At The Summit

Published 15 April 2012

At the top of Tjuatoten

The year is 2006 and I’m in Norway.

At that point of my life I didn’t do that much walking. It would be 9 months before I’ve even set foot on the Pennine Way for the first time (a short section of the Pennine Way being what got me in to long distance walking.) I certainly didn’t do big hills.

At that point my walking was more… well pottering around on simple, flattish paths. But you don’t get many of them when you’re in the Norwegian fjords.

We were staying in a town called Balestrand and Catherine spotted there was a “hill” and suggested we walked up it. Little did I know that we were talking of a hill that went up 1098m above sea level.

There’s a name for such a hill. It’s called a “mountain”. And given we started off at the bottom at pretty much sea level, well you can tell we went quite a way up.

It took us about four hours to get to the stop, and frankly I was shattered. But when we did reach the summit of Tjuatoten, well it was well worth it. Well worth it indeed.

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