Hardangervidda is not about epic mountain ranges. It’s not about spectacular waterfalls or deep gorges. It’s about wide open spaces. It’s a place for wandering thoughts; a place for letting the beast on your back ease off your shoulders for a while.

A parking lot marked the final gateway to that vast openness. The hiking track took off to our right. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted by it. Instead, we took the legal route and followed the tractor road, bumping along boulder-strewn patches, splashing through streams, dodging muddy trenches, enjoying the occasional silky smooth, sandy singletrack on the moraines. Or rather, ‘social singletrack’, as Joe called the parallel tracks from the tractor wheels, enabling us to share our stories. We had plenty to share.

Dark clouds hung like a half-shut blind over the sky, leaving a strip of warm afternoon light to bathe the sparse vegetation. The navigation should literally have been a walk in the park, but two likeminded outdoor companions talk too much and I made one small mistake after another. We met yet another stream too deep to cross by bike without getting our feet wet; so we slid through the water, laughing like kids when it turned out to be deeper than expected.

The humid, late-summer night descended on the tents like a wet blanket. The low, hissing sound of Joe’s Jetstream cooker disappeared a quarter of an hour before my tiny beer can stove even got close to bringing my minuscule pot to the boil. The sensible thing might have been to bring my own propane burner, but sometimes we don’t need to be sensible. Watching the flames from my little, hotheaded friend lick the bottom of my pot is the kind of simple joy I came here for.

Norwegians love their mountain cabins. Regularly, I find myself sifting through the cabin ads from time to time, dreaming about life in my very own tiny shelter in the mountains. Then I dismiss the thought, realising it would be a chain around my neck. It would never beat the feeling of watching a starry sky from the tent door, or the first rays of the morning sun licking the mountain ridge in the west. The feeling when you have packed all your necessities for the next few days and are free to put up your little home wherever you fancy.

The vastness of the plateau shrinks when taking on the landscape with bikes, and too soon we reached the end of the tractor road. Normally, this would be the end for bikers. Not so for us.

Our packrafts should quickly link the fairly short distance of water between the two tractor roads, but a strong headwind threatened otherwise. The bikes on the front of our bobbing boats restricted our paddle stroke to the last and least effective part, further limiting our progress. Still, a life devoted to flat water paddling gave me a slight edge over Joe, who fought it out with an even shorter paddle stroke due to his packraft being decked for white water, and the consequential difficult positioning of his bike. Looking at the shoreline, it was hard to tell if we were moving at all, and if we did, whether it was in the right direction.

After more than an hour and a half of all-in effort, and less than three kilometres of progress on the water, Joe resigned and resorted to pushing his bike along the rocky shoreline, sweetened by a short ride on a sandy beach. I paddled like a madman myself, barely keeping ahead of him during a blissful moment of moderate winds. What should have been a parade with a diagonal tailwind in a northernly bend of the lake, turned into a detour as the waves threatened to swamp my tiny craft.

I deflated my packraft, teeth chattering from the cold crossing, while Joe a couple hundred metres away unintentionally realised that fatbikes make for great floatation devises as he attempted to cross the river from the lake, only to discover a waist deep trench of chilling water grabbing hold of his bike, threatening to drag the whole equipage downstream.

We erected the tents on the grassy fields surrounding the old, abandoned cluster of stone huts from the days of livestock herding. To call the crossing the crux of the trip would be pompous. Still, the feeling of something coming to an end crept under our skin, even with a full day of riding left the next day.