Mar 2 • Adventure Stories
L'appel du vide
Last year I went to Norway again, as I went and did a south to north trip in 2023. Meeting up with my friends Sunniva and Fredrik that live up north(near Evenskjer) and being able to stay at their place for a while. I wanted to go back because I had barely any time during my 2023 trip to go out and properly hike up mountains.
One of the days, Sunniva needed to go to her parents for her dads birthday party. So we went for a "quick" drive over. So a short 3 hours later we arrive there. I think it was around 13:00. Roughly 1 hour later more people arrived and the language for conversation switched to Norse(for obvious reasons).
An hour later Fredrik was also a bit done with the party and we decided to hike up the nearest mountain called Fløya. Going up to Djevilporten. Originally this was a fully unpaved path, but a lot of tourists come there now, so Norway has asked Sherpa's from Nepal to make some Sherpa stairs(Called the Djeveltrappa here). Fortunately it is still incomplete right now, as it made the hike a lot easier. It still took us quite a while to get up there and longer then Fredrik thought it would take. He blamed his lack of stamina, though I have to admit, we had a pretty good pace going. Still only took about half the predicted time. And their are loads of small places to take a break. There are many beautiful places overlooking Svolvær, the local town.
After you get to the top of Djeveltrappa, you get to a flat area, from where you can decide to go to 3 different places. We chose to go towards Djevelporten. Which is a couple hundred meters straight up, after walking across a marsh, again with partial stairs. This part however is incredibly steep. I'd love to add a picture to show exactly how steep it was, but its simply not visible on the pictures I took.
So to get to Djevelporten we had go up another 200 meters, while the path is maybe 2m wide. I had figured this to be a major issue for my fear of heights. It never bothered me until we actually got to Djevelporten, which is this big rock suspended between 2 mountainsides, above a rather several hundred meter high canyon.
At this height, almost 600 meters above sea level, it was pretty windy. On the 4th picture, the path to climb up is to the right, just out of view. I call it a path... but you legit need to climb and be suspended above a whole lot of air. With me not trusting my skills enough at this point, taking the wind into account and my now rising anxiety, I decided it wasn't a good moment for me to tempt death. Fredrik did get up there and also mentioned that with the current conditions it is recommended to be a proficient climber (or simply have rather large balls and not give a shit).
From here we could go on towards Fløya and though the path isn't bad, its very exposed as you walk across the very edge of the mountain. In this weather, not very safe. So we decided to turn back. And as we walked down the sun also decided to set and it slowly got dark. So it was another good decision to leave as we didn't have any lights or climbing gear on us, for a possible dark trip back from Fløya.
We decided that we wanted to go towards Fløya the day after, but the weather stayed bad for the next few days.
During this hike I expected to have several panic attacks thanks to the height, but I had none. So I ended up doing some research that same day in the evening and figured out that its actually L'appel du Vide (literally Call of the Void), also often called to be a intrusive thought. Which makes it interesting, as it made me realize that what I was feeling wasn't fear of falling of a edge or something, but more a "internal voice" telling me to go jump off purposefully. Which I would do tbf, IF I had a base jump parachute on me.
And to give a bit of retrospect, the fear I felt when being up 8 meters, on the climbing wall... was insane. Also letting go and let myself fall, trust the gear was pretty difficult. The intrusive thoughts don't help with that.
Okay, Im done with this essay now. There you go, handed in before monday.
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L'appel du vide
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