Norway’s Star Island offers some of the best boat-based ski touring going, and we know just the guy to show you around...
After a long but rewarding day in the mountains and a cauldron of bacalao, the Portuguese-derived dish of salted Norwegian cod, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and olives, or the local reinskav, a traditional Sami stew of sautéed reindeer meat, we lounge on deck, shirtless in a spell of bluebird warmth unprecedented for late May so far above the Arctic Circle.
We’ll read, write, watch dolphins and giant sea eagles, spinning maps in our sunburned hands while pointing to ski lines on the horizon, and counting the top-to-bottom waterfalls that line the fjord like silver threads carefully woven into green tapestry.
And though it’s only Day One aboard S/Y Goxsheim, and most of us are veterans of Norwegian skiing who’ve plumbed other parts of this mountainous coast, we will all be having the exact same thought: this is the best trip ever.
We’d started early that day with zodiac shuffles to a black-sand beach where gurgling streams braided passively into the fjord. Assembling groups and gear on shore, we’d hiked first over benches of grass tussocks, then onto sloping meadows that alternated between mud and snow, before burrowing into the ubiquitous dwarf-birch fairy forest that ring the hillsides here like hula skirts.
Skinning upward under thinning trees, we’d shadowed the larger streams riving the snowpack, following into an alpine bowl invisible from below. After stitching our way up a headwall, we’d broken over its rocky rim onto the long, sloping plateau characteristic of most of the area’s flat-topped summits.
After a few more hours of sunny slogging we found ourselves on an overhanging promontory, legs dangling, gazing over the fjord. At anchor far below, Goxsheim fluttered like a wood-and-canvas ring worn on an improbable emerald finger.
Our first descent began in a shallow basin that funnelled onto a steep face. Diamond arcs peeled from our skis as we picked our way from chute to chute on perfect snow, skirting week-old avalanche debris to land at the base of a long, whale-like hill that seemed to breach from a sea of snow.
Guide Per Ås, a Swedish ex-pat based in La Grave, had then posed a question: should we ski down this draw directly to the beach we had landed on, or make a 20-minute climb to the unknown valley on the other side of the hill? Chad Sayers, Mattias Fredriksson, Janne Tjärnström, Klas Granström, Captain Charles and I had all answered by slapping on the skins.
Our reward was to circle the aquamarine fringe of a sagging frozen lake, gaining an outlet that was still encased under metres of snow and pinched by cliffs into a natural, several-kilometre-long halfpipe. No one expected the whoops of delight that followed, nor the reindeer herd that we encounter.
Below that, the morning’s quaintly braided creeks had become rivers roaring with snowmelt; the Scandinavians simply waded through the torrents like armoured Vikings, while Sayers and I, in typical Canadian fashion - took off our boots and rolled up our pants to ford the icy cascades au naturel, continuing barefoot across moss, snow, grass, swamp, and sand for the better part of an hour to the beach.
Back on board Goxsheim we busied ourselves with hanging our sweat-soaked gear in the rigging, making dives from the foredeck into an icy sea, hauling cold beers aboard in buckets, and, of course, downing our daily soup.
We would do it all again the next day. And the next. For a week in fact, and never in the same place twice. Every day we moved anchor to a different fjord to test a new mountain. A lot of it would be map-in-hand exploration, our daily theme a seven-hour tour and single 1,000-metre descent from a nameless summit in perfect weather. “It can’t get any better,” we would say to anyone who would listen. And then the next day it would -better terrain, better snow, better everything
Travel Information
• Captain Charles and S/Y Goxsheim run ski trips from February (when there is powder potential but it gets dark early) to the end of May (can range from winter to spring conditions, and never gets dark). You can check for details and book at gox.no or contact Per Ås directly (peras@peras.se). Trips are eight days/seven nights. Cost varies but you can count on at least $3,000.
• You’ll need standard touring gear, an ice axe, harness, crampons and ski crampons as well.