Senja - An Exploration by Packraft

Fjords, mountains and wilderness

One look at Senja on the map and it becomes clear that this is a place to explore by boat as well as by foot. A myriad of lakes and fjords surrounded by cliffs and mountains just waiting to be discovered.

Senja, look at those fjords!

Quite a long way north!

I was first introduced to packrafting a couple of years ago by packrafting hero Annie Le. I was taken with the adventure opportunities that these tiny little boats open up, joining up the blue bits on the map. Yep, these would be the perfect bit of adventure kit for our Senja exploration.

Looking clean and fresh - this is a photo from day1 (!)

Our plan was pretty simple, look at the map find some interesting places and go there. We weren’t sure how far or fast we’d be able to travel by packraft, or what the terrain would be like walking inland. Essentially the plan consisted of lots of pointing at the map saying wouldn’t it be cool to go here, and here, and here.

Can't remember what was going on here! 
Senja's highest peak in the background

Feet out relaxed paddling :-)

We began in Bardufoss, Jim, Alex and I headed for a supermarket to food shop before Chris’ flight got in. Among Norway’s culinary delights is the famous ‘Brown Cheese’, some people love it, others hate it, none of us had tried it. So gambling on brown cheese for our next 4 lunches seemed like a solid plan. In the checkout queue I recalled Chris may have mentioned something about “avoid brown cheese at all costs”… We agreed not to mention the cheese again until we’d set off. 

Bixit means Bixit. 
Classic foreign supermarket find

 Back at the hotel we divvied the food into 4 equal bags the were large piles of mash and reindeer sausage and alarmingly little chocolate. While we wait for Chris to arrive, we treat ourselves to ice-creams from the café across the street. I’m a little confused – we’re well inside the Arctic Circle, but it’s gloriously sunny and I’m sweating just standing around outside. I did not pack for this sort of weather.

 

Ice cream in the arctic circle yum.

Eventually Chris arrives and we hand him his share of the food, and set off in an eye-wateringly expensive taxi ride out to Senja. We’re dropped off at a trail head, so a least the first walk in is on an actual path. We faff about with our kit; Chris discovers his food bag contains the brown cheese, Howls of despair ensue.

Packing the taxi

 Our initial packrafting plan was to meander around the lakes in the NW of the island. This seemed like a good idea to get used to the little boats before heading out onto open fjords. Every transition from packraft to hiking we got a bit more efficient at the process. 

Setting up for our first packraft, fafftastic

Stopping for our first lunch, I’m eager to try the brown cheese, it’s OK, perhaps edible, anyway there is no alternative so I stuff it down. Calories are calories afterall. Strangely I don't have any photos of the cheese...

Climbing mountains in between traversing  lakes in the NW

In our first 4 days we traversed across to the west coast of the island, even on the ‘path’ the walking is not easy loose rock scrub and bog cover the ground. It would be hard to overstate how difficult the terrain was in places. Just because the gradient looks ok on the map doesn't mean it'll be easy walking, unlike our training trips in Scotland we were definitely faster in the pack rafts.

Faster by packraft

I'd been a little worried about the lack of fresh fruit on this trip; happily we soon discover that everywhere we look there are wild bilberries to be found. looking closely there were even cloudberries  down there too. Stopping every few step to gorge on a handful of fresh berries didn't exactly speed up progress.  

Cloudberries

In fact most mornings we were able to forage wild berries to add to the porridge. Yum.

A breakfast worthy of instagram

There were so many mountains on the map – none very high, most less than 1000m, but all definitely interesting to attempt to climb. Our first mountain was Innhesten, from our camp on night 1 we could see something at the top. Initially we thought it was a cairn but it was also moving – maybe it was a flag? There was nothing marked on our maps. We stowed the gear and set off up the mountain with our day sacks. Scrambling through shoulder high scrub growing on steep boulder fields was not the easiest ascent, I wondered if we would get through.  

Bashing through shoulder deep scrub 
(📷 Alex Kendall)

Eventually emerging from the undergrowth we headed on to the summit through boulders and snow patches.

Team photo on the summit of Inhesten

As we got closer to the top we could hear an intermittent whirring sound coming from the summit. It turned out the ‘flag’ we’d seen from the camp was actually some kind of rotating radar possibly NATO? It was certainly creepy anyway, standing on a the top with wilderness in all directions and  roar of the dish in our ears.

Creepy radar on top of Inhesten

 On day 3 we had some really steep passes the contend with. Not high, but bouldery, without paths and carrying heavy bags it was very slow going.

Traversing scree slopes

Chris finding a route through the boulder fields

One of the many mountains we’d pointed at on the map was the potential to climb Breidtind, the highest peak on Senja at 1001m. 

The path to Breidtind- looking up at the summit

There’s even a marked trail to the top of this mountain, we set off on a windy day eventually locating the trail markers. The path got steeper and narrower on the ascent with a great deal of scrambling to be had. 

Almost the top of Breidtind

Only Alex was brave enough to complete the final scramble across an exposed ridge to reach the final summit. On return he reported that if it had been in the alps there would likely have been wires to assist with the climbing. We returned to camp for a chilled out afternoon. 

Relaxing on our (sort of) island camp

Looking out over tomorrow's fjord

Day 5 was our to be our first attempt to put on to the Arctic Ocean – well in a fjord that opened on to it anyways.  

The Selga cliffs

Being a bit nervous of paddling out on to what is effectively the sea, we chose a easy route hugging the coast where there was a road in case of a sudden need to bail. In the end we needn’t have worried, we were travelling with the tide and very little wind, the swell was minimal and we had spectacular views of Selga and the cliffs of Mefjorden on the other side.

Our first Sea paddle!

Pulling in at Senjahoppen was our first civilization in several days and we camped in a little 'wellbeing area' behind the village updated weather forecasts and topped up our food supplies – more reindeer sausage and mash, in Norway you can buy powdered root mash as well as potato mash. Rot Mos with Pot Mos was a firm favourite for the trip.

Rotmos + potmos with Reindeer sausage

(it tasted better than it looked)

The up to date forecast for the evening was for dry weather an intermittent sun – it could not have been more wrong. Cooking dinner in the torrential rain was not exactly a trip highlight. We tried to get a fire going but it was just too wet to last very long.

Senjahoppen cooking in the rain

While on the wifi in Senjahoppen we found reports of a  ‘maelstrom’ near Hamn, which caused us some alarm. We were not prepared to deal with maelstroms in the packrafts! Further research indicated that this was more likely to be a tidal race where a lake met the sea, we weren’t going very close to it, so the most we could expect was a bit of current. In the end this was a total non-issue and we felt no current at all. A total non -event. (At the end of the trip our bus passed over the bridge where the current was pushed through a bottleneck, here we did see a noticeable flow going out to sea.)

Sticking close together, just in case...

Passing a fish farm near the maelstrom that wasn't

Perhaps the best days of the trip were to be found exploring the Fjord of Bergsbotn and islands around Hamn. This was pure Type 1 fun.  Two day of clear weather clear glass sea, it looked like we could be in the Caribbean. The sea temperature told us otherwise. We saw tons of wildlife even a seal popped it’s head up.

Blue skies and calm seas

Jellyfish everywhere

On the way round to Hamn, We pulled in at the troll sanctuary at Finnseter, partly to see the troll but also to stop in at the café! with toilets! and cake!

Troll Scantuary (with cafe)

Carrying on round the coast we saw all the tiny islands off the coast of Hamn looking like they were floating in the distance. As we got closer the sun came out and the calm sea and clear water we passed white sandy beaches and dozens of tiny islands all waiting to be explored. 

Pootling past islands near Hamn

As evening arrived we debated camping on the mainland next to a water source, but instead decided it would be more fun to camp on an island (and just be conservative with our water).  In the morning we saw a Sea Eagle being harassed by gulls on an island ahead of us.

Arctic circle or Caribbean?

The journey from Hamn to Sandsvika could have been done entirely around the coast in the packrafts, but it would have been rather exposed to the open ocean and with the weather picking up we went for a slightly more inland traverse. This involved traversing into the next fjord and paddling up to the hamlet of Barbogen when a path leads over a col and down to the beach.

Emerging from the sea

Barbogen turned out to be a like an opening scene from a horror movie. Completely deserted with a number of houses falling down but one or two still well-kept with pristine lawns. We hurried through making up stories as to what might have befallen the place. The path also felt like it had once been well used and signposted but has also fallen into disuse.

Sandsvika bay - isolated.

Coming over the col and down to the beach felt like descending into isolated wilderness, not a soul in sight and a cold polar wind blowing in from the north. This was the only night on the trip where it really felt cold. The remoteness of the spot was totally worth it.

Sandsvika campspot pano

The beach was wild and desolate on the western most edge of Senja facing NW onto the open ocean looking out there was nothing but ocean between us and Greenland. This was where ocean debris washed ashore. Combing the beach we found bouys from several generations and pieces of whale skeleton.

Whale vertebrae, alas too heavy to take home

Cliffs obscuring the sunset, again.

After Sandsvika we sheltered for a few days in Gryllefjord, the main village in the fjord of the same name. We’d spotted Gryllefjord on the map in planning a dead straight narrow fjord surrounded by steep ridges but with a 90 degree bend as it passes out to sea, it cut a dramatic landscape.

Views down Gryllefjord

All the forecasts had shown a front coming in, and since we were due a rest day and no-one felt like camping in the rain, we booked into an airBnB for 2 nights. Plans to cook ourselves a slap up meal with actual *vegetables* were initially folied by the village shop being closed on Sundays. We spent the next 24hrs moving between the café and the pizza place. Yum.

Reindeer herds on Sandsvika

On Monday we entered the shop and found some little baggies of what looked like chicken in the back of the freezer. We asked the store guy – ‘cod toungues’ he said. It seems these are a local delicacy, so we thought it would be rude not to… Also (by Norwegian standards) they were very cheap.  Pan fried super hot they were surprisingly tasty!

Frying the cod tounges,
A food experiment that actually worked!

Once most of the weather passed through we headed round the coast from Gryllefjord towards Torsken. 

Setting off after the storm

The forecast was still a little windier than I’d have liked but the fjord looked calm so we set off. As we headed out towards the most exposed section on fjord, the swell and wind picked up. In the grand scheme it was neither very windy, nor very swelly, but packrafts are not the most nimble of water craft and easily caught by the wind. I was glad when we’d traversed around and sheltered by an island in Torskefjorden.

Hugging the coast round to Torskefjorden

 We set up camp on the opposite side of the Fjord looking across the bay to the village of Torsken.  After setting up camp amongst all the midges on Senja we set off to climb Storkeipen, it’s not a high mountain at 661m but a steep scramble up to the ridgeline through the undergrowth. I took my time munching wild bilberries on the ascent. There wasn’t a path marked to get up to the ridge but once up there, it was clear that this is a frequently climbed peak. Looking out over the fjord from the summit was a small platoon of cairns.

Multi Cairn!

Chris points at a bus leaving Torsken "see they do exist"

In the evening we cooked dinner down by the shore line and made a small fire from the drift wood we found. Of course looking out over the water to Torsken we were very visible. Soon an outboard-boat left the harbour and headed straight towards us. Expecting to be told off for building a fire we prepared our best apologetic faces. As the boat got close to our camp a voice called out “do you need a lift?” It turns out folks from the fish farm sometimes climb the peaks and light a fire to signal they are ready for a return ride to the mainland. We assured him that we were quite alright and thank you for coming to check on us. How lovely.

The fire that almost got us into trouble

The next morning we completed our final packraft, 1km across the fjord to Torsken. Packing up the boats we headed up into the hills to climb Saufjellet. Perched between Torskefjorden and Gryllefjord, the views from the top were a spectacular mix of mountain ridge lake fjord and sea in all directions.  The sun had come out again as we lazed about on the summit, drinking tea marveling at how warm it could be in the arctic circle in the summer. What an excellent way to end the trip.

Taking our time on the final paddle to Torsken

In reality we only explored a tiny section of Senja, there's certainly a lot more out there for future expeditions. 

GPX trace of our actual route

Of course, no trip happens in isolation, as well as thanking Chris Alex and Jim for putting up with me for two whole weeks; big thanks to acwaterra and Môn Active for the crash course in sea paddling, and thanks to Andy at backcounty Scot for the bargin hire on the packrafts.

 Senja - I'd return in a heartbeat.