A Visit to Norrona HQ and High Camp Adventure Skiing!

Jordan Sunshine, Denver, Colorado: One month into a three-month paternity leave (thanks evo!), I was given the opportunity to visit technical outerwear brand Norrona and attend Fri Flyt High Camp Sunmore, a backcountry skiing and snowboarding festival. After a quick, “so honey, you know how it’s always been a dream of mine to go to Norway…” I was booking my plane ticket to Oslo.

The Land of Winter Sports

Fast forward three short weeks, and I arrive in Oslo. It's March, and the city and surrounding hills are blanketed in snow. Public transportation in Norway is excellent. One quick Flytojet train into the city and I’m on the Oslo subway heading to the historic Scandic Holmenkollen Park Hotel. I’m taken back by a cross country skier who boards the subway in spandex, skis in hand. That shock soon dissipates with each stop as half of my car fills with Nordic skiers and tobogganers. It turns out that many people use the metro to go to the local ski and sled hills after work or school every day – how cool is that?! I also take note of how much Norrona outerwear I spot: from kids wearing the Viking-logoed hat to the old man with the weathered puffy, this brand is the clearly the standard here.

I get off the train in a quiet neighborhood overlooking the city and port of Oslo to what is shaping up to be an epic Scandinavian sunset. I have no idea where my hotel is and there is no one around to ask. I start schlepping my ski bag up the hill where a nice old man leads me to the top of the hill where I spot a giant ski jump. More winter sports! The 100-year-old Scandic Holmenkollen Park Hotel sits next to the Holmenkollbakken Ski Jump and cross-country ski network. The winter sports enthusiasm continues indoors - the hotel is hosting Olympic biathlon qualifiers, and everyone's in the lobby wearing their country's colors.

I drop my gear in my room and go meet up with evo’s Senior Marketing Manager (and my previous boss) Sunny Fenton, as well as a very nice Canadian man and the owner of Valhalla Pure Outfitters in Victoria, BC named Mike. We jump back on that subway and head into town to catch dinner with our friend from Norrona, Frode. I expect pickled herring, loganberries, and aquavit, but nope, we go for Spanish tapas and wine.
 

A Socially Responsible Company

The next morning, we’re up bright and early to tour Norrona’s headquarters in Oslo. Adjacent to a frozen waterfall, it is an amazing old building with exposed brick that has been fully updated to be as tech-friendly and eco-friendly as possible. The majority of Norrona’s employees commute to work by metro or bike, and the ones that don’t drive electric cars. That is just the start of how green this company and its employees are. Norrona’s environmental mission is strong and up until recently they hadn't really advertised it. In fact, they are one of the greenest garment companies in the world, with a dedicated Corporate Social Responsibility program that includes a roadmap to 100% sustainability by 2020, a focus on every aspect of the product’s life cycle, and continuous giving back through their own “1% back” initiative.

As Brad Boren, Director of Innovation & Sustainability, explains, it hasn't been a focus to publish these initiatives because they are not done for marketing purposes, but rather because they believe in their importance, something that is second nature for many Norwegians. Recently, they've made more of an effort to be transparent so that they can be held accountable and set an example for other outdoor companies. Brad took us through the 2019 line, emphasizing some of their other sustainable efforts, from the way they source every material, glue, and dye, to color pallet selection designed to match jackets and pants from the last 5 years so newer products still go well with previous years’ pieces.

At lunch, prepared by their onsite chef (again no pickled fish – gyros this time), we meet CEO Jorgen Jorgensen, who spends every Monday outdoors, testing produts. A family-run company since 1929, Norrona’s mission is to innovate and make the greatest outdoor gear. Norrona built the first GORE-TEX jacket in Europe in the 70s and they have not stopped innovating since. Not only is he as enthusiastic as anyone about the values of the company, but he is notorious for emphasizing the importance of product details. This is a common theme with the staff as we find out several of them will be joining us on our journey up north!
 

Trains, Planes, and Automobiles Boats

From Norrona HQ, we jump on the train and head back to the airport to fly up to Alesund, a port town on the western shore of the country. A train, plane, and bus ride later, and we find ourselves on a boat, adequately named “Fjord Explorer", heading deep into the fjords to our destination, the town of Saebo at the base of the Sunmore Alps. It is everything I expected: Steep, snowy mountains feeding straight into the water. For this weekend only, this tiny tourist village is home to a few hundred brightly-colored backcountry touring fanatics who are here for Fri Flyt Magazine’s first of three High Camp festivals of the year. And they’re sleeping everywhere: cabins, tents (sub-zero Fahrenheit at night = no thank you), and for us, an 80-year old boat. We pack into the cozy sleeping quarters of Parate III along with other Norrona dealers from Germany, Austria, and France, plus a ton of ski gear.
 

High Camp Day 1

After a rocky night of sleep for this land-locked guy (Sunny, on the other hand, lives for sleeping on boats), we headed into the main hotel for a huge buffet breakfast (finally, pickled and smoked fish galore) before our first day of ski touring. I see hungry campers absolutely destroying fresh loaves of bread, taking over 10 slices each. Then it occurs to me that they are stacking up sandwiches for a long day in the mountains. Sandwich stacks on the hill, these are my kind of people! We meet our guides and Norrona’s local ambassador Asbjorn Eggebo Naess, toss our gear in a van, and head up the valley. We hit the weather window perfectly, as it has been snowing and windy for a couple weeks and we are now getting the first couple days of blue sky in a while.

We park at what seems to be a small lumber yard in a beautiful valley of mostly small farms. This is the trailhead. It is still cold in the morning shade, so we layer up in Norrona and start skinning. We skin straight across a couple farmhouse yards, complete with chickens and goats, and head up into the alpine. We get above tree-line and it is hot in the sun, yet still windy in the more exposed stretches of our skin track. We take a couple sandwich and Kvikk Lunsj bar breaks, the Norwegian outdoor snack of choice. These are essentially better Kit Kat bars with informative outdoor educational messages inside.

Our group takes its final ascent up the ridgeline to be greeted with a view of the ocean on the other side. It is like nothing I have ever seen. One by one, we make nice turns down a steep, powdery slope with just a couple tomahawks here and there. Without much time to gawk at our turns, skins are back on, and we climb to the next peak. This one delivers a long run on either side of a river valley, one side in the sun, one in the shade. Frode sends it T-to-B on the sunny side and never looks back. I take the shady side and again the snow is good, really good. Our group converges at the bottom of the river valley and it’s all smiles and laughs galore, especially as one of our Austrian friends takes the final transition way to hot and explodes into the yard sale of the day.

It is now mid-afternoon and most of the group opts to call it and start the final descent to the cars, but with sore legs and fear of FOMO (fear of fear of missing out, it’s a thing), Sunny and I nudge each other into one more afternoon climb with Frode, Asbjorn, and our main guide. We climb straight up what seems like endless switchbacks, pushing the limits of my kick-turn skills. At the summit, another epic view with different terrain on all sides. At the bottom is what looks like a tiny village that can only be accessed in the summer. I think the trolls from Frozen probably live there (I have a 4-year old daughter, okay!). We head off the East side of the peak, dropping into a small chute with what can only be described as “variable” snow. It is too late in the day to go for the initial plan that is now a sun-baked chute on the next peak, so we traverse around to the west side of the first peak. As we traverse the snow goes from shaded boiler plate to crust on powder to spring corn in the direct sun. Time for some nice slushy turns as we hop our way through the small shrubs and head back into the lower woods. A couple gnarly creek crossings and an icy logging road later and we are skiing back through some farm yards, dropping off cobblestone walls as those same goats give us the stink-eye for treading on their turf.

That night, tired and happy, we catch the Northern Lights shining down the fjord.
 

High Camp Day 2

Today is the big day: skiing from a boat! We grab our skis and jump on a small ferry literally across the dock from where we slept. It takes us further up the fjord and drops us on the other side. From there, we hop on a small bus and up an extremely steep, windy valley with cliffs several hundred feet up on either side, eventually arriving at a small bed and breakfast. This B&B is at the base of a glacier that leads up to one of the more obtainable saddles in the area.

A nice long gradual skin brings us to the top of the saddle, and from there we make our way to the peak. From here we can see down the other side, deep into the fjord where we will ski out. One by one we pick our way down each face, following the beta Asbjorn and our two guides pass along. If yesterday’s afternoon snow was variable, let’s call today’s mixed to sketchy. There is a bit of everything and we must stay on guard the entire time as we maneuver between patches of soft stuff and ice with cliffs on both sides. It is not easy to make it look good, yet Asbjorn makes gorgeous, spraying carves on the horizon line with the perfect fjord backdrop. It's a long and steep run, ending at a small reservoir and power plant. From there we can ski down the semi-snow-covered road that leads right to a village at the water’s edge. We ski through some frozen grass backyards and probably get with a hundred feet of the water before walking the rest of the way.

As we rest on the dock waiting on the ferry, soaking up the sun, I can’t stop frothing over how cool it was to have skiied from the peak high above us to sea level where I sit now, in this rustic little Norwegian village waiting for a boat! We take a cold ride back to Saebo, picking up other ski-tourists at other points along the way. Back at High Camp, Sunny, Frode, Asbjorn, and I sit at around a campfire drinking beer named after the peak above us. What a place!