Hubby climbs Kjerag

While I was at a surprise party today, my husband climbed to the Kjerag bolt with a group of men from church.  Lucky for me, he's good at taking pictures.  Since I was not along for the climb, there is not a lot of information I can add, but I'll see if I can get him to comment.  If you click on the pictures, you can get a larger view of them.

These pictures were taken today, June 2, 2012.  I canNOT believe there is still this much snow up there!  The snow is on the road from Sirdal to the parking area of the Eagle's Nest.

Here is the sign at the beginning of the climb.  I will crop some of it so you can read it better.

This picture is looking back at the parking lot after climbing the first section. You can see chains that are bolted into the rocks for the steeper climbs.

This is at the top of the first hill, looking down towards the valley, looking at the next hill that they will have to climb.  If you look back at the map, this will be the top of the first hill.

This is the top of the second hill, looking towards the last hill.

This is a view to the end of the fjord, and the town is Lysebotn.

This is a close up view of the town of Lysebotn.  You can take a ferry to here and drive up to the parking area for Kjerag.

This is a look up at one of the next steep sections to climb.

At this point, most of the climbing is finally done and they have reached the plateau that they had to walk across.  There is still climbing to do, but it is so gradual compared to what they had already done, it seemed easy.

The signs on the top of this cairn point to 4 different trails.  The bottom one is the Kjerag bolten and the one right above it is for the Eagle's Nest.

They finally arrived.  They ate lunch here while they were waiting for their turn to walk out on the bolt.

If you are standing there in the "staging area" this is the view you would see of the fjord

This is how you climb onto the bolt ... a little easier (VERY little) than it looks from the front

Here is a view of a friend of ours pretending he was going out onto the bolt.

And here is Ron:

Above, he is taking pictures down below the bolt.  Here are some of those pictures:

Great view of the fjord with a speedboat going on the opposite side

Our friend Joe who went with Ron - check out the icicles on the bottom of the bolt.

The entire group

Then they started down ... and actually ran into a "blizzard" on the way.  There were snow squalls blowing through the area - you can see one of them here:

They were trying to make it back before the snow hit, but some of them didn't quite make it.  It started with sleet blowing horizontally then it snowed and blew and was quite unpleasant. It also made the trail very slippery and treacherous.  You really need to be prepared for any type of weather when doing this hike!

So .... now I am excited to do this myself!  We're looking at trying to do it sometime in the first two weeks of July.

And for those interested in such things, below is the report from the Garmin Forerunner that Ron had attached to his backpack.

Garmin report