@danielalford_
Everyone - including the tourist board - calls Innerdalen ‘Norway’s most beautiful valley’. I wanted to go: to get a deeper understanding of what’s so special about it, and what it’s like to live here. Most people who visit do so to climb its famous pyramidal peak, Innerdalstårnet - and after that, they leave. The people I met here were surprised to find I had no interest in climbing the mountain. Instead, I spent my week hiking up the valley sides, finding hidden glacial lakes, streams and upland meadows.
The unique, almost alien, shape of Innerdalstårnet is a distinctive recurring motif in my photos - but what a camera can’t capture is that you can hear waterfalls everywhere in the valley. There are so many of them, and their sound is dominant, especially that of the main cascade, which runs from the glacial lake Storvatnet. Much of the valley is blanketed in pristine woodland and, every now and then, I came across huge boulders, called erratics, covered in thick layers of moss, which had been deposited by retreating glaciers.
Daniel’s first glimpse of the Innerdalen, with a fellow hiker in the foreground
I visited in autumn, when there are golden leaves on the trees and the forest floor is littered with mushrooms, like in a fairytale. I got crazy-lucky with the weather. It was one of the hottest Septembers in years, which made wild camping a dream. Parking my tent wherever I pleased gave me a sense of freedom and really immersed me in the landscape – I could choose the view I wanted to wake up to each morning. Travelling this way, cooking my meals on a fire and falling asleep to the murmur of a stream, I felt both freer and more connected to nature.