Hunnadalen Norway 2007

Hunnadalen valley is situated a short drive from Stavanger in the southern tip of Norway and holds a lifetime’s worth of rock to climb. Pete Benson, Guy Robertson and myself flew from Aberdeen to Stavanger and hired a car for a few days climbing. Expat Nick Ashton kindly showed us a round for a few days and allowed us to sleep on his floor. The locals had already picked off the pure ice routes but coming from a Scottish mixed background we were like kiddies in a candy store looking around at the potential for icy mixed climbing. The highlight of the trip was trying a 500 m gully system on the final day. Being with 2 mixed masters I decided that my share of the work would be the ice pitches. It turned out to be quite a route with 9 meaty pitches of Scottish VI & VII. Half way through the day it started to snow heavily and topping out in the dark we abseiled down a rock buttress to avoid the unstable snow that had built up. In the early hours we made the airport and had an hours sleep before flying back to Aberdeen and making it into the office for a day’s work. The route was called Ergopower since Pete had bought some cheap and nasty ergo tools on ebay which had him squeeling for traction on anything steep!