Way up on a mountain top!

When we awoke, there was the strangest ring of clouds
around our hostel (I swear it is not photoshopped)

[Note: this is the second post written today. Scroll down to begin at the Fjord boat post. Then pick up here].

Thursday morning we laced up our boots, grabbed our backpacks, and walked to the train station to take a portion of the world-famous Flam railway up the mountain for our day-long hike. I'll do a separate post about the railway, but for now I will just state that it is absolutely beautiful! I'll give you two photos of the view from the train now, but will come back to it in a later post.

View #1... as we climb!

View #2... getting closer to the top!

Our train stop (a very busy area as you can see)

We were supposed to take the train pretty far up the mountain, but received word early before we left that the upper part of the trail was still covered in ice. No matter! We figured that we'd get off a stop earlier and then hike up the mountain as far as we could go (until we reached the ice), before turning around to hike the trail back down. 

We got off at the station, took in the views, and then set off up the mountain! This post that will be composed mostly of pictures because my words will be greatly insufficient in trying to describe the scenery we encountered:

Hiking up

Waterfalls were not confined to areas right near the water... we passed many smaller water/ice falls rights next to the trail as we hiked

After only about 20 minutes of hiking, we ran into our first patch of serious ice. In fact, there was a giant sign to tell us just how dangerous it was...

Should we dare to venture up the giant ice patch?

Up and up we slid (some of us more successfully than others)

We made it! 

Safely beyond the first challenge, we continued our climb.

this is water dripping from moss/dirt/plant life on the side of the trail

There was a bit of miscommunication about what type of pose we were doing in this photo:
supermodel, intense actor, or enthusiastic champion... hmmmmm?

Group photo (taken by my camera and using self-timer)

Sadly, our trip leaders eventually decided that we had to turn around ("unsafe conditions" to blame). So we did... climbing down back to our hostel in Flam ended up taking the better part of 5 hours (though we went at a very leisurely pace). We covered (I think) 18km, but don't quote me on that. Along the way we...

...passed raging rivers 

....watched the train speed passed us on tracks nearby

...stopped to take in the beautiful surroundings 

...fooled around on the train tracks (Mad is a black belt)

...and fooled around even more on the train tracks

....and waited while others used the bathrooms at the tiny train station (where we had originally gotten off)

It started to rain medium-heavily at one point during the afternoon (the only time we encountered rain while out during the whole trip). A bunch of us took a small trail off the main road and found ourselves beneath a massive stone overhang and a very intense swell in the water of the river. SUPER cool!

We felt so small and our voices could barely be heard over the rushing water

 Back on the main road we continued wandering down as the sun came out

We walked across the bridge in the bottom left hand corner, while the train tracks snake around the upper part of the mountain through that giant tunnel: BEYOND gorgeous

They have quite a view out their back porch

We were greeted by several pets (the dog in this photo kind of blends into the brown/yellow grass)

beautiful sunshine, the mountains, and the river

The man who owns (and built) this house came out to talk with us. He served as a soldier and then decided to build a house and move into the country-side... pretty cool, 'eh?

Feeling very humbled by the HUGE waterfall (we are the tiny dots in the bottom right section of the photo) 

We were getting hungry and decided to look for a place to break for lunch.

We found a beautiful bridge, which we stretched out across to eat

Oh yeah, the bridge was at the base of a MASSIVE waterfall!

It's very, very hard to tell, but look in the very center at the very bottom of the picture)... that's us!

After lunch, we traveled through very diverse terrain. 

We hit some MAJOR patches of ice

Then traveled through forest, but back to ice...

We even visited a graveyard. Strangely, many of the gravestones had the last name "Flam" (the same name as the town)

We checked our map...

Then headed into countryside 

And eventually, after about six hours we found our way to the hostel!

One person led us in stretching in our common room

smelly shoes belonging to tired (but happy) feet!