In general I’m very pleased and a little surprised at how well these pictures come out. I was adjusting the exposure by pure guesswork because the screen on my camera is out of commission. Never buy a camera without a rangefinder.
8952 This is the view of the fjord going in toward Olden. There are higher mountains in the distance, hidden by the clouds. Every now and then you’d get a peek.
9005 The Crystal Serenity sailing in just ahead of us. The weather was clearing a little as we got further up the fjord.
9043 Three John Deere troll cars parked in the rain, the seats covered with the blue oil cloth. The dull black structure where 6 people sit is locally manufactured and put on the cars after the pick-up bed is removed.
9052 The valley as we were going up the hill.
9052a The valley as we were going down the hill 35 minutes later.
July 16 – Olden, Norway. Our second Norway stop is the small town of Olden, population less than 500. It’s quite a way up a fjord and the drop off point for visiting the Briksdalsbreen glacier the largest ice field on the continent of Europe.
I got up early, about 5:30am, to watch some of the sail in up the fjord. No, I didn’t set my alarm but I woke up and saw it was after 5am so up I went. Sunrise is about 4:30am and sunset is at 11pm so we’re getting a lot of daylight. Problem is the cloud cover is not letting it make it to the ground. It’s another gloomy, cloudy day, darker than yesterday and it’s raining.
My more serious problem is that the screen has gone out on my camera so there’s no way I can check the exposure of the pictures, critical in these difficult lighting conditions. It’s back to the film days of shoot it as well as you can and hope for the best. Fortunately I had 50 years of experience the first 10 of which I had no light meter at all so I’m not too bad at guessing exposures but this is the first time I’m doing it with a digital camera. We’ll just have to see what I get.
We are headed out to one of the most accessible parts of the Jostedalsbreen Glacier, Briksdalsbreen. This area is a thorn in the side of the ecofreaks because in the 1990s it grew and covered the entire glacial lake at its base. Right now it’s approximately at the same place it was in the 1960s. There’s no denying that ice is receding. If it hadn’t been receding most of the northern USA would be covered with ice. So apparently some receding is good but other receding is bad. The arrogance of humans to think that the way earth was in the last few hundred years is the way it should stay forever. The earth has been changing for a long, long time and, Al Gore aside, it will keep changing in the future no matter what we puny humans do.
We started out with about a 20 mile drive to a resort area near Briksdalsbreen, The drive up was spectacular despite the clouds and rain. Rocky cliff sides with gushing waterfalls, green meadows with wooden houses and barns (mostly they look like dairy), lakes with campgrounds and houses on the shores all looking quite majestic, maybe because of the rain. At the resort we transferred from the bus to Troll Cars. Now I was wondering exactly what troll cars were and I was unprepared for what I saw. They are 7 passenger plus driver vehicles built in the USA by the John Deere Corporation. When I saw the green and yellow paint job from a distance I recognized it immediately. I asked one of the drivers about them and found out that they are actually golf course maintenance vehicles that come with a pick-up truck style bed. They buy them that way and when they arrive they take the bed off and replace it with a 6-person seating module they build here. He said that one other place in Norway uses them but that they are all made here in Olden.
When they’re parked in a row they look like they’re connected, but each is independently operated by a human, not a troll. They have the seats covered with blue oilcloth not only helps keep the seat dry but also doubles as a water shield for the passengers while driving. They needed them today. Diana and I settled in for the drive up the hill. I had no idea how far it was but it wound up being about a mile and a half and quite steep. The got us as close as they could before dropping us off to walk the rest of the way. The ‘rest of the way’ was almost a half mile of narrow, sometimes very steep, footpath. If we had encountered this early in our vacation it would have been difficult but now it wasn’t bad at all. The motivator was that you can’t see Briksdalsbreen until you arrive at the end of the trail. The path runs between large boulders and up hills and until you crest the last one the glacier is hidden.
It’s a pretty sight, the glacier above and the lake below. Because the light is so low today with lots of cloud cover the aqua appearance of the glacial ice is very strong. Not as strong as when a glacier has just calved but very visible. In bright sun that color would be lost.
They had some inflatable boats there that you could join to row out to the glacier but we don’t have that much time here. The drive back down went past the same large waterfall as we did on the way up. The spray was huge and thick. Even if it hadn’t been raining we would have gotten wet. As we passed a viewpoint down the canyon I had photographed on the way up I noticed that it was almost completely obscured by clouds. In just 35 minutes the wind had blown the clouds up the valley and I could see them moving past us to go even higher. I’m glad we were up there when we were.
The drive back in was gloomier and darker than when we went up. It was still pretty when you could see it. It was back to the ship for a little shopping at the stores and then on board to sail on to our next port.
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