Spring Cleaning and Updates

Photo: Last light over Haugheia, Vestvågøy, Lofoten Islands, Norway.

With the midnight sun and the summer hiking season just over a month away, I’ve begun a bit of a spring cleaning of the website to get everything updated as much as possible. Truth be told, I’ve been a bit lazy over these last couple years as I didn’t see much need to follow up on things when no one was really traveling anyhow. But I guess with things getting back to normal, its time for a refresh!

It is actually a pretty difficult job to try and keep up with the changes on Lofoten. Even living here full time and reading the local newspapers and websites, there is lots of stuff which happens without me knowing unless I travel to a particular area. Most of this revolves around changes in parking – and unfortunately, an increasing amount of paid parking is required for many hiking locations. Or parking areas are closed or moved, or shuttle buses are going to run, they kinda do, then they stop – such as for Kvalvika and Ryten in the Fredvang area, where it seems like the on the ground logistics change almost monthly. I try to keep things as accurate as possible, but I do fall behind, especially these last two years.

So whats coming up?

I spent most of today separating the hikes into their own page and menu location: Hiking Lofoten, now separate from the previous, and somewhat confusingly named Outdoors. This process took a while, and hopefully I caught all the broken links, but if you come across anything I might have missed, please let me know!

I never intended for this website to be about hiking, but more just Lofoten travel in general. But as it turned out over the last 12 years, it seems to be mostly about hiking. So I guess its better to have hikes in a separate category. Additionally though, I have a series of articles mostly about being a good user of the outdoors and nature that are waiting to be added, so having all of this combined with hiking guides made things begin to feel a little crowded. So look for more informative articles coming in the future.

A large majority of the content here was published between 2014 – 2017. For the hikes in particular, I’ve probably visited most the mountains more times in the follow years, but have been slow to update new photos. So I’ll begin to add some new images to already existing hikes.

There is also a pretty large backlogs of hikes to add as well. For some locations I’m waiting until they will be published first in an ebook or elsewhere – and there are some hikes that I’ll only list in ebooks and not here on the website. But there are a fair amount of hikes I’ve done over the last couple summers that don’t really belong to any particular project I have in mind, so they’ll get published as time allows.

There’s probably some more stuff on the to do list as well…