What can you do on a normal day in mid-march in Northern Norway? Skiing or snowshoe-walking… (pubs are too sparse and expensive )

As we had to wait quite some days for the weather to clear up a bit, we were quite thrilled that even some rays of sun made it towards us

So we took the chance and did some hiking around a lake

Spring is coming – slowly but steadily

removing all old ice

Yet, despite it being 5° warm the wind is chilly and the felt temperature around -1°, so you need to warm up quite often

The grip is loosening

“Mountain range”

And isolated peaks

As night approached the sky cleared… Seeing the Aurora indicators at 4 (out of 10) gave us even more hope – and then around 8pm it started…

First only a bit

Then getting more and more intense

sky in glow

showing all kind of formations

stretching over the entire sky

parallel bands of light

just pure beauty

and illumination

The mountain is throwing light out

then towards the end of the show the aurora got much stronger

real dancing dragons in the sky

a double helix

swirls of light

and a shape

which is just beautiful

falling down again

gas hobs

and smoke rings

different colours as well

the final showdown

Wow – that surely was an amazing show which lasted around 2h; afterwards the sky stayed clear and a faint bright glimmer remained, but the “aurora disk” turned away as the earth rotated outside the proton eruption of the sun.

Anyhow the next day was just spectacular

Sheer sunshine

Glittering snow

Yes, getting very, very much down… (into the snow )

Another frozen lake which we didn’t want to cross…

with beautiful rocks emerging from the snow and ice

the distant mountain range in full brightness

and the wind blowing

Pristine snow fields – perfect for hiking

and viewing

birches, birches, birches…

Our classical tea break

with the obvious way behind and long shadows of the later afternoon

At night the climate got back to “normal” – which means rather windy. Around 30 – 40 m/sec (approx. 100 – 140 km/h) wind speed is normal and all people who used the day for a time out had some trouble coming back.

This skipper (brrrr… sailing in Northern Norway in March…) had to try for approx. 3h to get past the point due to strong currents and winds.

Here you can see how windy it really got…

So we decided to stay inside in our last night in Norway and watch the reflections of the fire