Day 2 – Backpacking Sørøya – Hiking Tarhalsen to Holmevannet
Getting up for an early start on day 2 of our trekking, we started from Tarhalsen back towards Gamvik (a small set of houses at the end of the road from Akkarfjord. There was a light rain and what looked like a storm coming through, but eventually this cleared up and we only had a light drizzle the first hour of walking. I had also found my first wild reindeer horn (first of many) and this was exciting because they are difficult to spot when you’re hiking. They’re either covered by the vegetation or too old and rotted or are broken on the tips and therefore not worth carrying. I saw it from the corner of my eye and darted over to it.
Eventually we made it to our first beach and had breakfast there. Here we saw one camper and passed by two other hikers who planned on doing the same route but over 10 days time.
There’s some slight climbing involved in passing the beach near Gamvik, but if you follow close to the water and half way up the mountain, you’ll eventually reach back onto the trail as shown by the photo above. From here you’ll be able to see Storsand beach, which is one of the most pristine places to visit. It’s approximately 3.7km from the first beach to Storsand and fairly easy walking.
Here we met a friendly farm cat who came to greet us on the trail.
The water was absolutely clear and you could see every detail.
The beach was an arctic paradise. Perfect white sand, not a single piece of trash, and cold, although refreshing water that felt great to bath in after a half-day’s worth of hiking.
After the beach came a long climb up. Here we are perhaps a third of the way up the mountain next to a flowing stream. Perfect to drink from and watch the views of the beach from….or to take a rest.
Long after the climb, we made it almost 20km into the path.
We took a pause up here before the Holmevannet lake and tried some fishing. There wasn’t any bites, but I blame that on my equipment, since it wasn’t the best reel and rod set up to get far out into the lake. Luckily we still anticipated that we may not get fish, although I saw a blog post dedicated to only trout fishing on this island, where the two guys had gotten lots of fish at many of the lakes.
Maybe two kilometers past the lake, we finally made it to our camping spot. We quickly set up tent because of the major bug (knøtt) problem and mosquitoes. If I were to hike again, I’d either wait till later in the year or bring a mosquito net hat and use some spray to deter them. We were itching for the next week afterwards…But this was a perfect lake to stop at for the night. I can send the GPX file if you’d like to see the route from this day.
Location:
Storsand is a major white sand beach on the northern side of the island. This is around 6km from Tarhalsen and will take a couple hours to hike to from the northern tip of the island. It’s worth it to spend a few hours or a day even here because there’s less bugs compared to the mountain and great scenery here.