The best time of day to start the Kjerag hike

The arithmetic that sets the deadline

Work it forwards. If the trail takes you eight hours, which is squarely in the middle of the published range, then a one o'clock start puts you back at the car park at nine in the evening. Add two and a half hours of road and you are in Stavanger at half past eleven at night, having driven twenty-seven hairpin bends in the dark at the end of a day that emptied your legs. If the trail takes you ten hours, which happens, none of those numbers work at all.

That is why I am blunt about this. It is not a preference about light or crowds. It is the one operational fact on this site that regularly decides whether someone has a good day or a bad night.

What I watched happen, most summers

People arrived at the car park in the early afternoon, having underestimated the drive from Stavanger, looked at the sign, and went anyway. Some of them were fine. Some of them came back in the dark and some of them did not come back at all that evening, because a friend was waiting in the car park at nine at night while the other one was still somewhere on the second descent, moving slowly, with a phone that had stopped being any use. Nobody in that story did anything reckless. They just started three hours too late.

The other thing I watched was the turning round. The people who set off late and turned back at the first or second chain were, without exception, the ones who had a fine afternoon. Turning round is a decision, not a failure: the safety page has more on that.

Why early is better even when the timing is not tight

The boulder is quiet. By the middle of an August afternoon there is a queue for the photograph, and it is not a short one. Early parties walk straight out onto it. That difference alone is worth an alarm clock: the crowds page.

The rock is at its best. Overnight damp burns off on a clear morning, and the first party of the day meets the slabs in their best condition. Late in the day the same slabs have often had a shower on them.

The weather goes the way it usually goes. Fog on the plateau and wind up the fjord side both tend to build rather than fade. A morning that looks poor at the car park can clear; an afternoon that looks poor usually does not.

You keep a margin. Everything from a turned ankle to a slow companion is survivable with four hours of daylight in hand and much less so with none.

Midsummer changes the numbers, not the rule

The light in a Norwegian June is very long, and a late finish in the third week of June is not the same thing as a late finish in the third week of September. That extra light buys you margin, and margin is exactly what a Kjerag day needs. It does not buy you a shorter trail or fresher legs, and the twenty-seven hairpins are equally slow at ten at night in any month.

If you are driving yourself

Then your start time at the car park is your Stavanger departure time plus two and a half hours, and that is the sum people get wrong. Leaving the city at eight in the morning is not an early start, it is a half past ten start on the mountain. Leaving at six is an early start. Read the getting-there page and, if the drive itself is the part you would rather not do at either end of a ten-hour walk, the no-car page.

How a booked day solves this

The main reason to book a seat is not the guiding, it is the timetable. The guided day out of Stavanger is roughly eleven hours door to door with hotel pickup at the start, which means somebody else has already made the start-time decision correctly and is driving the hairpins at the end of it. For anyone who knows they are a slow walker, that is the single most useful thing on offer: the guided hike. The two-day version goes further and puts you in Lysebotn overnight, so the hiking day begins without a drive attached: the two-day trip.

Check a departure

A word about what that widget books. It books the ride out of Stavanger and, on most of these, a guide. It does not book Kjerag. Nobody sells a ticket to the trail: it is free, open and unguided, and anyone who gets themselves to the top of the road can walk up it without paying a soul.

Frequently asked questions