The usual commute to a ski hill consists of cramming in the car with your best friends before dawn, sipping a hot coffee from the gas station, blasting the defroster and hoping the engine heats things up quickly. But that wasn’t the case for the folks on this recent sail-to-ski voyage across Norway. Navigating from Bergen to Rosendal, 75 miles as the crow flies, aboard the Statsraad Lemkuhl—a 321-foot long, 3-masted steel bark ship built in 1914 as a training vessel for the German merchant marine—this group of avid skiers instead sailed a winding path through Norway’s beautiful fjords, taking turns on their skis in multiple locations along the way.
Joining the crew was Wille Lindberg, a former Freeride World Tour competitor, who guided these adventurous skiers to low-angle terrain near his home in Jondal, around the Folgefonna glacier for some gnarlier lines and, finally, on a ski tour up one of the countless mountains shooting out from the sea just outside the final stop, Rosendal.
Usually, when you can see the parking lot from the top of the chairlift, that’s pretty cool. How about looking down at the glistening fjords of Norway and there’s an enormous sailboat waiting for you to finish your run. Where do we sign up?
