A dog-sleigh tour in Norway, as narrated on March 27, 1957.

Two years ago today I was sitting in a log cabin on a mountain plateau in the middle of Norway surrounded by six feet of snow and a blizzard. How did I come to be there ?

It was supposed to be a holiday. I and twenty or so other mad English people had been persuaded that a dog-sleigh ski tour in Norway was a brilliant idea for a perfect holiday -- touring on skis among the mountains with a team of dogs to carry all our luggage by sleigh.

Anyway, the evening of March 21, 1955 saw us all on board the boat at Newcastle, and listening to a gale warning; retreat into cabin. It was the next afternoon (having missed most of my birthday) before I felt well enough to rise from my bed to find we were steaming up the long narrow fjord leading into the harbour at Bergen. The sun was shining and there was no snow in sight. By 8.30pm we were in the night train to Oslo. For the next 4 1/2 hours we climbed into the mountains and at 1am we had reached our destination: Finse station, the highest mainline station in Europe and over 4000ft above the sea. We put on all the clothes we could and got out; the cold nearly took our breath away. Every station in Norway has a thermometer on display; the one at Finse that night read -23C, or 41 degrees of frost Fahrenheit; quite cold.

Then we met Henrik, a 6' 6" Norwegian who was to be our guide and protector for the next ten days. He informed us that there was not room for us all in the tourist hut so some of us would have to sleep in the ice rink. He led us the few hundred yards across the lake. It was a perfect night; as we walked across the frozen lake by moonlight the snow crackled under our feet and my ears felt as if they were just about to drop off -- my ear muffs were at the bottom of my rucksack. Suddenly a terrific barking and yelping broke out only a few yards away. We were not being attacked by wolves; we had merely aroused our team of dogs who sleep out in the open and seemed to be keen to start the tour there and then. But we were glad to have a night in bed first. I was thankful to be allotted a bed in the hut and not in the ice rink.

The hut, so-called, was more of a small hotel, very friendly and comfortable though surrounded by six feet of snow with steps cut down to the doors. The next morning the sun shone and it became really hot; even the shade temperature rose to 15 degrees of frost. First enjoyment was the Norwegian breakfast. Norwegians and I share the same ideas on breakfast -- cereals, porridge and stewed fruit, followed by bacon, steak, eggs, fish, followed by countless varieties of cheese, biscuits, butter, rolls, toast and marmalade, with coffee and tea or milk to drink.(Norwegians consume gallons of milk.) So you can then get through the day almost without lunch.

Then we went out to practise skiing; the poor Norwegians who had to accompany us had a bit of a shock -- nearly all of us had only ever been skiing once before; they were expecting a really experienced party. No Norwegian would contemplate a ski tour without having skied at least every weekend throughout the season. Mad English. We also met the dogs -- Greenland Huskies. Some of them had recently been to the Antarctic, and some you may have seen yourselves; they were on show at the Festival of Britain in London. A team consisted of five dogs in line ahead with a six foot sleigh and a driver. Although very friendly with humans, they love to fight each other, so have to be kept always at arm's length and male and female harnessed alternately.

We had two days skiing locally accompanied by press photographers and reporters. As this was the first time that this had been tried as a British holiday they were out to make the most of us. Unfortunately for them there were no serious accidents the whole time; no one fell down a crevasse and no one died of cold.

On the third day we started our tour. Twelve of us in our party with two guides, Henrik and CC (Henrik had been active with the 'Heavy Water' saboteurs during the war and C.C.Grondahl was head of a well-known publishing firm). We ourselves were a vet student from S. Rhodesia, a City of London policewoman and her brother, an engineer and a doctor from Liverpool, a student from Birmingham University, two girls who were secretaries in London, a Somerset farmer, a Lancashire textile worker and his wife, and a Birmingham telephone engineer who spoke perfect Norwegian. And Me. We set off in hot sunshine, carrying only our lunch and a few spare clothes, with the rest of our things packed in polythene bags on the sleigh. The first two hours or so were a long slow climb over open mountain country with nothing in sight but a waste of snow, rocks and sky. We felt like Scott's last expedition; with good reason; it was in this same area that he had done his Antarctic training in 1910. An appropriately Antarctic countryside. Anyway, eventually the mountains closed in on us and we found ourselves in a narrow pass looking down a steep narrow valley -- downhill at last. We stopped for a rest before descending and were informed that this was Hell Valley. We soon knew why. The slope was covered with a sheet of ice and littered with rocks so that the only way to get down was to take skis OFF and slide down as best we could. And it was a 500ft descent. Not much of a downhill skiing holiday, we thought. How the dog drivers coped with all this is difficult to explain. Even with brakes full on digging deep into the ice, the dogs were determined to rush at full speed down the slope. Only one sleigh overturned.

At the bottom we were allowed a welcome stop for lunch and had time to look about us We were now surrounded by precipitous cliffs. On one side a glacier flowing over the edge of the mountain formed a fantastically beautiful icefall -- a jumbled mass of huge blue-green transparent blocks of ice. Brilliant colours; it was almost worth going all that way just for that sight. In the afternoon the sun disappeared and it became colder as we pressed on across a series of lakes finishing with a long downhill run. We all enjoyed that, an easy gradient over good snow suitable for everyone. We descended below the tree line, the first trees we had seen since our arrival at Finse, and soon saw ahead of us a tiny little hut, the first building we had seen that day -- presumably a barn of some sort. But no; this was our destination for the night. Instestolen Hytta. When we reached it we found lashings of hot tea prepared for us, and later a huge meal, and one room for all 16 of us (just) with very comfortable beds. We had traveled 12 miles that day in six hours and were only too glad to find anywhere to lie down.

Next day it was snowing with a fair wind blowing even down in the valley, and we had nine miles to go over a mountain. We put on all our windproof and waterproof clothing (after the usual breakfast of course) and started climbing. We climbed 1500ft on to the mountain plateau, where, as expected, the wind was a gale and the snow was falling almost horizontally. We stopped for lunch and tried to shelter behind rocks, but soon felt nearly perished and moved on. Now on the level for some time with wind and snow lessening, but the light was really difficult and disturbing. With no sun, everything was just an overall dull whiteness -- a whiteout in fact. We were linked by a line of thin cord in case we lost sight of the next man ahead. There were no shadows to show the folds in the ground and the sky was exactly the same colour as the snow, making strain on the eyes worse than bright sunshine. One man who had not been wearing sunglasses at the time was walking round half blind during the evening. We could pick out nothing but occasional black rocks clear of snow, until at about 3pm we could see ahead a group of huts standing out black in the all white landscape. It looked like a mirage. It was, in a way. They appeared to be only a short distance away, but after we had crossed a little valley and climbed the opposite ridge, there they were again apparently as far away as before. After another valley and another ridge, the phantom huts were still a distant vision. There followed a long steep slope on which most of us spent more time sliding down in ungainly positions rather than upright on skis, not being able to detect the shadowless bumps and humps of the snow surface. But still the huts were half a mile away, half a mile of weary trudging across the flat white surface of another frozen lake, until at long last we arrived. This was Kraekkje Hytta. Some three times the size of Instestolen with, thank heaven, a vast drying room as one of its chief attractions. And , of course, more vast quantities of food.

And that is where I was two years ago today, dog-tired as you might say.

There were six more days. Too much to talk about. One day, after setting off into a blizzard, we were forced to retreat and trek for six miles with the wind behind us to the nearest railway station. With the dogs packed into boxes -- quite a normal procedure for Norwegian Railways -- we all returned safely to Finse by train. On another day we were stuck in a hut for a whole day (useful for socialising and saunas). But there were also good days of welcoming sunshine, and even one with NO WIND.

We finally finished up at Finse on April 1st. Our friends Henrik and CC were, I suspect, quite relieved to see us depart the following day each in one piece.

When we arrived back in Newcastle 14 days after leaving , we all thought we had done something worth doing -- and had enjoyed it.

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