Lofoten fascinates in the colourful time, with light and colour conditions that bring a smile to the lips and exhilaration to body and soul. The blue hour has been an inspiration to musicians, poets and artists for centuries.
From mid September, we enter the colourful time, the moment when the trees put on their autumn costumes, when heather and moorland are dressed in gold and the first snow sprinkles a sugary topping on Lofoten’s beautiful peaks. This time is like a magical journey, when the mountains are lit up with colours that change from hour to hour. On a typical October day in Lofoten you can see dark green clouds parading around the skies above Vestfjorden, while the sun makes its leisurely way from east to west in the pink and violet hues of the morning hours. Then the sky explodes into orange and joyful yellow, before a final cooling into blue.
The blue hour is filled with a wonderful blueish light that makes you just sit down and look. A time for reflection and melancholy, or all that is needed to relax and breathe pure blue air into an overstressed body. Enough time perhaps to realise that the mountain you are sitting on has been completely transformed, as if the mountain has turned itself round or bowed a little towards the sea. Sometimes you feel you must hold your breath and not blink, to make sure you see all there is to see of the changing clouds. But you don’t have to do that - the blue hour is long enough. Much longer than an ordinary hour.
When the sun takes its paintbox off into the sea and prepares itself for its next performance, Lofoten lies naked and ready for new artists. The open landscape of sea and sky means it never really becomes fully dark. The feeling of freedom and inspiration creates its own light. The dream is to lie back in quiet excitement and look up at the big open sky, speckled with tiny lights, indescribably far off. Lights of stars we can never visit. But then, suddenly, a visit from our own star flickers across the sky; a two to four day journey is painted out over our heads in dancing movements of green, white, red and blue. The northern lights, the Aurora Borealis, one of the colourful time’s most beautiful performers.
Towards the end of the colourful time, it is not only the colours that inspire and enthuse, it is the sound of fishing boats, seagulls and the springtime dripping from roofs and icicles. The Lofoten mountains, covered in velvety cream, shine clear and clean in the ever strengthening sunlight. Like a final warning that the sun will soon be ready to resume its power; it prepares itself for the round-the-clock duties of summer. That will be the time of the midnight sun.
Winter in Lofoten
