2023-12-06 11:13:43
In winter, people go to Aurdal, in the Norwegian mountain region of Valdres, primarily for skiing and tobogganing. And even we, who didn’t come here for sport, but rather out of curiosity for the concerts at the Hemsing Festival in the village’s almost 300-year-old wooden church, were immediately drawn outside as soon as we got off the bus: the sun , the clear air, the fresh snow, the view from the slope of a valley bathed in light – after a few minutes you’ll feel light and snow-soaked.
A winter trip to Norway leads to a white, blue and gold world full of magic: frozen waterfalls cling to granite boulders above mountain roads, icicles on gutters sparkle in the light, and anyone who takes just one step sideways from the cleared road finds themselves knee-deep in snow. In Germany, snow is now yesterday’s snow. Anyone who has seen the snow-covered ski jump in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the middle of the green forests and meadows below the Wetterstein massif on an early January day knows the feeling of standing at the end of a geological era. It’s oppressive. But if you come to the Norwegian high mountains in the depths of winter, you travel back to our climatic past, which suddenly seems happier than it probably ever was.
The wooden church of Aurdal, built in 1737, is the main concert venue of the Hemsing Festival. : Image: Jan Brachmann
The Flytoget, the express train from Oslo Airport, shoots almost curvelessly through snow-covered hills, against which wooden houses and stables in red and white paint stand out. If you don’t take a rental car, which is actually recommended to get to Valdres, you will have to rely on the long-distance bus. You drive from Sandvika, where you can reach directly with the Flytoget towards Drammen, to Aurdal. The bus journey takes two and a half to three hours, depending on the weather. After just fifteen minutes, the thermometer shows a drop in the outside temperature of three degrees. The Tyrifjorden, a large mountain lake north of Oslo, has frozen over at the Sundvoll narrows. It gets colder and colder with every meter of altitude that the bus climbs on the modern mountain road.
At Sperillen, a long lake that is nothing more than a widening of the Begna, the eighth-longest river in Norway, everything sinks into ice, snow and mist. The visibility is so poor that it is often difficult to distinguish between the embankment on this side and the edge of land on the opposite bank. Rounded mountaintops appear above the ice like giant gray whale heads. Here you can only surrender to winter like fate. If you want to get ahead, you need good tires and antifreeze in the windshield wiper system. It is this reminder of how hostile winter is for warm-blooded people like us that will make the idyll of Aurdal, with music and sun, shine even brighter.
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