From Øvre Dividal to Senja
We leave the shelter of the woods for Norway’s working forests and farms, on a two-day jaunt from Øvre Dividal to the island of Senja.
Leaving Dividal
We left the park deeply enamored with the place, with the cold, windy rain, the plants and animals, and with the comfort of the cabin we had slept in. The hike back to the parking lot was wetter from the previous day’s rain, but the creek crossings still went smoothly, from rock to rock to rock.
My bicycle had grown a pair of antlers and a fat little bag of garbage, and we were getting a little low on food. Curiosity got the best of us on the way out, though, and we went poking around the ornithological research station (Dividalen fuglestasjon). Opened in 1995, the station has banded 92,000 birds in the roughly 25 years since. Their mist-netting setup was deluxe compared to the mist nets I’ve used, with a couple of tall flagpoles and pulley systems to hoist and lower. I’ve been too lazy to work through the informational material in Norwegian, but the images suggest a possible focus on crossbills, or at least their regular presence in the area.
The area around the station was bustling with new wildflowers, which was exciting. The signage introduced me to a new mammal, the mårhund (common raccoon dog), which was even more exciting. They’re invasive here, and a cause for concern, but this doesn’t stop them from being adorable everywhere.
We stopped at the Joker in Holt, where we hoped to check another grocery chain off of our to-shop list. Grocery chains are the norm in most rural centers big enough to merit the name “town”. Smaller villages/hamlets/community centers often have a general store/grocery/cafe. These smaller stores can be more fun than the chain stores, but basically all of them are closed on Sunday, so we were out of luck. Fortunately, we had some backup food in the bear can and pretty flowers to keep our spirits up.
The Målselv country
From Holt we rode to Øverbygd, and then along the Målselv almost until Moen. For the first time on the trip I felt like I had a cyclist’s legs, and kept a quick pace through the day’s intermittent showers. I had 35 miles of faster than average riding before I lost my form, and it felt so good.
The country here is hay field and pasture, and the river valley often broadened enough for multiple farms on a side. The broad, white peaks of the range backgrounded everything, and the road, though very rideable, was more cracked and heaved than we’ve grown used to.
We rode through long stretches of working forest, and they were being worked actively. Stands of pine had been recently thinned, and heavy equipment was running on many of the dirt side roads. This is the first forest we’ve seen that felt more like plantation than wild land, and there was a lot of it.
We passed the first (of many?) Flaggstad’s along our route, and that had me giggling for a while. There’s nothing particularly funny about the name, except maybe that it supports the argument that Norway is a made-up country with a made-up language that’s the set designers just had to throw together quickly when we decided to go on this trip.
Anyway, the giggling was completely inexplicably until I realized how tired I was. And finding camp was very hard. Flats under the power lines were inaccessible. Accessible water was muddy and impacted by old, rotten infrastructure. The peat crowns rose a foot or two above the forest floor around nearly every tree, and everywhere else was all lumps and heaves, long rises and deep channels. The flat spots that seemed to be everywhere were, close up, wildly lumpy ground masked by even-height ferns or vaccinium shrubs.
Regularly spaced across this challenging lump-scape were higher, browner bumps. Mysterious, they invited investigation, and then punished the curious. These were massive ant colonies, each mound crawling so densely with ants the whole surface seemed to move if you stood close enough. And if you did stand close enough? Then there were ants on you. I’m not squeamish about insects but I dreamt vividly of those ant-mounds when I finally got to sleep. shudder
Rural character
As I remember it, the landscape on this two-day section is mostly rural but rarely pastoral. There are more homes with broken windows than I expect to see in Norway. The cars are older, and the exhausts smokier. H and I have discussed this, and she’s not sure she agrees. Sure, there was one area along the road so far that felt poorer than usual, but maybe it wasn’t here? I’m pretty confident in the geography, though, despite my terrible memory. It’s the weather that makes me question my own recollections.
Rainy days do not inspire good feelings for a place, and they rarely inspire landscape photography in me, at least while humming along at 15 km/t. My record is sparse - a couple snapshots of homes, and a pair of hand-painted mailboxes.
Most of the photos from here on will be of small or inane things, and you’ll just have to take my word on the character of the place. Or not. Fortunately, the wildflowers have been giving it their absolute best.
Bike maintenance
It’s time that I mention a few ongoing bicycle issues that have been driving me slowly mad. The cable tension on my rear derailleur has been slipping at an alarming rate, requiring a full adjustment once or twice a day. And my new wheels, built by hand from solid middle-of-the-pack parts, keep proving themselves unequal to the strain of touring. Front and rear have required truing twice each while on this trip, after test-driving and adjusting them at home.
Today was a good, grey day to sit on the side of the bike lane in the rain and deal with the issues. I cranked the bolt that holds the shift cable down, got my rear wheel true enough to stop dragging on the brake pads, and caught back up with H, who was waiting for me just ahead.
To Finnsnes and beyond!
Our second day on the way to Senja was grey and intermittently rainy from the start, but we buckled on our big-kid pants and hit the road. I sometimes despair over our society’s overuse of plastics, but contemporary rain gear is absolute wizardry.
Thinking to avoid the E6 for just a few meters more, I took us on a terrible shortcut at Moen. We crossed the older of the two bridges over the Målselv, putting us on a raggedy street, all farm equipment and rust. I took all of the wrong turns on muddy gravel, until the road ended in hike-a-bike up a gravel-and-grass slope to the highway.
Most of the remaining road to Finnesnes has faded from memory, but I recall that we failed to eat at a closed cafe, then saw (and smelled) the bakery that bakes our tasty grocery store bread. (Try the Urkorn if you’re here!) We passed a whole herd of neon-garbed munchkins on bikes, and then their teacher, who had the whole class out for a ride.
By the time we reached town, the clouds were breaking and the sun was peeking through. I bought lots of celebratory licorice (lakris/salmiak), and tried to get over the last pangs of awkward feeling about wandering around in public wearing spandex.
We bought so many groceries that they nearly tipped the world sideways under their weight. We ate what we could at a picnic table by the harbor, while watching two middle-schoolers steal their parents’ tender and putter off to sea. We squeezed everything we couldn’t eat into our panniers, and took the bridge over to Senja.
New friends
- globe flowers
New not-friends
- giant ant-mounds, like the worst where’s waldo ever.
Mysteries
- What is this thing? A commercial fishing net or something? And what are they doing with it?
- How is the water always so beautiful here?
