Inderøy Walk – Mosviksenderen /Skavlen Transmitter
It is now October and winter weather is around the corner. My friend and I had looked up at the tall mast last week and agreed to walk up to it, if the weather permitted. The weather wasn’t that great, but we did the walk anyway.
I’ve been trying to find information about the mast but the information I have found is a bit limited. The building is located at 401 meters above sea level. The mast is a transmitter for several Norwegian television and radio stations and was built in 1973. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skavlen_Transmitter )
The hill in the distance, covered in cloud, is where the mast should be visible on a clear day.
We drove along Fv 192, towards Saltvikhavn in Mosvik, drove about 1.5 km past the turn to Salvikhavn and found a parking spot on the side of the road. After all, we wanted the uphill walk for the exercise. We parked about 2 km from the mast at an elevation of about 200 meters above sea level. The temperature was about 3 degrees Celsius and there had been snow at higher elevations in the night. There was some slush on the road, much of which is a gravel road. Thankfully my friend had already changed to winter tires on her car.
As we started our walk up the hill it was obvious that the views today would be very limited. Cloud cover was low, but there was no precipitation while we were walking. The closest spit of land is Ytterøy, an island. In the distance is Levanger.The first part of the road leads around a farm. As we walked uphill, the sheep were being moved into a different field. They all seem to have their winter coats on and they had on different colours. The darker ones had horns.As we walked uphill, there was more and more snow. It was a bit slippery under foot. But we weren’t the first ones up the hill today. We saw one vehicle drive up and there were tracks of several vehicles in the new snow.I asked my friend what she thought the purpose of the sign was and her comment was that when there is a large amount of snow in the winter, the road needs to be marked. They may not plough the road all winter, but it would have to be usable by snow scooter. There were lots of other trails off the road, often with tracks from an ATV. “Danger – ice falls from antenna” – we must be getting nearer our goal. Notice how much snow there is now. Height above sea level makes a big difference. At lower elevations the precipitation would be rain. We have now climbed about 200 meters in elevation.Finally, the goal of our walk, though the top of the mast disappeared into the cloud cover. I was surprised at how large a building was connected to the mast.There were three vehicles outside the building, doors were open and people were obviously at work. Here is where the cables come out of the building and head up into the mast.There was certainly a lot of different equipment on the mast and I couldn’t see all the way to the top because of the cloud cover.I’m not sure if the view would be much more interesting in clear weather. Though one sees the mast in clear weather from afar, standing on the ground at the bottom of it, it looks like there are a lot of trees around it.
Though I enjoyed the walk, I would definitely recommend doing the walk when the weather is clearer. I plan to do the walk again next year, in the summer months of the year. The walk was a little over 2 km each way and we used a little over an hour.
A few days later I was able to take this photo of the mast, taken from the other side of Skarnsund. Though it shows up well for the naked eye, I had problems getting the mast to show up in a picture, even when I zoomed in a lot.
I have zoomed in a lot to take this picture, which means it became very grainy.
