21-Aug-2010 -- Two years ago I made my previous visit to this point:

I ran a two-day orienteering event less than 10 km from this point. My father who taught me orienteering also took part at that time, it turned out to be his last competition ever due to a very aggressive cancer which was discovered two weeks later and killed him by Dec 10th.

Today, two years later, Modum held another competition, even closer to the confluence, so I decided to both run the event and make another trip to see how farm and logging activities keep changing the confluence area.

My race is documented here, I got second place just like I did two years ago.

For the confluence trip I parked (somewhat illegally) at the end of a bus stop very close to the point, then hiked in across the same logged areas as on my previous visit.

Near the point itself there's a lot of tractor trails and the farmland has been extended a little bit closer. I took photos both from the edge of the farmland (less than 20m from the point) and inside the remaining trees as close to the point as possible.

On the way out I decided to see where the tractor trail I found two years ago would go, and it turned out to lead directly to a house by the main road, about 200m south of the bus stop, see the Google Earth image with my track log.

Afterwards I decided to visit the one feature that Vikersund is famous for: The Vikersund Giant Ski Jump hill which is just 6.8 km from the confluence.

There are just 5 such Giant hills in the world, hills where it is possible to jump 200m or more. The largest has been in Planica for some years now, it has the world record with a 239m jump made by the Norwegian Bjørn-Einar Romøren.

The Google Earth image shows what Vikersund looked like last year, currently the entire hill is being redeveloped in order to make it possible to break the world record.

I made a panorama of the ski jump area, it is somewhat disconcerting that the Vikersund church and cemetery is located alongside the bottom of the landing areas: If you make a bad mistake in the giant hill, they can bury you more or less exactly where you crash-landed.