Barbara and Dan’s ski and hiking trip to Europe: March 2025
I spent most of March in Europe; first skiing the Birkebeiner in Norway and then the Haute Route in the Alps. Here is a blog on that trip with a bunch of pics and videos….I dont usually do “travel blogs” but this was such an exceptional trip, I had to write something for friends and family…
Looking out over the Alps !
The Birkebeiner!
Barbara came up with the idea to ski the Birkebeiner almost a year ago and without too much more thought we decided to go for it! The Birkebeiner is the 54km (34 miles) ski race, born from the events in the 13th century:
“It was in this landscape that the king’s son was brought to safety in the 13th century. The Birkebeinerrennet was introduced in 1932 to honor the Birkebeinerne, who saved the heir by escaping their enemy by skiing across the mountains. “ (https://birkebeiner.no/)
As part of the race, all participants must carry a pack weighing at least 3.5 kg, the weight of the king’s son. So we were going to do this, I figured why not tack on some skiing in the Alps to boot, so a trip was born!
We left for Norway on March 10, 2025 and first visited with our good friends Terje and Maud in Oslo. Terje and I worked very closely together in 1993-1994 when I did my first sabbatical and our kids were born in Norway in 1994 (tvilling!) Terje is now a professor at the University of Oslo and over the years, we have managed to stay in touch. Terje and Maud visited us in Alaska and Seattle and we’ve visited them a few times in Norway and also met up for some other adventures in the Alps. For this year, Terje also decided to do the Birkebeiner, along with his son (Thomas) and Thomas’ girlfriend. As you can guess, my Norwegian friends were pretty good at this xc racing. Terje had recently done a 90 km race (the Grenaderrennet) this year and a 220 km race in Sweden (the Nordensköldsloppet) last year (yikes!)
So after I gave a seminar at the University of Oslo (on smoke impacts on PM and O3 using machine learning techniques), we packed up and headed to a rented house near Rena (start of the Birkebeiner). Early the next morning we headed over to the start of the race! There were about 10,000 people registered for the race, but fortunately the start times are staggered by age and qualification times. Barbara and I got to start with “the elders, which had one of the earliest starting times. Here are a few pictures of the scene, the start and the Gaia GPS track.
Near the end of this video you can see a group of skiiers in blue at the starting line. These are the elite class skiiers and they got to start before the rest of us (I suppose we’ve have been trampled otherwise!)
Here is our group starting at 8 am!
It was a really amazing experience. I was pretty sure I could do it, but damn it was a long ways! And the route climbed up about 1000 meters (3300 feet) of elevation! After the uphill there were also some steep downhill sections, which on xc racing skis was quite tricky. Along the way, there were many people just sitting (drinking, etc) by the side of the trail and cheering you on. Many families seemed to make a day of it just hanging out by the side of the trail At a few spots, there were some really enthusiastic cheering squads., often offering drinks of unknown beverages! I took this video around the 40 km (25 mile) mark….
And here is Barbara with her own cheering squad just a few 100 meters from the finish!
I managed to cross the finish line after about 7 hours, Barbara about 30 minutes later. These are well below the cutoff times (11 hours) that you had to finish by, but still…. Terje’s time was 4:09 and Thomas’ time was 3:02. Wow. Above is a video I took of us cheering Barbara on very close to the finish line.
A few things I learned doing this:
- Wax skis really are faster than skin skis (mine had skins), although most of the faster participants double poled the whole way and did very little “classic” skiing.
- I could have cut my time by over an hour if I took shorter breaks. Not knowing my own limits, I told myself I had plenty of time and took longish breaks.
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Barbara says she wants to go back and improve her time!
Crans-Montana
After the Birkebeiner we headed over to Switzerland and met up with our friend Jonathan. He had rented a place at Crans Montana ski resort and Jonathan and I planned to downhill ski there for 5 days to get our legs in shape and to acclimatize for the Haut route. Crans Montana was wonderful. A big mountain with 4000 vertical feet of skiable terrain and with a peak height of about 3 km (10,000 feet). It was spring conditions, hard in the morning, perfect in midday and soft in the afternoon. Overall, really wonderful skiing. While we never waited in lines for the lifts, the groomer runs were often crowded. For some reason, very few people were going off-piste, so we often had acres of untracked snow for ourselves ! Heaven on earth!
Barbara did not ski here, but she did a bunch of hiking in the lower valley and a hike near the top of the gondola, where we all met for lunch one day.
Jonathan skiing near the top of the Crans Montana gondola!
Most of these tracks were ours !
View of the Alps from Crans Montana
After Crans Montana, Barbara headed to Spain to hike with her friend Melissa and sister Carol and I went on to the Haute Route.
The Haute Route !
Jonathan, Terje and I, met up with guide, Hamish, at the “Plan B” hotel in Chamonix on the morning of the 24th for a discussion and gear check. (Plan B hotel is highly recommended, btw). Then we headed off for our warm up day so Hamish could assess our skills. We had a good day skiing, skinning and cramponing near the Brevent Flegere ski resort. Then the next morning we headed off on the real trip. The Haute Route is a big trip with quite a few skiing and technical challenges. For 7 days, we averaged about 3000 feet of vertical climbing per day, mostly on skins. A few of the passes required ice axe and crampons and often we had to rope up on the glaciers due to crevasse danger. There were also some fun rock sections that used ropes and some ladders. Skiing ranged from absolutely wonderful powder for many miles on beautiful glaciers to crappy conditions thru avalanche debris, long icy traverses and several scary-steep-icy slopes, one of which was skied at night by headlamp! Not a trip for a casual blue slope skier!
Left to rigtht, Terje, Hamish and Jonathan on our warm-up day.
The classic Haute Route goes from Chamonix to Zermatt. Strangely, on the second day, you come down to the town of Champex and take a taxi to Verbier to continue the trip. In total, we stayed at 5 huts (one French, 4 Swiss). They were great to get to at the end of the day and it was always fun to sit around and shoot the breeze with people from all over Europe. We did not see any other non-Europeans on the route. The food ranged from really good to ok, but it was always adequate. You could buy beer and wine at the huts at surprisingly reasonable prices and water too, but who needs water when you have beer and wine! Our guide had a thing for “Röstis”, which were a large potato pancake with cheese, meat, eggs or whatever else was lying around in the kitchen. We always starting skiing at 7am and would get to the next hut by 2 pm, whereupon we immediately unpacked, found our bunks and ordered Röstis and beer from the kitchen!
But some of the huts were super crowded. On our last night (Vignettes Hut) there were more than a hundred people staying in a cramped hut, and that made it really hard to find places to dry gear and sleep. We slept (sort-of) shoulder-to-shoulder in the bunk beds. Who knew so many people snored!
Our guide, Hamish was great (from the company High Mountain Guides). He looked like he was in his twenties, but actually was in his late 30s and had many years experience as a guide. This is a serious career in the Alps and a lot of training is required. He got us going early every day (for safety) and really focused on safety and keeping us moving (which is part of safety). Sort of like herding turtles… But he managed to keep us moving in a kind manner. Our overall pace was pretty similar to the 3 or 4 groups we often ran into between huts, but I usually felt like we were the safest team on the mountain. For example, we roped up across some parts of the glacier where others didn’t and, because of Hamish’s efficiency, it really didn’t cost us any extra time.
We had many miles of uphill skinning….
Then down we went!
There were many transitions (skiis to skins to crampons) and Hamish taught and pushed us to transition as quickly as we could.
We were usually skiing over, under or around huge mountains like this. I was really glad we had no significant snowfall. I would think the avalanche danger would be huge on this route after a significant snowstorm! We did hear two massive icefall avalanches. Fortunately these were well off our route and, as far as we know, no one was hurt from these.
Some of the passes were pretty steep and required crampons, ropes and/or ladders that were already in place. These were fun!
The Prafleuri Hut
The team with Rostis and beer after a hard day of skiing!
Some things I learned on this trip:
- Always pull up on your AT bindings when going uphill. (Dave and Debbie already told me this, but it was strongly reinforced by Hamish!)
- Always use walk mode on your boots when going uphill.
- How to pack a full pack that is able to carry skis, two sets of crampons (regular and ski crampons), ice axe, shovel, skins, etc so that everything is readily accessible.
- How to really do a good kick turn on steep slopes.
- Ski crampons are amazing. Highly recommended for anyone who does regular bc ski trips.
- Plastic earplugs are worthless. You can try wax earplugs or better yet, sleeping pills. After a couple of nights with very poor sleep I was very sleep deprived….
We had an amazing trip. We made it to every planned hut and only had one day of bad weather. But on the last day one of our team members had some severe leg issues and we had to bail out to Arolla, rather than Zermatt. Getting to Arolla involved a 5000 vertical ski descent, mostly on glaciers. Not a bad way to spend your last day in the mountains! But despite the reroute on the last day we had a great trip. I am thinking I might go back to Arolla and do that last day to Zermatt, if anyone wants to join me!
Jonathan, Dan and Terje in Arolla. A bit worn out, in need of showers, but happy !
