Quick ski post

Saturday morning, I boarded a bus. With fifty students and several colleagues, we headed north to Stryn, where we will be cross country skiing for the next four days. Some students have been skiing their whole lives, and others had never seen snow before this year. This annual tradition is always something I look forward to, in the beautiful winter nature. I feel lucky to get to be here, with these rambunctious and nervous and ultimately quite positive young people.

From the bus, looking out over the frozen Nordfjord. The place where we are skiing is in this image, on the far left of the frame, up just a bit below the tree line. To drive there, though, we had to travel all the way around the fjord, the coastline that you can see on the right of the image, winding around turns for another hour and a half’s drive.

*Streaks of cloud, the piled snow. In this image, behind these dark trees and below, is the Nordfjord*. On those mountains is the enormous Jostedalsbre Glacier, the largest ice cap in continental Europe, though every year it is shrinking. We can’t see the glacier ice itself now, because it is covered by this season’s fresh snow, but from some angles, between mountains, you can sometimes see surprisingly flat stretches of the horizon. These are the glacier.

Saturday night, the student group I’m supporting this week was set to sleep outside, in a covered but open shelter. We dug the benches and fire pit out of the piled snow. We had a fire and cookies and hot chocolate.

I didn’t sleep well. I was very cold all night, despite the thermal sleeping bag and the advice I followed from my outdoor education colleagues. But it was negative 11 Celsius with a wind chill of negative 22. I haven’t calculated the Fahrenheit yet to make that fully meaningful to me, but it reminded me of a camping trip with my dad at Devil’s Lake State Park in western Wisconsin many years ago, of which I have really fond memories of being together with him, of cooking over the fire, and a less fond memory of waking up to a frozen water bottle even though I’d kept it in my sleeping bag.

But here I am this morning, ready in a few minutes to suit up and head out into this next day of skiing.

Wishing you well, and thanks for reading,

Jimmy