Adam i Norge

After saying goodbye to my friend Taylor, I traveled further North - first to Tromsø (the largest city in northern Norway) and then to Alta. Alta is located at 70 degrees North latitude. For comparison, in North America 70 degrees North runs along the northern coast of Alaska. It was the beginning of August, and it was still light outside for nearly 24 hours. Around 11pm the sun would begin to set. It would eventually touch the horizon and hover there for a bit before rising again by 2am. Sunset blended into sunrise and there was no semblance of night. I made the trip to Alta to visit a unique hytte with an interesting history, Nordlysobservatoriet Haldde (translation: the Northern Lights Observatory at Haldde). The hike to get there took me to the highest point in the region, the top of a mountain called Sugartop. En route, I was fortunate to stumble upon a herd of reindeer! reindeer!  You can actually see the hytte when you are a couple miles away - notice the oddly ...

In my very first blog post I presented a passage from my research proposal that really gets to the heart of my interest in wilderness architecture and DNT hytter: As havens in the remote wilderness, these cabins provide necessary shelter to a revolving door of multiple occupants. Each visitor comes with their own stories, accumulated along the trail. Spoken aloud around a fire or left behind in the form of forgotten objects or traces of activity, their stories become part of the cabins themselves. As I journey from hytte-to-hytte, this is an aspect of the architecture that I continually explore. How do hytter function as containers of stories? How do those stories change the experience of the architecture? What can the physical condition of the hytte, objects that have been left behind, and stories in the hyttebook teach us about people and culture? Throughout the "in-between" - on the trail, in the mountains, in the forest - traces of culture are less apparent. They exi...

After staying one luxurious night at Maistua in Harstad, Taylor and I made our way back down to our rental car and drove west to Vesterålen - the archipelago of islands just north of Lofoten. While Lofoten has become a well known tourist destination, Vesterålen tends to fly more under the radar. It has a similar landscape, but not near the crowds. See below for a quick time-lapse video taken during our drive: After about two and a half hours of scenic driving we arrived at the small town of Guvåg on the island of Langøya, where after a short hike we reached our destination,  Guvåghytta. Guvåghytta the primary lodging cabin is on the left, the two boat houses on the right In 2014 (the most recent year for which I could find such a list), Guvåghytta was voted the DNT's most beautiful coastal hytte. It's easy to see why. Guvåghytta is situated on a small rocky cove and looks out towards the Norwegian Sea. Silhouettes of mountains line the horizon in all directions....