About this site

Who writes here

My name is Torhild Øvstebø. I grew up on the Sirdal side and I worked eleven summers at Øygardstøl, the car park and service building at the top of the 27 hairpin bends where the Kjerag trail begins. I sold coffee. I pointed at the map on the wall, more times than I could count. And I watched people come back down, which is the part that taught me anything.

Eleven seasons is enough to see the whole range. The ones who went up in trainers and got away with it. The ones who turned round at the first chain and were right to. The ones who sat in the car park at nine at night waiting for a friend who had underestimated the way down. The August afternoons when there was a queue for the photograph on the boulder and nobody had expected a queue. The mornings when the car park was in sunshine and the plateau was in fog, and I had to explain that the two are separate weather systems as far as your day is concerned.

Why the site exists

Because the same three conversations happened at that counter every week, and none of them needed to.

The first was fear pointed in the wrong direction. People asked me how many had fallen off the boulder, and the answer is that there is no recorded death from falling off Kjeragbolten in Norwegian history. You step onto it from the side. It is a flat top with rock on both sides of the crevice. What actually hurts hikers is the trail: wet slabs, three ascents and two descents, and tired legs on the way back. What kills people at Kjerag is BASE jumping, which is a different sport practised by different people off the same cliff, and jumpers have been killed there with accidents reported most years. Nearly everything written about this mountain mixes those three things together. On this site they are kept apart, on how safe is it, has anyone fallen and BASE jumping.

The second was people asking where to buy a ticket. There is no ticket office and never has been. What is bookable is the ride out of Stavanger and the guide, which is a different purchase entirely and worth understanding before you make it. That is is the hike free and the bookings page.

The third was the road. Almost nobody arrived understanding that the road is the constraint, not the hike. Fv500 above Lysebotn opens in late May or early June and closes in October or November, depending on snow, and the chains on the steep slabs come down when it closes and go back up when it opens. There is no regular public bus from Stavanger to Lysebotn. The real planning question was never whether somebody was fit enough. It was whether the road was open on their dates and how they were going to get to the top of it. That is the road and the hairpins, the season and getting there without a car.

What this site is not

Not official anything. I do not speak for Sandnes municipality, for the people who maintain the chains, for the car park, or for any operator. I am not a guide and I run no tours. I am not the trail: if the plateau is in cloud on your date, I cannot move it, and if the road is still under snow, I cannot open it. Nobody sees a page here before it goes up.

I am opinionated about two things and I will not pretend otherwise. Footwear, because I watched what wet rock does to the wrong soles. And start times, because people who set off at two in the afternoon came down in the dark, every single season, and it was always avoidable. That is what to wear and the best time of day, and they are the two pages I would press into a stranger’s hand.

How it is written

In the first person, because a person wrote it, and with the unflattering half of the answer first wherever there is one. The hike is about 11 km and takes six to ten hours for most people, and I am not going to round that down to make a booking look better. The boulder is not dangerous and I am not going to dress it up to make a page exciting. Both of those are on how hard is it and the boulder.

Where I describe what reviewers say, I describe what recurs rather than lifting one sentence out of one listing, and I do not name guides. Ratings and review counts are the published figures I noted at my last reading; the booking panels show the live ones, and they move. The six reviews are on the reviews hub, and where a listing has only two or four reviews I say so in the first paragraph.

I publish no prices anywhere on this site. Amounts change every season and a figure left on a page is wrong within months. What does not change is the structure of the day: what is free, what is unavoidable, what is optional. That is what it costs, and it has no figures in it on purpose.

How it is funded

Through affiliate links to GetYourGuide. If you book a hike or a boat through a link here, the site earns a commission and you pay no more than you otherwise would. It costs me nothing to tell you that the trail is free, that a guide is optional in summer, and that with a car and an open road you need none of it, and I have said all three on most pages here. That should tell you what the commission does and does not buy. The full statement is on the disclosure page.

Corrections

Road dates move with the snow, the car park changes its staffed hours, and I get things wrong. If you have just been and something here is out of date, write to me at [email protected] and I will fix it. The contact page says what is useful to include.