STORIES FROM ‘FURUKOLLEN’

Imagine that you are standing at the top of the mountain, right next to where the waterful rushes over the cliffs and plunges a hundred meters straight down in cascades of never ending streams of melted snow. At the bottom of the vally, right where the rainbow cuts across the lake on the right hand side, is where you can find a beautiful wooden house painted in traditional NORWEGIAN RED and named FURUKOLLEN – FURU meaning ‘pine tree’ and KOLLEN meaning a ‘small hill’.

The house is located in the tiny village of LESJAVERK with less than 300 permanent citizens, close to 400 kilometers north of Oslo, the capital of NORWAY, at the bottom of the monumental valley called GUDBRANDSDALEN.

Lesjaverk is my second home, a place I have visited on average once a year since my first visit in 1950. This is where I have spent most of my summers, fishing trout in the lake, boating along the many small unpopulated islands, walking through the thick forests of pine and birch, listening to the constant sound of water rushing through the waterfall down the mountain side.

Now I am here again, this time on my own. I intend to enjoy the silence and loneliness in full, filling my nostrils with the smells from the pine and birch trees surrounding me on all sides, reading the great books I took along, and visiting the lake to see if some of the trout will accept my invitation to swallow the colorful flies. But I have also decided to share some of my experiences and thoughts with you, through a daily update with a PHOTO a short TEXT.

I hope you will enjoy it – and don’t hesitate to comment!