Some mountain flowers

Unbelievably shitty weather today ... cold and snow and wind. Brr and yuck. Got to make up for it with some pretty summer flowers.

Batty cuteness!

Remember the little bat I posted about, the one I 'met' at the cabin? Well, here's the video I promised. Is that little guy adorable or what?? :-) Look at his little face. Aw. :-) I mentioned that he threatened to bite me ... as you'll see, he probably wouldn't have been able to even if he'd tried, his mouth was just so tiny ... but you can really see his teeth in the video, he is soo cute flashing his fangs like that. He also made some squeaky noises at me, but I can't hear them on the video, so I guess the camera wasn't able to pick them up. They were very faint, I could barely hear them. But check out how fast he can move. :-o He sort of hooked himself along and just moved so fast, I was surprised. It was such a great experience getting so close to a bat. It's the first time I've seen one of them that close. In the past when I have seen them that is all I've done, seen them. I have never been able to touch and hold one like this. I was so happy to get the chance to do that. He wasn't very happy about it, as you can see from the video, but at least he got to be out of the cold and wet for a little while. :-)



After the video :-) I picked him up again and carried him around the house to a woodpile on the old veranda. I let him crawl in among the stacked wood, that way he would be out of the wind. When I checked a couple of hours later, he had flown away. :-)

Summer memories

I've uploaded some of my videos from this summer to my Youtube channel already, but there's lots more to come. A lot from Ireland, obviously. :-) Also quite a few from the mountains. One of them is totally adorable, I was soo psyched to get that footage. Or have that experience, I should say, I guess. I knew I was in for a treat when my father came into the living room (where we spend most of our indoors time when we're at the cabin) and said to my mother, Honey, don't go in the washroom, there's a bat in the sink. :-D

Was that little guy adorable or what?? But that video's still on the list of upcoming attractions. I'll post it here when it's done. Aw, he was such a cutie. He tried to threaten me by showing me his tiny tiny tiny teeth and squeaking at me. Aww. I want a pet bat ... :-)

Back home ... !

... for about twelve hours, but still. Nice to see the turtles again. :-) The little guys were of course happy to see me - Herman mostly, Henrik was really lazy and had to be coaxed off their little floating bark island to come say hello :-D - but Raphael surprised me, he's less standoffish than I'd expected. So, yay. :-)

It was seriously weird to get back to the city though ... at around 6pm I got down to the Railway Square subway station to get a line 2 train home, and it was so weird to think that just eight hours earlier I had been up in the mountains ... so incredibly different, like two different worlds. And in another twelve hours or so I will be in Ireland. :-) Kind of hard to wrap my head around it ... :-D

Of course I took a million pictures while I was away. OK, not a million, but a couple of thousand. Yeah, seriously. o_O Here are some of the good ones, with explanations where necessary.

Linnaéa borealis. A great year for them this year, they're everywhere. They were my grandmother's favorite flower, they always make me think of her.

One of the goat kids spending the summer at the shieling this year. Don't ask what happens to them when the summer's over ...

We had a little bit of rain, but mostly sun.

A frog I met while hiking to Wild Man's Valley. Is this fellow gorgeous or what. :-)

Lom stave church (late 1170s).

Oh, the scenery ... !!!

In Ireland I will have internet access, apparently, or so Paz says, at least. :-) So more photos coming up soon, presumably. More, but different. :-)

From total stress ...

... to tranquility. Friday will be soo stressful, I feel my shoulders tense up just thinking about it. But once we get in the car, I can relax ... and then in a few hours, total peace and quiet. Ah. :-)

Summertime ...

... and the living is easy ... or at least it will be in about 24 hours. :-) I've been working all summer so far - quite a bit of overtime too, since we've had people off on vacation constantly for like a month - but now it's my turn to get some r&r. So ... another boring post like yesterday's, I'm afraid, but what are you gonna do. I've been crazy busy getting ready for my trip to the mountains, which I'm leaving for tomorrow afternoon. So ... I guess maybe a few updates may pop up in my absence, but nothing much, till I get back. :-)

Have a great week! :-)

Rondane 2009

The second part of my summer vacation this year was the week and a half I spent at our cabin in the mountains, as usual. Not just there though, we were all over the place this year. :-) I took a gadzillion pictures, but I also shot a bunch of videos. Here's one of them ... just showing off the mountains and the beautiful nature in the area. Rondane is Norway's oldest national park, it was established in 1962, and now covers about 960 square kilometres. It's a fantastic area for hiking in summer and skiing in winter. There's hunting going on in the fall - in fact right now :-) - for grouse, moose and reindeer, and there's fishing opportunities all year round.

To my eyes this is a beautiful area ... it may seem barren at first glance, but, well, life finds a way. :-) There's so much to be seen if you know where to look. And it's important to remember, IMO, that the beauty of nature takes many forms.

Mountain flora

I have such a long list of things that I want to blog about ... I hardly know where to start. Just pick one and start writing, I guess. :-) Today I picked the one I felt the most like writing about - summertime!! :-) December 21st is the longest night of the year here - the darkest day, so to speak. That's the day when we say that 'the sun turns' ... after the 21st, the winter solstice, the days start getting longer. But it's imperceptible so far. We're in the very depths of winter, with only a few hours of daylight every day. (But I shouldn't complain - at least we do have those few hours, up north they're living in full dark 24/7 now.) I don't like winter much. :-) So for today's post I decided to choose a cheerful topic and write about something that perhaps we all need reminding of right about now. Summer in the mountains, and all the beautiful flowers that grow there.

Well, not all of them, just the ones I've got good pictures of on photobucket. ;-)

I've already posted about 'Wild Man Valley', the strange area a couple of hours from our cabin where the flora is so different from the surroundings for many many kilometers. There are so many species of plant growing there, and in such abundance. It's quite amazing, a sight not to be missed if one ever gets the chance. :-)

Ferns and other large plants. Many species grow to unusual size in this place, sizes they could never achieve only some tens of meters from this site.

The purplish plants you see here are called tyrihjelm (Aconitum lycoctonum). I'm not sure what the name means, except that hjelm means helmet. The popular name for the plant in the East Valley is lushatt, which means louse hat - the plant can be used to make an effective remedy against head lice. I think this is most often called wolfsbane in English.

Buttercups (Ranunculus acris) growing on a miniature island in the river that runs along the valley floor. These are usually called smørblomst in Norwegian - butter flowers. :-)

These were my grandmother's favorite flowers - linnea (Linnaea borealis). They are tiny and delicate; the flower grows in pairs of beautiful pale pink bells, and they smell of sweet almonds. This is the flower that the greatest of the great botanists, Carl von Linné, picked as the one he wanted to forever bear his own name. This plant tends to grow in certain specific spots - they send out long extended roots that new stems sprout from, so if you find one, you'll always find more. I know the right places to find them in the area around our cabin - of course I know ;-) - and I used to always pick a bouquet of them for my grandmother. She appreciated this especially in the last few years of her life when she wasn't in shape to walk anywhere much herself. But she always got her linnea. :-) I think the English name is twinflower.

In this valley they spread out to cover much larger areas than I've ever seen them do anywhere else.

A closer look at some individual plants. They are so beautiful ... a pity the color doesn't show up very well in these shots. Next summer I'll try to get some better ones, with my new camera, which I haven't had the chance to use up there yet. But also, the flowers do tend to get less pink and more white as the summer wanes.

The plant grows in various types of forested environment. They love the shade and are often found growing more or less underneath larger species.

Reinlav or reinmose (Cladonia rangiferina) is extremely common in this area. It grows almost everywhere, and the growths can be very dense, as you see here. The name means reindeer moss - the name is due to the fact that this species is a favorite winter food of the wild reindeer that live in this and other mountainous areas. I think this name is in relatively common use in English too (ie reindeer moss).

Blueberries!! Well, at least what we call blueberries in Norway - blåbær (Vaccinium myrtillus). Very tasty and very healthy. :-) This year was a pretty good year for blueberries in Rondane ... in the sense that there were quite a few of them to be found ... but they weren't all that good. We picked some to eat on all the hikes we went on this summer, but some of them were just ... meh. Kind of watery and tasteless ... bland. But others were really good. And of course they all looked v. pretty. :-)

Tettegras (Pinguicula alpina). Umm ... butterwort, right? This and the two other Pinguicula species listed here are the only carnivorous plants in this country. No flower, alas ... I was there too late in the year this summer, there were only leaves left on all the specimens I saw.

Geitrams (Epilobium angustifolium) - fireweed in English - which is always colorful, is extra bright at the high altitudes our cabin is at. And this year they were especially vibrant ... I'd never seen them so brightly colored before. Beautiful. The house in the background is the one Hilde and Storm built after retiring as managers at Bjørnhollia.

2008 was a lousy year for cloudberries (Rubus chamaemorus), but of course there are always some. They are called multe in Norwegian, and are generally considered an acquired taste. ;-)

Another very common species of plant in this area is røsslyng (Calluna vulgaris). Yeah, basically heather. :-) It's closely related to the erica species, but it's a separate species. It grows in very varied terrain, but it does prefer open spaces with lots of sunlight. The brightness of the flowers varies from year to year ... this year there were a lot of plants with very strongly colored flowers. Don't ask me why, but it was certainly very pretty. :-)

More heather ... this was in more marshy terrain, the picture above is of a dry spot.

My mother picked a huge bouquet of them, which of course was absolutely beautiful. I mean, wow. :-)

Bluebells (Campanula rotundifolia)!! They are so pretty, I love their color ... pale but still so striking against the mountain grasses. :-) They're called bluebells in Norwegian - blåklokker - but the English name is harebell. These were growing randomly by the side of the road in Røros.

And these were on the stairs in the churchyard there. :-)

This next plant is one of several closely related species (they differ in color) which grow on sunny open hillsides in mountainous areas. They're pretty rare. The family name in Norwegian is søte, ie sweet ... this purple one is called bittersøte, bittersweet. Not sure about the latin name. I'll find out. The flowers need strong sun to open - when they're closed, which is most of the time, they're very humble and unassuming and very easy to miss ...

... but when they open up, they're just absolutely beautiful. :-)

This is another quite rare plant - Olavsstake (Moneses uniflora), ie, St Olav's candlestick. :-) St Olav (king Olav II the Saint, 1015-30) is our patron saint, and one of the very few Norwegian saints who ever became popular outside of Norway. :-) The old superstition had it that this flower grew in the holy king's footsteps ... and as a result it's distributed widely across the country. The king travelled all over in his efforts to 'convert' us to Christianity (this basically consisted in him telling people that either you accept Christ as your lord or I will burn your houses down and kill you, and people saying hey man, don't do that, we totally accept this Christ guy, just don't burn anything ... and the king having them baptized and then riding away happily and never seeing any of these people again. :-D)

This next one is quite common and easy to find - kattefot and harelabb are the common names for it. (Cat's paw and hare's foot. :-) I don't know either the latin name or the correct English name ... I'll do some research. And next summer I'll take some better pictures. :-)

And finally, another very rare plant, which I think I've only seen the time a couple of years ago when I took this picture. Maybe a few more times, I'm not sure. Mogop (Anemone vernalis) prefers very rocky ground - as you see - it grows in places where few other plants manage to survive. A very hardy species ... and quite beautiful, although as you see quite tiny.

Whew, this took forever ... ! And now I can hardly wait for summer ... ;-)

Mountain vacation 2008. Bjørneborg & Bjørnhollia

Time for some pictures of our cabin and of Bjørnhollia. (Which I wrote about rather extensively here.) Starting with the latter ...

This is a view of Bjørnhollia from the shortcut, a path that I normally use to get down there ... the road curves and takes up to several minutes more to walk. ;-) The red T is the symbol of the Norwegian Tourist Association; they use it to mark the accepted tracks through the various wildernesses in our lovely country. :-)

Front left: the managers' house; front right: the old sleeping quarters. Back left: the employees' residence. Center: the main building, which houses the kitchens, the common room, cellars, dining hall, various sleeping quarters.

Front: the byre; back: employees' residence and main building; center: the dormitory building.

A view of the whole place, seen from across the valley, ie, the slope of mount Musvollkampen.

These pictures (above) were all taken in the summer of 2005. But nothing's changed since then. :-)

This is our cabin; the front view when you come walking down the path from the road. This entire side of it is the new addition. Well, 'new' addition. :-) The tiny building in the background is the new outhouse.

The back of the building. That's my mother you see putting some fresh varnish on the window frames in the kitchen. :-)

The old outhouse (left), now part woodshed and part storage shed, and the new woodshed (right). The new outhouse also doubles as an extra woodshed. We like to know we have plenty of wood to burn. :-)

Side view of the old outhouse. My grandfather built this in the fifties.

The new outhouse, right, and the new woodshed. (Yeah, they're not new, we just call them that ... cause everything else is so much older.)

The cabin seen from outside the new outhouse. The old outhouse in the foreground ... as you see.

A couple of views of the living room. We spend most of our time either outside or in this room.

The kitchen. Not entirely tidy ... this was taken on the day we were leaving.

My grandmother's room. My room now, I guess. :-(

Mount Musvollkampen seen from our property.

The cabin seen from the path from the road. When you're standing where I was when I took the picture, you're literally a few seconds' walk away from the house. So it's pretty well concealed. From the road you have no idea that it's there. :-)

You can see the house in this photo, but just barely ...

In closing, another view of Bjørnhollia - a very charming one if I do say so myself - with mount Musvollkampen in the background. This picture was taken this year. Doesn't it look wonderful there? Don't you just want to walk in there and put your feet up and get a nice cup of coffee? :-)

You'd be more than welcome to!! :-)