Winter Travel Destination of the Week: Romsdalen, Norway

Last week I started the new and never ending weekly event: Winter Travel Destination of the Week! Last week I was inspired by a guy who told me that Utah has the worlds best powder snow. I was a bit sceptical as usual, but googled something like “powder snow utah” and I found an article in Cnn describing my dream skiing resort.

This week I decided to listen to myself rather than the web. I therefore award Romsdalen in Norway this weeks “Winter Travel Destination of the Week”. The reason is that I this is the place I have spent most of my winters, and it is a place everybody should go once in their lifetime. The snow might not be as powdery as in Utah, but the mountains are as steep as you can possibly want them. Romsdalen is the perfect image of Norway’s dramatic landscape and also the perfect place for you to go skiing. What you have to remember is that this is a place where you will have to climb the mountain yourself. That means that you will also have to be ok with spending a full day taking one step at the time to get to the top, just for a 20 minutes ride back down to your car.

But the fact is that this is an adventure you will not experience in any of the world’s ski resorts. In Romsdalen’s mountains you are pretty much on your own. The landscape is wild and dramatic, the cliffs are steep and scary and you are the king of the world standing on top of it. It is hard to imagine a better place to be when you have reached the top only using you own feet.

There are several good places to have your base camp in Romsdalen. My favorite place is Eresfjorden or Eidsvaagen; two tiny villages (if even that) with a couple of hundred local residents. But there are camp sites and opportunities for renting cabins. From both places you have hundreds of different mountains you can climb. And there are options suitable for beginners as well as the most daring extremists. But if you will feel a bit too lonely in these remote villages you may rather want to stay in the local towns Molde or Aalesund. You should also take a day trip to Trollveggen Wall which is Europes tallest vertical over hanging rock face, and Trollvegen, a very windy road that goes up the mountains to a great view point. These are both very popular tourist attractions and you will not have the mountains to your self like you would other places in Romsdalen.

For more information about travel to Norway, visit the Norway Travel Guide on : www.mynorwaytravelguide.org

Norway's mountains