Nordre Kolsås from
Kolsås Nordre Kolsås |
Estimated net time | 3-3½ hours |
Difficulty | No difficulties. |
Drinking water | At best very limited access to running water. |
GSM coverage | Coverage at the summit and throughout most of the route. |
Parking | Many possibilities for parking around trail head. |
Start height | 60 metres |
Vertical metres | 425 metres for the roundtrip |
Trip distance | 6.8 km |
GPS-file | X |
Map |
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Route photo |
There are many routes to Nordre Kolsås, and many suitable trail heads. This
route assumes you start at Kolsås (e.g. Brynsvei). From Kolsås make your way
towards the foot of Søndre Kolsås, and then head north along the foot of Søndre
Kolsås. When you get to Merradalen follow this gully to the top of it, and then
turn right and circumvent Nordre Kolsås counter clockwise until you can ascend
the summit from north. The latter parts of this path is marked by light blue /
indigo paint.
From Nordre Kolsås summit head back down north before turning right and heading south towards Søndre Kolsås. Follow the marked path (indigo). At the southern walls of Søndre Kolsås continue a little west before following the path, including some wooden stairs, down towards south, and then gradually south-west back to the trail head.
Njål, Sigurd and me had taken the morning flight to Oslo the previous day (Saturday), in order to spend a day in Oslo and watch Norway-Iceland in a World Cup qualifier at Ullevaal. Our excellent host, as usual was Tore. We then left Tore's after breakfast on Sunday morning to go to Skui to watch Jonatan play football for his team in the Jutul-Cup. After Jonatan had finished his games we all headed back to Cecilie and Jon's place to quickly get changed and head towards Nordre Kolsås.
We started our hike at 12:55 and planned to be back by 15:00 to allow us get the 15:24 airport express train from Sandvika. Unfortunately Njål wasn't in the right mood for a hike so we ended up making relatively poor progress. When we got to the path junction above Merradalen we therefore decided to split, with Cecilie taken Jonatan and Njål directly towards Søndre Kolsås and back home, while Jon, Sigurd and me would continue towards Nordre Kolsås. After the split the three of us heading towards Nordre Kolsås increased the pace considerably, including doing a lot of running.
After Nordre Kolsås we headed towards Søndre, running almost all the way. At one point Sigurd took a bad fall, hurting his arm and not being able to run for quite a while. But by now we were quite confident we would make it back in time for the planned train.
After a quick stop at the southern edge of Søndre Kolsås we ran down towards trail head, getting back around 14:45, a few minutes after the others. This gave me just enough time for a quick shower before Jon drove us to Sandvika. We even had time to buy drinks at the railway station before embarking for the airport. At the airport we ended up having to wait quite a while since the flight got 1:30 hours delayed because of technical problems, which meant we got home at 20:30.