Norway walking holidays: a curator's guide for British walkers

The four shapes, and how to tell which one you are asking for

Those four shapes suit four different British walkers, and most of the disappointment we hear about second-hand comes from someone booking one and expecting another. This note sorts them out: what each shape asks of you, when the Norwegian calendar allows it, how the guided and self-guided formats actually differ, which regions suit which walker, and the weeks we turn down. It is the umbrella piece for everything else we have written for British readers, and the specific notes are linked as we go.

The hut-to-hut traverse. A new bed each night, four to six walking days, and the distinctive Norwegian arrangement in which your main luggage travels by road while you carry a day pack. A representative week is lodge to lodge in Jotunheimen finishing on Galdhøpiggen: six days and roughly 51 km on foot, spread over four walking days of between 9 and 16 km across rough, uneven mountain terrain, with a guided glacier crossing to the 2,469 m summit at the end. The days are not long by Lake District standards. The ground is what tires people.

The lodge-based week. Two or three fixed bases, day walks out and back, and no packing between breakfasts. A walking week through Hardanger runs eight days from a comfortable lodge, most days at 16 to 20 km, with one demanding twelve-hour Trolltunga day carrying 900 m of ascent. This is the shape we recommend most often for couples who walk at slightly different speeds, because the hard days are optional in a way they are not on a traverse.

The historic-road walk. Norway has a small number of graded eighteenth and nineteenth-century roads restored as walking routes, and they are the country's least-advertised asset for walkers who want the landscape without the gradient. Walking the Kongevegen over Filefjell is six days and 42.5 km, of which four are walking days of 5 to 14 km on a made surface, with one steep switchbacked descent as the only technical moment of the week. No scrambling, no exposure. The Dovrefjell pilgrim walk is the same idea on the St Olav route: three walking days of 15 to 21 km with one longer crossing over Hjerkinnhø.

The coastal island week. Lofoten, Vesterålen, the Helgeland coast. The walking is shorter and steeper than the fjell, the weather is more changeable, and the trip is usually a hybrid: walking plus boat, or walking plus bicycle. We have written the format question up separately in walking or cycling Lofoten, because on those islands it is a real decision rather than a foregone conclusion.

If you can say which of those four sentences describes the week already in your head, the rest of the planning becomes straightforward. If you cannot, that is the conversation to have first.

What a Norwegian walking day asks of a British walker

British walkers arrive with a calibration problem rather than a fitness problem. The numbers look modest: 12 km, 500 m of ascent, five hours. A Munro day is bigger on paper. Then the day takes seven hours, and nobody can quite account for the extra two.

Three things explain it. The ground is rougher for longer, because Norwegian paths are worn routes across boulder, bog and moraine rather than built and pitched paths. Water is everywhere, and stream crossings are a normal feature of a day rather than an incident. And the distances between shelter are longer, which changes how you pace a day even when the day itself is short. The comparison is set out in detail in how hard Norwegian walking actually is, and for readers who think in summits rather than in hours, Norwegian tops for Munro baggers does the same job in a different currency.

Navigation is different too, and better than most people expect. Norwegian mountain routes are marked with painted red T-marks on rock and with stone cairns across open ground, maintained to a consistent national standard. In clear weather you rarely need the map. In cloud on the open fjell you need it properly, and you need to be able to use it, because the cairns are spaced for visibility rather than for fog.

The last calibration point is legal rather than physical. Norway's right to roam is broader than Scotland's and much broader than England's, and it changes the texture of a walking week. We compared the two systems in allemannsretten and the Scottish right to roam. The short of it is that the Norwegian version is older, less contested, and treated as ordinary rather than as a concession that had to be won.

The season is shorter than the map suggests

The most common planning error is to treat the Norwegian walking season as though it ran from May to October. In the high fjell it does not. Staffed mountain lodges run roughly from the last week of June to the middle of September. The snowpack clears from the marked trails around the third week of June in an average year, and the fortnight straight after that is the wettest walking of the whole season, because the snowmelt is still running off the plateau.

That leaves a real inland season of about eleven weeks, and the best of it is narrower still. The Norwegian school year restarts in the middle of August, which empties the popular routes almost overnight, and the mountain birch turns gold across the inland uplands in the first week of September. The fortnight that straddles those two events is the one we book most often for returning walkers. The full month-by-month picture, including which British school holidays work and which do not, is in the Norway walking calendar for UK walkers, and the late end of it in a September or October walking holiday.

The coast is more forgiving. Lofoten and Helgeland extend the season by roughly a fortnight at each end, so a late-May or early-October coastal week is a genuine proposition when the same dates on Hardangervidda would be a wasted flight. Where work or school terms have already fixed your dates and the fjell will not take them, the islands often will, and that is a better answer than writing the year off.

Guided, self-guided, and the third option nobody explains

British walkers usually arrive assuming there are two choices, guided or independent. There are three, and the middle one is the Norwegian speciality.

Self-guided with luggage moved. You walk on your own, with route notes, maps and a booked bed at the far end of each day, and a vehicle takes your case to the next lodge while you carry a day pack. In Norwegian this is selvguidet walking with bagasjetransport, and most of our catalogue is built this way. It suits experienced walkers who want the country to themselves during the day and a shower, a bed and three courses at the end of it.

Guided in a small group. A Norwegian mountain guide, a fixed group, and a week with a deliberate shape. Four guided days in Jotunheimen from a Valdres farm is the pattern: four days of three to eight hours, climbing between 300 and 1,100 metres, with Besseggen, which is long, steep and exposed in places, held back until the last day. Guided is the right answer for a first Norwegian mountain week, for anyone unsure of their own weather judgement, and for solo walkers who would rather not spend seven days alone.

Independent on the hut system. Join DNT, buy the standard key, and walk hut to hut using self-service huts stocked with tinned and dried food and a payment box you settle yourself. It is the cheapest way to walk in Norway and the one with the most character, and it asks the most of you: beds that cannot be reserved, weather calls you make alone, and provisioning that stops when the staffed season does. How the DNT mountain hut system works covers the membership, the key, the categories of hut and the etiquette, which is more codified than British walkers expect.

We book the first two. We are glad to talk anybody through the third, and we do it fairly regularly for walkers who want the fjell with nobody standing between them and it.

Five regions, and the walker each one suits

Jotunheimen is the high one: Norway's densest concentration of 2,000-metre summits, the glacier crossings, Besseggen, Galdhøpiggen. It suits walkers with hill experience who want the country's serious mountain landscape and will trade comfort for altitude. Wainwright walked here and wrote about it, which we picked up in the Wainwright essay.

Rondane is the older, quieter half of central Norway: rounded fells, wide dry plateau between them, and the country's first national park. A gentle hut-to-hut walk through Rondane is four days with three walking days of 10 to 14 km, and it is the trip we recommend most often as a first Norwegian multi-day walk. The ground is dry underfoot by fjell standards, which matters more than the distances do.

Hardanger is the fjord option, and the one that photographs best. Lower altitude, longer season, orchards and waterfalls at the bottom and the Hardangervidda plateau at the top, with Trolltunga and Dronningstien as the set pieces. The trade is that it is the busiest of the five in July.

Filefjell and the historic roads are the answer for walkers who want Norway without a hard week: the Kongevegen again, and the pilgrim routes over Dovrefjell. This is also where we send parties of mixed ability, because a graded surface removes most of the variance between the fastest and the slowest walker in a group.

Lofoten and the coast are the ones people have seen the photographs of. Short sharp climbs from sea level, fishing villages, the midnight sun in June, and a walking week that is really a hybrid week. If you are choosing between the islands and the interior, Lofoten, Jotunheimen and Hardangervidda compared is the piece that settles it.

There is a sixth answer we give more often than you would think, which is that a particular walker should go to Norway for something other than a long linear walk. British walkers who want a crossing in the mould of the Coast to Coast find the nearest Norwegian equivalents behave differently, and we set out why in the Norwegian Coast to Coast question.

The money conversation, without the numbers

We do not publish prices in these notes, and the reason goes beyond commercial caution: the figure that matters is not the trip price but the shape of the spend, and that shape is unusual in Norway.

Norwegian walking holidays are front-loaded. Accommodation, half board and luggage transfer are normally bundled, so the headline number covers most of the week and the daily extras are small. Against that, the things British walkers habitually treat as incidental are expensive: long airport transfers, a bought lunch, a beer, a taxi when the weather turns. Parties that budget for a bundled week and then spend as they would in the Alps come home surprised. Parties that pick up a packed lunch at the lodge each morning, as Norwegians do, barely notice the difference.

Two structural points are worth knowing before you compare offers. Single supplements are real and not trivial, because mountain lodges have very few single rooms. And a comparison between two operators is rarely like for like: what the transfer includes, whether luggage moves every day or most days, and whether the guide is a qualified Norwegian mountain guide or a tour leader with a first-aid certificate all move the number. We took two well-known British operators apart on exactly this point in the Inntravel and Exodus comparison.

Getting there, and the day you lose

Fly to Oslo for anything inland. The train north through Gudbrandsdalen to Otta or Lillehammer is reliable, comfortable and worth the window seat, and most inland trailheads are a bus or a booked transfer from one of those stations. Allow a full day at each end. The walking starts on the second day of the holiday, and any itinerary that pretends otherwise is selling you a tired first morning.

Fly to Bodø or Evenes for the coast and the islands. From Bodø the ferry crossing opens the southern Lofoten villages; from Evenes the road runs west into the archipelago. Both add a connection, and in winter both add weather risk, though that matters less in the walking season.

One practical note that catches British walkers out: Norwegian lodges expect you at dinner, and dinner is early. A late arrival that would be unremarkable in Italy is a nuisance in the fjell, where a kitchen is cooking for a fixed table at a fixed hour. Build the travel day so that you arrive in daylight and in time to eat.

The weeks we turn down

Refusing dates is a large part of the job, and it is worth being plain about which ones.

We do not book inland walking weeks between mid-October and mid-May. The staffed lodges are shut, the high fjell is winter terrain that requires skis or snowshoes and the competence to use them, and a walking party up there is in the wrong equipment for the ground. October half-term falls squarely into this gap, and the answer we give most often is to move to May half-term the following year and take the coast instead.

We push enquiries out of the first fortnight of June for anything on the high fjell. The trails are open in name, the streams are at their highest, the bog is at its worst and the lodges are only just opening. The same dates in Hardanger or on the coast are perfectly good.

We do not promise a hut-to-hut traverse on Lofoten, because the islands are not built that way. The walking there is a series of superb short climbs from a fixed base, not a chain of them. And we do not put anybody on Besseggen or Trolltunga as the first serious day of a week. Both are long, both are exposed in places, and both are a great deal better on day four than on day one.

Where we come in

The walking is yours. What we do is narrow the field: which of the four shapes fits the week you actually want, which region carries it, which fortnight of a short season gives you the best odds, and whose version of "luggage moved" means what you assume it means. We turn down more enquiries than we accept, usually on dates, and the walkers we turn down tend to come back the following year for the right week.

If you have a rough window and a vague picture, that is exactly the right moment to write. Tell us what you walk at home, what you want to remember afterwards, and which weeks you can genuinely take off work, and we will tell you which Norwegian week that adds up to. Start at plan my trip, or read through the rest of the walking notes first if you would rather narrow it down yourself.

Erik Thorsen