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

Alnes

The village of Alnes and the Alnes Fyr (lighthouse) are located on a small peninsula on the north side of Godøya, an island west of Ålesund. The island consists primarily of a sharp 500m peak called Storhornet (which would be cool to visit - it looks like there is a large lake perched practically on top).

AERIAL VIEW

This small sandy beach faces the open Atlantic. There's a cobble berm hiding beneath the back of the beach, at the edge of the dunes, that probably records big winter storms - which must be pretty spectacular here. As at all the beaches we've seen in Norway, the largest boulders probably have glacial origins.

Part of my fascination with this place was that we drove here from Ålesund in less than 30 minutes, much of it in very long, very deep tunnels.

Alnes is hidden on the far side of Godøya, the island in the distance. You can't see the road because it's 150m below sea level.

Geiranger

Okay, this entry is not a beach, but that's the point. Fjords, particularly iconic Norwegian fjords like Geirangerfjord, are not good places to find beaches. The steep rocky cliffs plunge directly into deep water, leaving little real estate on which beaches can form. The bedrock may have yielded sediment while glaciated, but that material was all transported far away -- any that was left behind is probably sitting at the bottom of the fjord.

Hjelle

Hjelle is located at the upper end of Oppstrynsvatnet, a lake that stretches 10 km or so in this narrow glacially formed valley. I think the Norwegians would recognize this as a fjord, even though the water is not marine.

I noticed this beach from our hotel and after dinner, I wandered down the road to check it out. The beach lies on the shoreward edge of narrow forested foreland that I suspect records the gradual accretion of this beach. Behind this, the mountains rise quickly. The beach is oriented into the major axis of the lake and I imagine that it acts as a swash-aligned pocket beach, slowly accumulating sediment.

AERIAL VIEW (this narrow beach is completely lost in the shadows in the Google imagery)

There were many small berms, recording a series of water levels and wave conditions. Lakes often have complex outlets - natural and engineered - and I have no idea what controls the elevation of this one. I suspect that wave setup when the wind is blowing can also affect lake levels, but again, I'm not sure how much of an effect it might have here.

This sediment color and texture on this beach was quite different than another small beach just to the north (photo below), which is nearer the mouth of one of the rivers that drains into the lake, and I suspect the reddish sediment has different origins. Whereas the beach below is likely derived from stream sediment, the coarser sand and gravel on the beach in the earlier photos may be more locally derived, probably from the steep uplands behind the beach.

The beach in the earlier photos is below the trees in the distance - not far away, but perhaps a different beach system.

Balestrand

The Sognefjord is the longest fjord in Norway and one of the longest in the world. It's more than 200km from it's innermost point to the ocean (though deciding where to draw that line is probably tricky). Balestrand must be about half way and is located along a central basin that is as much as 1000m deep.

AERIAL VIEW

The Sognefjord drains two of the highest and most glaciated of Norway's mountains, Jotunheimen and Jostedsalbreen, so it's no surprise that it was the path of a very large glacier during icier times. Flying over Greenland a couple of weeks later made it easier to imagine what this landscape must have once looked like. More than once, actually.

The bedrock yields limited sand and gravel from which to build beaches and the steep coastline limits the real estate on which beaches can form. The exceptions seem to be rare cases where geography and sediment conspire to form pocket beaches or adjacent to the mouths of some of the small tributaries, typically at the heads of bays. The Salish Sea has more beaches because the topography is less extreme and because the glaciers left behind a thick blanket of sand and gravel.

In Balestrand, there was a narrow cobble foreshore in places, but in this particular location, the construction of groins (jetties) and the addition of sand has resulted in a small artificial swimming beach. 

Orrestranda

Norway has a lot of coastline, most of which is steep and rocky, so I went into this trip knowing beaches would be scarce. One area where sandy beaches are more common is along the Jæren Coast, south of Stavanger, where a broad area of the coast is relatively low and marked by cultivated fields, not fjords and mountains (they're still there, just a few tens of miles farther inland). Like the south end of the Lista Peninsula (previous post) this area may be an old moraine.

AERIAL VIEW

The shoreline consists of sandy beaches, segmented by low headlands. The headlands, at least in this area, appear to consist of cobble and boulder lags, consistent with the moraine idea. The day was damp and windy, so my visit to this beach was brief. Apparently, there are also some nice coarse gravel and cobble beaches along this coast - but none that I saw. Maybe next trip.

Traveling north, we skirted the Stavanger airport and the huge oil field supply center at Tananger. I made due note of the large Schlumberger complex, a nod to a much older epoch of my geologic history (albeit in the Williston Basin, not the North Sea). Our day ended on an island north of Stavanger, reached by a series of deep undersea tunnels -- another chapter in Norway's engineering geology story.

Havika Beach

Just a short distance east from the previous post, the boulder field is gone, there is more sand, and pocket beaches have formed between bedrock headlands. We swung by Havika Beach (that's what I'm calling it - the Norwegian may translate a bit differently).

AERIAL VIEW

The beach was backed by a field of small dunes, although it turned out that some of the hummocks weren't actually dunes at all, but were underlain by bedrock knobs (or very large boulders).

Lista

The Lista Lighthouse (Fyr) sits at the southwestern corner of the Lista Peninsula near the southern tip of Norway. We were staying in Farsund, just east, and drove out after dinner. There's not much of a beach, and I didn't get down to water's edge anyway, but the shoreline itself was fascinating.

AERIAL VIEW

The broad coastal strip slopes very gradually to the sea and is strewn with large boulders. I suspect that this is a moraine, but I don't know enough about the regional glacial history to speculate more about its origin. 

The aerial photography suggests that in some places cobbles have been rearranged by waves to form indistinct berms, but for the most part the boulders seem to be scattered randomly and the waves don't seem to have had the persistence to create any real shoreline morphology. I suppose this is due to the durability of the underlying surface and the lack of mobile sediment, perhaps combined with an emerging coastline?