Davide Sapienza | Farout - tailor made experiences
The Meeting Place - two friends in Sunndalen
June 2000 and I am cycling through Styrkeprøven. I have come all the way from Italy to face this invigorating amateur cycling bonanza in Norway, a country I had grown fond of years before.
After Oppdal, the road rises up to Drivdalen. Of those 17 hours and 28 minutes, from Trondheim to Oslo, there is no better defining moment in my heart's memories than my body in glorious awe peeping through a crack in the clouds and watching something to the west. I need to come back here. I say to myself: and the information is stored, and frozen in time.
Did not have a clue about Muskox or the Sunndalsfjella and Dovrefjell. Did not know about the high peaks. And did not have a clue that I would meet Eirik Bræin Gikling, of all places, in Vadsø, Finnmark.
As a writer and a visitor of this planet, I am drawn to experience a landscape and its culture with the people who were born in and with it. I did not know that Eirik was born in Sunndaløra, neither that our destinies would meet again in this amazing norwegian eden.
If there is one thing I learnt of Norway, it is the quality of light and its thin air: the fragrance, the very feeling that you are touching it and yet the impalpable dreamlike quality of its life
Eirik knew my love for the snow and ski, so he proposed a crossing of the National Park. And on February 20, we headed to Kongsvoll, said hello to Odvvar, my friends sweet father, wore oure heavy rucksacks and started our journey into a newborn friendship between two very curious lovers of the great white silence, as Jack London would call it: nature, exploration, vastness, solitude and mystery.
On my way to Molde, I had decided to call my new notebook "The Muskox Travels". I had read something about the Dovre mountains, and knew Muskox was there. And that is was hard to meet them: but on our way to the Reinheim hytta, we first spotted 12 of them in the distance, and later 6 others at a "safety" distance of 200 metres. "The Muskox Travels" had really started in earnest. They are so enchanting and so light on the snow, they wear their hundreds of kilos quite well. Eirik was guiding me with the grace of someone who does know what skis are about. While on my first day I proceeded like a bear bambi on ice, he was patient and full of advice.
In a solitary wind and the cold, experiencing the long open fields of Stroplsjødalen, my guide explained the amazing and imaginary climatic frontier we were crossing: "Look North, and you can see clouds wrestling with sky and mountains; look South, and now the sun is shining. As you see, we are exactly sliding in the middle of this".
Eirik had carefully planned so that we would be staying at the Salhobu hytta before the long haul to his Torbuvatnet cozy Litjebua. Feeling reassured I said, "my friend, I think our Expedition should be called The Meeting Place. Here we have met to experience our first crossing together. Our small enterprise in the heart fo winter will leave a beautiful spell across this imaginary frontier".
We crossed the whole 100 plus kilometres up and down and through Reinheim, Amotsdalshytta, Salhobu, Torbuvatn, Raugbergshytta and down to Grødalen in five days, including a full day at "home" in Litjebua. The Meeting Place climate was very nice with us. I guess he liked our approach?
Because when your soul dives into the wilderness, you never know what you might find there in those unknwown regions of the heart of man, exactly as you dont know what is there for you to reap in the great land.
The Håkudalen plateau to Raugbergshytta in a glorious sun, on our last day, cemented a mutual feeling of respect and love for the landscape that explains why The Meeting Place, to us, is now a "real" landscape of wilderness, and human ability to share beautiful moments. I guess we won our Friendship Olympics and that we will continue, until the mountains will fall...
Davide Sapienza
www.davidesapienza.net
