A new found friendship took me up a path I haven’t travelled for many years. This sentence sound metaphorical, but it isn’t, in fact it is not at all. A visiting colleague opened for the opportunity for me to work as a mountain guide for a day. In the company of a wonderful lady I walked the few kilometres to the Pulpit Rock on a sunny weekday. The Pulpit Rock is a peculiar rock formation of a nearly flat, square mountain plateau situated 604 metres above sea level. Under the Rock there’s a vertical mountainside which ends in a scree slope, an accumulation of rocks and fragments of rocks which again runs into the fjord a little further down.
We started our walk from the parking lot above the Preikestolen Youth Hostel where I have spent many of my summers cleaning and cooking. Im in no better shape then I was while doing the climb, and my pulse reached new heights. The first part of the hike is quite steep. The bad thing about that is of course that me being in such bad shape will have trouble keeping my pulse down, I feel flushed, and I need to take many small breaks. The positive side is that when you stop and turn around the view is stunning; where stunning is indeed an understatement. We could see across the fjord to the city and beyond.
We climbed a few screes, passed a few Spaniards, laughed at a few Germans, and followed the path thread by hundreds of thousands every summer. When we had finished climbing, we sat down for lunch. We found a decent plateau where we had a wonderful view of the fjord, a lake, the forests and the surrounding mountain tops. How wonderful it is to sit on top of the world, enjoying a nice meal with good company, with the heaviest part of the walk behind us, and the best yet to come. We sat down in isolation, though with quite a few tourists passing by a few metres away, but when left we left behind a group of about 30 people who had been inspired by our lunch break.
A few minutes’ walk later we rounded the mountain and came out to the steep slopes running down into the fjord. A few balancing acts and a few metres of plain walking we saw the Pulpit Rock.
The view is surreal, better than any postcard. I can not begin to describe and will instead leave you with these few photos a mere attempts of showing the magnificence of the goal of our hike.
Anne blabbers 