Farstad

I'd added this beach to my list months ago. It had sort of jumped off the map when I was exploring trip options on Google, perhaps because there simply weren't that many beaches to choose from. We were staying in Kristiansund for two days and I knew we'd be checking out the Atlantic Road (Atlanterhavsveien). Farstad was just a few more kilometers farther down the coast and seemed like a good lunch stop before turning around and heading back.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach is a crescent-shaped kilometer of sand, bracketed by a stream mouth at one end and a boulder moraine at the other. I suspect the stream is the source of the sand, since it drains a fairly substantial valley and once it hits the ocean, there's not much place for the sediment to go besides onto the beach and into the small dune field.

The presence of a few large boulders on the beach indicate that the original glacial surface doesn't lie far beneath the sand. These boulders are unlikely to have been moved here by waves (if they were, I wouldn't want to have been nearby). They were most likely already here and the beach simply built around them.

According to the sign, this is the "world's northernmost sand dune region of the southern variety." I'll take their word for it, even if I'm not quite sure what that means.

This was my favorite beach of the trip.

There are a lot more pictures from our Norway trip on my hshipman blog. Here's the link to Farstad, but if you want the whole trip (60 posts!), you can try:
hshipman: Scandinavia 2018