Destination: Norway : Troll Tracks : An inn-to-inn ski trek through a pristine wilderness of powder

In the windy darkness, snow covered our ski tracks, piled up against the window panes and swirled over the roof of the Hovringen Fjellstue, a mountain inn at the top of Norway’s Troll Trail. Inside, the red candles dripped to stubs and were replaced not just once, but twice on this stormy evening. Folk tunes wheezed out of an old accordion, and the cozy living room was filled with good conversation.

I love the sound of people talking. But we had not come to Norway in March, at the height of cross-country ski season, to talk. In such a winter wilderness, we wanted to ski. Gulps of cold air, diagonal strides that feel like flying, the intense quiet of snow falling on snow. This is why we had come to Norway.

Norway’s topography, location and history make it one of the best places in the world for ski touring. Its glacier-worn mountains are high but not steep. Its longtime ski culture means hundreds of kilometers of ski trails sprinkled with huts and inns where you can eat lunch or stay overnight. Its long winter provides a deep snow base topped by fresh powder almost every morning.

Hundreds of kilometers of gentle terrain and prepared tracks mean you don’t need to be an expert to enjoy cross-country skiing in Norway. You can base your holiday at one village, sleep in the same comfy inn every night and still ski dozens of different trails. However, if you want to ski inn-to-inn, it’s best to know how to ski on broken snow in bad weather, how to use a map with a compass and how to deal with winter emergencies. You should be comfortable skiing at least seven hours a day loaded with a full pack, including extra clothes, food and first-aid gear. You’ll also need to carry a sleeping bag if you stay in huts rather than inns.

Our plan was to ski from hut to hut and inn to inn on Norway’s Troll Trail, a 160-kilometer (about 100-mile) cross-country ski route that winds through the rounded Rondane mountain range in central Norway. It can take as long as eight hours to ski between huts on the Troll Trail (often called the Troll Highway), and for much of it, there are no roads. If something goes wrong, you can’t just hop a bus.

So before setting off on the hut-to-hut adventure, we warmed up by skiing a few days around Sjusjoen, a cross-country ski center on the plateau above Lillehammer’s Olympic village at the southern end of the Troll Trail.

From there, we took the train and a bus north to Hovringen, a village near the northern gateway of the Troll Trail, at the entrance to Rondane National Park.

The brochures had us traveling hut-to-hut, under our own power, beneath endless blue Norwegian skies. Instead, we encountered a series of storms fierce enough to force the cancellation of World Cup ski races hosted by Norway, bad enough to make us stay off back-country trails where we would risk becoming lost or frozen or both. But while our Norwegian ski adventure, like the weather, was not what we had predicted, it still was fun.

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The Troll Trail, Troll-Loypa in Norwegian, gets its name from the mischievous trolls who goaded picaresque folk hero Peer Gynt on escapades that always ended in disaster. The ugly monsters are just legend, of course.

But for us, for now, so was the ski trail. If the wind had been blowing from Lapland, a 12-hour train ride north, or even from Greenland in the west (where there are 40 words for snow), that storm would not have been so bad. We would have gone to bed in anticipation of rising early to graze at a breakfast buffet piled with pickled herring, local cheeses and seeded rolls. And then, after a last sip of hot chocolate, we would have waxed our skis with Blue Extra, buckled into backpacks and skied seven hours to the east, to the next lodge.

Instead, the wind had swooped up from the south, out of Europe, laden with moisture and fury and more snow than I had ever seen. The flakes clung to the window panes like insects, then clumped together like lichen, and then covered the glass in rolling layers that resembled the hills we so wanted to tour.

Sno, the Norse call it. This, in particular, was dyp ny sno, new fresh snow. In Danish, there is pulver sne, powder snow like flour; to sne that sticks together when you make a ball; fin sne, fine snow like sugar, and slud, a miserable snow and rain combo.

We got this language lesson on our first night on the Troll Trail while chatting by the hearth at Hovringen Fjellstue, the rustic inn nestled in a hollow beneath the gentle swells of the bare Rondane mountains. The inn’s small clean rooms were stocked with simple amenities that would seem like luxuries after a long day of cross-country skiing; a warm radiator to dry your socks, a window to check how much snow had fallen, a comfy bed, a hot shower, just enough room to change from long underwear into jeans, no television, no phone. Instead of staying in their rooms, guests gather by the fire in the living room to play cards and talk about the day’s outing. It was there that we met Marianne Anker Jensen, a spunky pain-therapy psychologist from Denmark who works in a community hospital there with insane patients who are also plagued by alcohol and drug addictions. Understandably, come vacation time, Marianne likes to really get away. She has visited Hovringen many times. It is special, so beautiful, she says. “The mountains, the sky like blue heaven, the snow--you can ski all day.”

It’s eight kilometers (about five miles) to Peer Gynt hytta, a stone hut centered between several villages like the hub of a wheel, Marianne tells us. People on their way to other inns stop there for lunch, prop up their skis and picnic in the sno with a steaming thermos of coffee.

Sometimes the sun’s reflection off the snow makes it warm enough to strip down to a T-shirt, even though the thermometer reads below freezing. When the weather is like that, a big snow tractor tows everybody on a long rope to the top of the highest peak, up, up, 2,000 meters up. It takes a full glorious day to meander down.

The peaks here are said to be 600 million years old--folds of the earth’s crust risen from a lifeless sea and worn by erosion and several glacial epochs.

We are beyond the tree border, too far north even for dwarf birch and fir. These mountains grow only ice, which accentuates their stark baldness against the long horizon. “The mountains,” Marianne says, “they come so close when it is clear.”

But this was a blizzard.

We nursed pilseners and tea and talked late into the night about the Danes selling fake feta cheese (cow’s milk curdled with enzymes) to Iraq and Norway exporting huge amounts of Jarlsburg cheese to Australia. (That and petroleum exports, Marianne believes, are the reasons Norway doesn’t need to be, and is not, in the European Union).

The storm grew during the night. In the morning, before the road was closed, my husband, Tao, and I hopped the bus back down to the valley in search of better weather.

We were disappointed we hadn’t skied the north end of the Troll Trail, but thanks to Marianne, we had, in our minds at least, toured a few of the trails in Rondane National Park. In this simple country inn, there had been no television, no lonely hallways, nothing but the company of new friends.

A train and a couple buses took us past plank farmhouses, bleak winter streams, gray and brown landscape, to the south end of the Troll Highway. As the bus swayed up the mountain from Lillehammer to Sjusjoen, we were enveloped by fog. By the time we reached the cross-country ski touring center (a ski shop, a bar, a few lodges) on the plateau, we couldn’t see a ski-pole length in front of us.

Still, we were determined. We went into the little ski shop to rent back-country skis.

Rolf, a graying broad-shouldered man wearing a wool shirt rolled up at the cuffs, looked at us, then looked outside. The fog was getting dark. Rolf didn’t say no, but, oddly enough, he also didn’t happen to have equipment in our sizes.

We chatted him up. Found out he raised pigs during the summer. That he had a brother in the States whom he had once visited in Walla Walla, Wash., for a year.

“I have been to Leavenworth [Wash.],” Rolf said. “Ah! We have skied in Leavenworth!” we told him. And along buffalo trails in Wyoming, golf courses in New Hampshire, river banks in Massachusetts, lake shores in Connecticut. Tao and I couldn’t claim to be back-country experts, but we did know how to ski on broken snow in bad weather, how to navigate with a map and compass. We were in good enough shape to plod along for eight-hour stretches loaded with full packs. We showed Rolf our 10-essentials kit: extra food, extra clothing. We promised we wouldn’t embark on an overnight trip that afternoon, maybe not even tomorrow if the weather didn’t clear.

Turns out Rolf did have metal-edged skis and high-top leather boots in exactly our sizes. He handed us an extra map. “You must be back by Saturday,” he said. “Why?” we asked. “To watch the Birkebeiner ski race.” Rolf was planning to compete.

To understand Norway’s relationship with cross-country skiing it helps to know a little history.

The 36-mile Birkebeiner ski marathon honors the spirit of skiing soldiers who saved Norway’s prince from civil strife in 1206. Every March, about 9,000 competitors from all over the world loosely follow the hilly escape route that ends in Lillehammer. Each skier carries an eight-pound pack representing the royal infant.

Rolf planned to stuff his pack with clothes and food to make the weight. We promised to return by Saturday to cheer for him.

*

The blizzard that trapped us in Hovringen lodge two days earlier had created a miniature landscape here in Sjusjoen. Towering pines looked like baby Christmas trees because we could only see their tops. Small summer cabins were buried up to their eaves. We skied for days mostly on tracked trails that wound through fir forests and up and down gentle hills. Where the tracks had been snowed over, we followed trail markers planted every few hundred meters.

We saw little except white against white snow. The world, it seemed, was a blank sheet of newsprint with no landmarks, no sense of scale. Sometimes we couldn’t see full stride ahead, which meant we couldn’t tell whether our bodies would, in the next second, hurtle up or down or around a curve. It was weird, like skiing blindly into infinity, or heaven, or the North Pole.

We wound up in Pellestova, a village of a smattering of cabins and the big brown Pellestova Fjellhotel at the top of a windy mountain. The hotel’s dinner, boiled beef and Brussels sprouts, was as bland as it looked, but at least there was a fireplace in the living room. We hung our socks on the hearth and listened to the staticky weather forecast.

By morning, the storm was so fierce the innkeeper forbade anyone out the door. We had planned to ski to another inn a day away before heading back to Sjusjoen to watch Rolf in the Birkebeiner. Instead, we were stuck on the Troll Trail again. This time, with a bunch of British mountaineers intent on finishing several bottles of whiskey. Two of the happy climbers wore watches with digital barometers. The already low barometric pressure continued to fall. We breathed in the smell of wet wool, sloppy whiskey and musty cigarette smoke, read bad borrowed British spy novels--and tried not to go crazy.

On Saturday, we woke to blue skies.

We skied through a landscape virtually untouched by humans. Trails trafficked two days ago by picnicking families and lone racers were now gone. With every step, our skis broke a thin crust and sank a few inches into soft bottomless powder.

Undistracted by signs of humanity, our eyes drifted to the curve of the lake, the gentle fall of the land, shadows under pine boughs, rabbit tracks. Tiny ice crystals hung in the air and sparkled in the sun. It was cold, but I felt warm and alive, the hollow of my back dripping sweat. It was nine miles back to Sjusjoen, a morning of beauty and desolation.

We watched the Birkebeiner from the top of the last hill before the skiers descended into Lillehammer. We never spotted Rolf, but we did see hundreds of other racers who reminded us of him, icy-haired men in Lycra jumpsuits and skinny racing skis, looks of determination etched in their weathered faces.

As they rounded the corner, they were met with singing. Ringing bells. Cheering women on skis wearing wool skirts and snowflake-pattern sweaters. The skiing cheerleaders waved Norwegian flags, sang patriotic songs and handed out cups of hot chocolate to the racers. This made the skiers smile, no matter how tired, and that was the last we saw of them before they floated down the hill to the finish.

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GUIDEBOOK: Ski Scoop

Getting there: Swissair, KLM, Northwest and British Airways offer connecting service, with one change of planes, between LAX and Oslo. Advance-purchase, round-trip fares start at about $900.

From Oslo, take the train to Lillehammer, about 90 miles north; several trains daily; $100-$120 round trip.

Where to stay: Hovringen Fjellstue, 2679 Hovringen, Norway; rates start at about $65 per person, per night, including all meals; from the U.S. telephone 011-47-61-233718.

Pellestova Fjellhotel, 2636 Oyer, Norway; rates about $70 per person, including meals; tel. 011-47-61-277488.

Tour packages: Consider lodge-to-lodge ski-touring packages to save money and planning headaches. These cost $630 to $700 a person plus air fare and a $48 membership in Norway’s mountaineering association (DNT). It’s likely you’ll be with 12 to 15 people (mostly Europeans) on these tours. Contact DNT (address below) or Borton Overseas travel agency, tel. (800) 843-0602 in Minneapolis.

For more information: Scandinavian Tourist Board, 655 3rd Ave., 18th Floor, New York 10017; tel. (212) 949-2333, fax (212) 983-5260.

Den Norske Turistforening (DNT), Stortingsgaten 28, Post Box 1963, Vika 0125, Oslo, Norway. DNT publishes excellent maps, organizes tours and has the keys for the self-service huts stocked with food. (The huts operate on an honor system.) Ask for the booklet, Mountain Touring Holiday in Norway; tel. 011-47-22-83-25-50, fax 011-47-22-83-24-78.

--P.B.