• SOLO PREPARATION •

After four days of preparation, packing and fine-tuning some of my arctic survival skills with local Norwegian guides, I took two trains and a taxi, saddled with two pairs of skis and two heavily loaded pulks rammed full of food and equipment for my month-long solo jaunt in the Norwegian wilderness. Packing and preparing for a solo expedition, especially a month-long solo expedition, involves seemingly endless checklists and much packing and repacking. There's no room for error; you must remember to pack absolutely everything you need, double-checking everything functions, checking you know how to repair everything and having a plan or redundancy for when something breaks.

 

• SNOW •
Starting from Haugastol, I skied over to a local lake through deep snow and heavy snowfall and set up camp for the evening.
I repacked for a month on the move, going through my equipment and expedition processes.

Expedition life is drastically different to our normal lives and I find it’s good to spend a day or evening mentally preparing and switching gears, so to speak. I was also thinking about how I was going to haul 100+ kg of food and equipment through the constant heavy snowfall and knee-deep snow…

Over the next week, progress was very slow. Constant snowfall, poor visibility, knee-deep snow and essential gear repairs slowed progress, but through a system of skiing a quarter of a mile to make vague tracks and then dragging each of my pulks one at a time through the tracks, I could travel about 4 miles a day (around 12 miles with all the back and forth) before having to camp as darkness descended.

One evening, as I was skirting a giant frozen lake sitting in the shadow of the Hardangervidda plateau, I decided to camp in an area that on the map seemed flat and safe. Although flat, it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that they were draining the lake for a hydroelectric plant downstream, and so I spent the night waiting to fall into the frozen lake as it violently cracked, moaned and screamed underneath me. It was a truly impressive but unnerving experience hearing this huge ice sheet shift, crack and moan underneath me for hours on end.
I didn’t get much sleep.

For the next few days, I continued at a snail's pace, travelling through increasingly deep snow and increasingly warmer temperatures but after a tough slog, managed to reach the Hardangervidda plateau. No more shifting ice lakes for me!
I had hauled my pulks up roughly 900 metres in under 2 miles, and I was ready to camp and eat some hot food by the end of it! Heavy fog and cloud left me with essentially zero visibility, so I camped where I thought was flat and ate and slept, hoping for better and flatter conditions the next morning.

Over the entirety of my expedition, I had two good visibility days and the morning after the night before was not one of them. The terrain was becoming flatter and featureless, but visibility was so poor that I could barely make out the route marker “sticks” that are put out for limited navigation on the plateau. I was truly alone and map navigation was essentially pointless as the constant whiteout conditions disguised all landmarks and features. It was a case of trusting my compass, GPS and keeping an eye out for any landmarks and marker sticks to cross-reference on my map. 

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• HEAT •

I have to mention the heat at this point in my journey, as it was something I'd never experienced on an expedition such as this. I decided to take one rest day up on the plateau as, despite being February in Norway and being camped over 1000 metres above sea level, it was 10c and very sunny! This is not normal. Combining this with the deep snow that was melting and turning into heavy, swamp-like slush meant that hauling two pulks weighing 100 kg was going to be a fruitless task. I have since heard many similar stories around the world this year and it continues to remind me how climate change is starting to make a serious and potentially irreversible impact on our home.

 

• PROGRESS •
By week two, after making some equipment adjustments and waiting a few days for temperatures to drop into minus figures again and the snow to somewhat harden and become vaguely skiable, I was making some decent progress across the plateau.

The Hardangervidda plateau is rugged, barren and very impressive in the wintertime and throughout whiteout, dense cloud, clear sky days and despite the hard-going conditions, it was really enjoyable travelling alone, testing my skills and planning my days and goals for the expedition. It felt like a big step up from my previous solo expedition in Finse the year before.

I was making progress.

My plan was to ski across the north, central, eastern and southern parts of the plateau using local huts as areas to aim for, always plotting my own routes on the many maps I had of this vast area.

I would be meeting up with another group and travelling back to civilisation with them in a few weeks from the south east of the plateau, but if snow conditions didn’t improve and progress continued to be slow, I would have to rethink the extent of my travel. I kept monitoring the short and long-term weather forecasts but improvement was minimal. Regardless, I felt good and my expedition routines were firmly in place.

 

• RED FOX •
After meeting the warm and friendly owners of the beautiful Tuva Hytte, a Norwegian-style cabin, and some fascinating husky dog sled racing teams and their beautiful dogs, I camped near the cabin, again hoping for some decent visibility the next morning so I could ski into the centre of the plateau.

Waking as the sun rose over the plateau, I stepped outside my tent to a confusing chaos. Torn bags were strewn around, my main pulk bags shredded open and some of my freeze-dried meals scattered across the snow with claw and teeth marks in them. Most of my bags containing food supplies had totally vanished. Surrounding all of the chaos were small animal footprints in the deep snow.

Feeling slightly dazed by the whole situation and after discussing with the family at Tuva Hytte, we all came to the conclusion that a Norwegian arctic red fox had probably been tracking me for a few days and taken the opportunity the night before to raid my supplies. They hadn't been seen in the area for many years and were thought to be extinct in the area. He had gutted my supplies, leaving me with 3 days' worth of food only because he hadn’t been able to rip open a few of the freeze-dried meals or had time to stash them somewhere else.
In total, he ate or stashed 20 days' worth of food, well over £300 worth and due to snowfall and wind during the night, his tracks were faded and I was unable to locate any of the food he had hidden away. I was pretty devastated at this point as I had sunk all my money into this expedition but at the same time, I was impressed by his cunning and perseverance as I had been camped directly next to my pulks full of supplies and had heard nothing during the night.

What to do? Well, after a 15-mile round trip off the plateau, down a valley and into the local town of Ustaoset and phone calls with the lead guide of the expedition I was meant to meet in two weeks, my only option was to stretch my supplies to 5 days, ski back to Haugastol and end my expedition early. I was gutted. Expedition over.

 

• FINALE •
My last 5 days were actually very eventful and gave me the opportunity to practice and develop some core expedition skills like zero visibility navigation, survival in heavy storm conditions and food rationing! Despite what had happened, I enjoyed the last five days of my solo expedition and ended it with a 9-mile dash for the train through the morning haze of the plateau. It was bittersweet.

As I had packed up my tent that morning, I noticed on a small hill across from me a red fox watching me. I knew who this was and said good morning and wished him and his family a safe winter. We looked at each other for a while and then, as he trotted off into the snowy landscape, I finished packing my tent.

I was happy that the red fox and his family wouldn't go hungry that winter.​