Beerenberg

Mon
7 Jul
2014

So today is the day. I guess that all of us are quite exci­ted. I am cer­tain­ly loo­king for­ward to the pro­s­pect of get­ting up Bee­ren­berg, but I can’t deny that I have a lot of respect for this tour. The long hike yes­ter­day and the limi­t­ed rest in the bivac add up to it.

Here, in Eke­rold­da­len, the­re is the last chan­ce to turn around indi­vi­du­al­ly. From now on it is all of us or no one. Just befo­re we start, we make this clear again, and then we fol­low the GPS up into the fog. Rocks and mos­ses, stone fields and snow patches.

After 2 hours, the fog is clea­ring. Wide moss fields around us, and the peak of Bee­ren­berg ahead! Cer­tain­ly a maje­s­tic view. Hard to belie­ve it is still seve­ral kilo­me­t­res and more than 1700 met­res of alti­tu­de to the top, it seems so near. But it isn’t.

A litt­le dripp­le of melt­wa­ter is the last chan­ce to re-fill the bot­t­les. Water is important now, as we start to hike across the gent­ly slo­ping snow fields towards the top.

The sky is now beau­tiful­ly clear, the gla­cier-cover­ed cra­ter shi­ning white with a deep-blue back­ground. Just grand! A huge, impres­si­ve land­scape, seen by few from such a clo­se distance.

Kilo­met­re is fol­lo­wing upon kilo­met­re. Gud­jon, who is gui­ding groups in simi­lar ter­rain in Ice­land, is get­ting the rope out. A short intro­duc­tion – not ever­y­bo­dy has been on a gla­cier befo­re – and then we con­ti­nue as a rope team. Soon we see the first, small cracks, which are then get­ting wider, tur­ning into crev­as­sed ter­rain. Direct­ly next to us, Sør­breen is flowing down as a more hea­vi­ly crev­as­sed gla­cier, wide gaps yaw­ning not far away.

We are aiming at a small group of rocks cal­led Nunatak­ken. Unfort­u­na­te­ly, the wea­ther luck does not hold, and it beco­mes more and more clear that we won’t make it to the top today. The sky is tur­ning from blue to grey, and a cloud is sud­den­ly han­ging at the cra­ter rim, dis­ap­pearing again only to come back lar­ger and thi­c­ker soon. The wind is also picking up, some of us are almost loo­sing their balan­ce for seconds. My opti­mism is for the peak going down.

Soon, Gud­jon stops the group, and I know what he wants to say. Alt­hough his reason is a dif­fe­rent one at this moment: one group mem­ber is exhaus­ted, the ascent is too long, he won’t con­ti­nue. It does not mat­ter, the result is the same, both reasons good enough: we have to turn around here, in an alti­tu­de of 1600 met­res. It is only about 2 kilo­me­t­res to the top as the crow flies, but it would take 4-5 hours. Mother natu­re is just clo­sing the door.

Click on thumb­nail to open an enlar­ged ver­si­on of the spe­ci­fic pho­to.

This is, of cour­se, dis­ap­poin­ting, and for a moment, the­re is ten­si­on and a dis­cus­sion which I don’t like, cer­tain­ly not here and now. It des­troys the impres­si­on this uni­que land­scape makes on me. After all the effort we have taken to get here, I would rather enjoy the view for the few minu­tes we spend here, than poin­ting out that we are not going up in poor visi­bi­li­ty and incre­asing wind for ano­ther 4-5 hours through crev­as­sed ter­rain.

We turn around. After a rather quick des­cent, we reach our bivac in Eke­rold­da­len after a total of just over 12 hours up and down.

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