Norway

I'm finally leaving to Norway tomorrow. I have to wake up in 6 hours (5am, early start) so I'm not going to make this very long. First stop is Trondheim (Harbak, Vingsand) and later we will continue further up north to Gjerdalen ja fianlly the Lofoten islands

I don't like checking the weather forecast for Norway, because it always looks bad, but I'm sure the weather will turn out to be fine (yeah right!)

Puumala

My last weeks boulder hunt went well. The weather could not have been better and I spent every day running around the woods looking for new boulders and making first ascents.

Puumala area     

  

I found a lot of boulders, big ones, but not that many lines for some reason. The rock quality wasn't the best in some places. I put a few nice problems, but overall this area wasn't quite as good as I thought it might be. Oh well, that's the way it goes sometimes.

Puumala       

Here's a little clip I filmed while I was there. I didn't have much time to put into editing it, but the footage isn't that great anyway so whatever. It shows two new problems I put up: Milestone and Laiskuus Palkitaan.





On Monday I'm leaving to Norway. I haven't spent much time there climbing, but I've seen enough to know that the potential for new bouldering is huge there. The last few days it's been really hot in Finland, so hopefully we'll find better conditions in northern Norway. If not, you can always do night sessions. Soon you wont even need headlamps because the sun doesn't set that far up north in the summer!

New boulders

Not many people would drive 8 hours back and forth on a Friday to go run around the woods for nine hours while it's raining.

That's how I spent my Friday. After hours on the computer scrolling trough maps and aerial images, I was headed towards a remote area about 4 hours drive North east of Helsinki. Maps are an essential tool for finding boulders in Finland, because there are thick forest everywhere so the visibility is often really bad and the boulders are usually scattered around. You never really get a good view from the road, so you really need to go look at each boulder individually. So, after several exhausting hours of non-stop boulder hunting, I did find some really cool projects and not just individual boulders, but potentially actual areas.

 Some of the small roads were in bad shape               

The weather forecast for the this week looks a bit dubious, but whatever. I'm psyched to go out there and make some first ascents and brush some cool projects. If it's going to rain the whole time, at least I'll have a change to go look for some new boulders around.

I'm driving out there in the morning and I was just packing some of my stuff and once again realized how much gear I actually bring on a bouldering trip. Often people say that bouldering is nice because you don't need a lot of gear. I would say quite the opposite. When I was sport climbing in Spain, I often realized how nice it was that you didn't have to carry a lot of gear.

I'll be out for a few days if the weather allows and hopefully come back with some photos and video.