Norwegian Ice

It's been a couple of months since my Norway adventures.  As we're coming into spring, I was beginning to wonder if I would again be in the mood to blog about my ice-climbing trip.  Well, as it happens, all I needed was to be stuck in a hotel room while a snow storm swept through Worcester Massachusetts to recondition my brain.

It might seem obvious, but what I learned from my trip was that ice-climbing is not rock climbing; it is also not Scottish winter climbing.  Vertical frozen waterfalls are really a different kind of beast.

In some ways, it's so much more fun with all the extra gear you get to play with - the axes, crampons and ice screws; even the mounting of the ice-screw holders onto your harness could become a little project for the evening.  Further, what could be more therapeutic than repeatedly throwing an axe and kicking sharp points into a giant lump of ice?!

On the other hand, all that extra gear creates ridiculous challenges:
- More gear equates to more weight to move up the waterfall with you, it's quite amazing how heavy the axes and crampons become over the course of the day.  At the end of the day, even walking out on flat ground was a struggle with my crampons.
- Axe and crampons placements that are good enough to climb on require strength and precision.  Neither gentle tapping towards achieving an ice sculpture nor mad hacking of the climb to release giant ice boulders onto your belayer were helpful.
- Ice screws are a clever invention, but incredibly fiddly; for me, it is still impossible to hold onto my axe with one hand and screw in (or unscrew) with another.  On leading, this is very inconvenient.
- Failing on any of the above would result in falling with all the aforementioned gear, which is highly undesirable.

Although my week of ice-climbing is probably the most physically and mentally challenging thing that I have done for some time, I have had a fantastic trip (see Rjukan photos here).  Rjukan is stunningly beautiful, I can see why it is the place to go for ice-climbing.  As an added bonus, we ended the trip by spending the last day in Oslo (see photo of Oslo harbour front) and went to see Edvard Munch's work at the National Gallery.

Norway definitely has a lot to offer and I like what I have seen so far; however, it is only fair to report that Norway did live up to it's reputation for being an extremely expensive place to visit.  I thought I was prepared, but it is not until you hand over 200 Norwegian Krone for your burger and chips do you truly feel the pain.  In one of his regular columns, John Simpson wrote about his recent trip to Oslo to cover the awarding of the Nobel Prize.  While I'm not sure I share his choice of Norwegian survival essentials of silk long johns and cherry vodkas, I fully subscribe to his view on the "unthinkable prices"of all things in Norway - which reminded him of Woody Allen's line in Manhattan from the taxi he and his girlfriend were travelling in: "you're so beautiful I can scarcely keep my eyes on the meter".