids on regular father-son and father-daughter trips of our own.
My kids and I pull ahead of the others through a cold, steady rain to Fondsbu hut, on the shore of Bygdin lake. Inside, we all peel off wet clothes and boots and feel warmth creep back into our bodies.
At dinner, boisterous trekkers fill every chair in the hut’s 67-seat dining room for two sittings. They’re mostly Norwegians drinking heartily and bellowing “skol!” at frequent intervals. We dig into salad and bread followed by turkey with home-fried potatoes and vegetables—and for dessert, chocolate mousse with sorbet. Then Sjølborg Kvålshaugen, the hut warden, stands before the packed room, hands clasped. Six feet tall and strong-looking—with a beautiful voice that stills the Norwegians—she sings, a cappella, the jazz classic “Whenever We Say Goodbye.”
The warmth and food and good cheer lift everyone’s spirits. But after dinner, Sjølborg informs me that most of the way to our next hut is snow-covered, and tomorrow’s forecast calls for rain and temps barely above freezing. At our bunks, I share this news with everyone. My mom says nothing, her smile gone; Nate and Alex burrow inside their sleeping bags.
That’s just how a mutiny begins: when they don’t talk to you.
Kyrkja (peak), above Leirvatnet (lake), outside Leirvassbu Hut.
Olavsbu and Leirvassbu Huts
Given the forecast, we unanimously agree on hunkering down for another night at Fondsbu—the park’s numerous trail options let us easily shave a day and one hut from my original itinerary. While the others read, play games, drink hot cocoa, eat chocolate, nap, and generally exult in the comfort of the hut’s two spacious living rooms, Jasmine, Jeff, and I again suit up for the worst that Norway can throw at us. We head out for a four-hour hike past icy lakes and white cascades, below dark mountains that occasionally peek through the gray fog—enjoying every moment. Knowing a hut awaits has a way of making miserable weather seem beautifully mystical.
But that rain delay is our last mulligan. Any more days off will affect our reservations at later huts. So we hit the trail again on our fourth morning, in a cold wind and intermittent rain on a 10.5-mile, mostly uphill hump from Fondsbu to Olavsbu hut. Alex, Nate, and my mom happily deploy the three trekking umbrellas I brought, until the wind keeps inverting them and threatening to Mary Poppins my featherweight children to Sweden. When we stopped for a hurried lunch on wet rocks, I see the frowns and tight grimaces on my family’s faces as they quietly huddle like penguins. The day ends with a long descent over snow that my mom negotiates slowly. She and I arrive at the hut well after everyone else, walking the home stretch in a raw, driving deluge.
The next morning, the thermometer outside the Olavsbu hut reads zero Celsius and the wind—which seems to rarely rest in Norway—moans a Gregorian chant. But the sun finally shatters the persistent overcast. So even as we again wear multiple layers and set out across snow-covered ground, the spiritual lift the sunshine gives us feels palpable. Everyone walks with a quicker, lighter step as we pass beneath peaks whose blades of gray rock carve into the oceanic sky. Jasmine, a preternaturally ebullient person who I think could find reasons for optimism living as a galleon slave, says, “I can’t believe how beautiful it is here! I’m just so happy!” My mom is doing great, clearly enjoying the scenery.
Then we come to another stream crossing.
They’re a regular feature of a Jotunheimen trek, and most hikers cross them easily. But for a 75-year-old, the pushy water and slick rocks pose a real challenge. This one—100 feet across, swift, calf-deep, achingly cold with snowmelt, its bed paved with cobblestones—looks harder than average. A walkway of rocks, some slightly submerged, offers a route across that would save us from a numbing ford—if everyone can avoid falling in.
I survey my family’s expressions: Nate, eagerness; Alex, uncertainty; my mom, mortal dread. I tell everyone that I’ll lead the kids and my mom across one at a time—quietly hoping we don’t end up with any broken bones or frigid immersions.
Scrambling up Kyrkja, Jotunheimen.
“Can I follow you first, Dad?” Nate pleads. Using our poles for balance in the tugging current, my son and I step carefully from stone to stone, some gaps requiring long, awkward strides. Nate stays focused and silent. At the opposite bank, the pent-up thrill explodes from him and he gushes, “That was exciting!”
I return to guide Alex. I’m a little worried, but the anxiety is misplaced—she knocks it off as confidently as her brother, reminding me yet again how much my kids have blossomed into seasoned backcountry travelers.
Then it’s my mom’s turn. She mutters her displeasure, but fixes the stream with a look I’ve seen before: It says, “Don’t push your luck with me.” Someday, when my mom puts away her boots for good, it won’t be her attitude that fails her. She attacks the crossing, shifting her weight from one slippery rock to the next, stretching and bending like a venerable yogi. Just before reaching the other side, she slips—and my pulse leaps. But she catches herself, only dunking one boot. Those balance exercises she does at her health club have really paid off.
Beyond the stream, we encounter no more serious challenges and the terrain gets more gentle. We walk in warm sunshine up a rock-and-tundra-carpeted valley, below muscular mountains speckled with snowfields, past lakes choked with plates of broken-up ice. Beyond a low pass, we descend gentle, stress-free slopes of soft snow, toward a lake named Leirvatnet and the most opulent hut of our trek, Leirvassbu.
In our private room, with a view of the lake and mountains, Nate—not normally a paragon of personal hygiene—dashes for our shower. He soaks for a solid 15 minutes and emerges burbling, “That was absolutely amazing.” I check in on the girls’ room: all smiles.
Later, in the spacious dining hall, we relax with beer and wine and an appetizer of skinke, a prosciutto-like meat, served with potato and egg. After a salmon dinner followed by strawberries and ice cream, it appears everyone has made a full recovery. Proof positive: When the conversation shifts to that stream crossing, even mom is laughing.
The Visdalen above Spiterstulen.
Kyrkja, Spiterstulen, and Galdhøpiggen
At 4:40 a.m. on our sixth morning, in the gray light that substitutes for darkness in July at this northerly latitude, Jasmine, Jeff, and I walk out of the Leirvassbu hut. It’s cloudy and barely above freezing but not raining. Across Leirvatnet, fog swirls around the top of our objective, a sharply conical peak named Kyrkja (pronounced “sheersh-ya”).
We ascend steadily over wet rock and snow that has firmed up overnight. From a saddle, we begin the real climbing: a 900-foot scramble up a steep ridge of talus, slabs, and a few short but exposed, third-class pitches. The wind picks up as we gain elevation.
Two hours after stepping out of the hut, we make a final series of moves and stroll onto the 6,667-foot (2,032m) summit, an area the size of a small bedroom with sheer drop-offs on three sides. We look down 2,000 feet to the speck that is our lakeside hut and out over a chaotic jumble of mountains smothered in snow and ice. Partly frozen lakes mirror clouds aflame with dawn light. We linger briefly, take a few photos, then head down.
At 8:15, we join my family for a breakfast of freshly baked breads, cereal, yogurt, fruit, and omelets with fried potatoes at Leirvassbu—still buzzing with the thrill of having knocked off one of the many optional side hikes that make a trek in Jotunheimen perfect for a mixed group.
Hiking Galdhøpiggen (2469m), above the Visdalen.
By early afternoon, we’re descending a snow-free valley, with just a few more hours of dry, almost flat hiking to our last hut, Spiterstulen. Frothing streams gray with glacial flour crash into an emerald river. Pyramidal peaks vault skyward. At one point, we count seven glaciers within view. Under a clear sky, the temperature leaps above 50F, a Nordic heat wave. For the first time all week, I change into shorts and a T-shirt. Jeff and Jasmine proclaim this “the most idyllic day of hiking we have ever had.”
But en route to Spiterstulen, we face one last stream crossing—fortunately, easier than yesterday’s. Once again, Nate and Alex dance across, while my mom pulls it off at a slow but competent waltz. “Too bad the trip’s almost over,” Penny tells her, “you’re just getting good at these.”
She laughs, but adds, “I still don’t like stream crossings.”
I wonder whether she thinks these glorious views were worth the week’s challenges. So I walk with her, away from the others, and confess, “I feel badly for dragging you out here. I didn’t think it was going to be this hard.”
“I like being out here,” she responds without hesitation. “I like the walking.” Then she ticks off what for her were the hard parts—the stream crossings, the harsh weather, the need to keep moving. Of course, those are the rigors of many multi-day treks. We both understand that she may have crossed a threshold. One day, we may look back on this week as our last big wilderness trek together. That day will inevitably come, I know, but the real tragedy would have been if we never started hiking together in the first place.
In which case Jotunheimen will represent something else: a serendipitous junction in the lives of my mother and my kids, when she was still able to take a trip this hard and they had both reached an age where they could do it. That was not something I had anticipated. But then, life doesn’t give you advance warning of these pivotal moments.
Back in my 20s, I just thought it was cool that my mom hiked to all these rugged, beautiful places with me—something no other mom I knew did. But now that I’m a parent, taking outdoor adventures with my own kids, I understand what she had the perspective to know more than a quarter-century ago: the greatest value was not in the places we saw, but in the moments and memories we shared.
When we arrive at Spiterstulen, where we’ll spend two nights before returning to Oslo, everyone basks in the well-deserved glow of a goal achieved.
Actually, there’s one more goal for three of us.
Nearing the summit of Galdhøpiggen (2469m).
Just before 9 a.m. the next morning, under another brilliantly blue sky, Penny, Jeff, and I embark another of the side hikes off this trek: a 5,000-foot climb to the summit of Galdhøpiggen, at 8,100 feet the highest peak in Norway.
We ascend a steep, treeless mountainside, past cascades and domestic sheep grazing a meadow. Cliffs to either side fall away hundreds of feet to glaciers. In the cool breeze and bright alpine sun, we hardly break a sweat en route to a summit with expansive vistas of the mountains and glaciers of Jotunheimen.
The view is stunning, but doesn’t take my mind off my mom in the valley below, where she, Jasmine, and the kids will take a short hike from the hut to see waterfalls and glaciers. Rather than dwelling on whether this is really our last big hike together, though, I find myself thinking about one of our first. We hiked to the top of Mt. Washington’s Boott Spur almost 30 years ago. A picture from that day hangs in my parents’ house, on a wall next to high-school portraits of their five kids. The photo shows me with one arm around my mom’s shoulders and the other arm raised in victory. She’s grinning with an expression of amusement and disbelief—the same look she would later have atop Half Dome—as if she can’t quite fathom having made it there.
I got a similar shot of us hiking from Olavsbu to Leirvassbu, a little while after the big stream crossing. Snow-covered mountains, tundra, and a long lake spread out behind us. Our faces look older, but The World’s Toughest Grandma still looks amazed to find herself so far from home.
My expression shows no disbelief, however. I always knew she would make it.
NOTE: A version of this story was first published in the January 2013 issue of Backpacker Magazine.
See all of my stories about Family Adventures and stories about International Adventures at The Big Outside, and my popular post, “10 Tips For Raising Outdoors-Loving Kids.”
THIS TRIP IS GOOD FOR adults and children with the endurance to walk 10-mile days through rugged terrain, possibly encountering wintry weather even at the height of summer. Trails are well-marked and generally easy to follow, with signs at junctions, but can be snow-covered.
Make It Happen
Season July to September, although summer snow cover can vary greatly from year to year.
The Itinerary The route from Gjendesheim to Spiterstulen is about 60 miles and takes six or seven days (including the option of one rest/weather day or adding a hut, Skogadalsbøen).
Day one: Gjendesheim to Memurubu via Besseggen Ridge, 9.8 miles, 4,339 feet. (Option: take a 30-minute ferry halfway down Gjende lake from Gjendesheim to Memurubu.)
Day two: Take the 30-minute ferry from Memurubu to Gjendebu, at the far end of Gjende, then hike 10.4 miles to Fondsbu.
Day three: Fondsbu to Olavsbu, 10.5 miles. (Option: hike 15.5 miles from Fondsbu to Skogadalsbøen, and 11.8 miles from Skogadalsbøen to Olavsbu the next day, adding one day of trekking.)
Day four: Olavsbu to Leirvassbu, 7 miles. Side hike up Kyrkja, three miles out-and-back, 1,700 feet when done from trail junction en route to Leirvassbu. If you climb Kyrkja from Leirvassbu Hut, plan on 3.5 to 4.5 hours round-trip.
Day five: Leirvassbu to Spiterstulen, 10 miles.
Day six: Dayhike Galdhøpiggen, 8.25 miles round-trip, 5,009 feet, return to Spiterstulen.
Getting There There’s regular, very reliable bus service from Oslo to Gjendesheim and from Spiterstulen back to Oslo. Bus drivers accept major credit cards, except for the segment from Spiterstulen to Lom (bring about 50 Norwegian krone cash per adult). The trip takes about five hours in each direction; plan a day of bus travel at each end of your trek. See flytoget.no/eng/.
Huts Small parties need not make reservations (except recommended at Gjendesheim, which is popular), but reservations are recommended for five or more people, especially if you want private rooms. Norwegian huts will not turn away trekkers, but once all beds are full, guests get a mattress on the floor. Staffed huts serve breakfast and dinner and you can purchase a bag lunch and usually snacks. Self-service huts provide stoves and all kitchen necessities and have non-perishable food for sale; some trekkers bring their own food to cook. Huts accept major credit cards. A Norwegian Trekking Association (DNT) membership gets you a discount at all DNT huts (including Gjendesheim, Fondsbu, Skogadalsbøen, and Olavsbu). On this trek, Olavsbu is the only self-service hut, and Memurubu, Leirvassbu and Spiterstulen are private (i.e., not DNT) huts. See Contact (below) for the DNT website, which has information about huts and membership.
Cost DNT huts, 555 to 660 Norwegian krone (NOK), or about $100 to $115 per adult DNT member for lodging and three meals, more for non-members, less for children. DNT adult membership is 550 NOK (about $100), with discounts for family members, students, seniors, and children. The cost for private huts varied for my family (two adults, two children) from roughly $300 to $500 per night, including three meals.
Maps “Jotunheimen” two-map set (1:50.000), 249 NOK (about $42), available from the DNT (bit.ly/norwaymaps) and at staffed DNT huts, including Gjendesheim. See this online map of this trek through Jotunheimen.
Guidebook Walking in Norway, by Connie Roos, $19, cicerone.co.uk.
Concerns
• Weather ranges to extremes. Waterproof-breathable jacket and pants, gaiters, and boots, and warm, breathable insulation, hat, and gloves are recommended.
• Many Norwegians are fluent in English; language barriers are rarely a problem.
Contact Norwegian Trekking Association (DNT), english.turistforeningen.no.