It is these trees that had brought me here, to the office of Hallgeir Strifeldt, the director of planning for the municipality of Alta, at 9 am on a Monday in the middle of winter.
His mother's family were reindeer herders, but when his grandmother died in childbirth on the plateau, his grandfather brought his infant mother to Alta and left her with a Norwegian family to raise.
Alta is a relatively large town in the Finnmark province, the crown of the horse's mane that forms Norway's jagged coastline and Europe's northern shore.