The guided Kjerag hike: my review

Where the eleven hours go

Two and a half hours out by road, about five and a half on the mountain including the walk to the boulder and the wait for your turn on it, then two and a half hours back. There is a safety briefing before you start walking. Add the pickup at your hotel and the drop-off at the end and you have your day, all of it.

I want to be exact about what that means, because I spent eleven summers watching people misjudge it. You will leave Stavanger early and you will get back in the evening. You will not do anything else that day. If you had a table booked or a boat to catch, move it. The single most common bad afternoon at Øygardstøl was somebody who had planned a Kjerag hike around something else rather than the other way round.

The road is the reason the day is shaped like this. The car park sits at the top of 27 hairpin bends on Fv500 above Lysebotn, and there is no short way to it from Stavanger. Driving it yourself through Sirdal takes roughly three hours. The van takes two and a half. Nobody has found a faster version, and the pages on getting there and the road explain why.

What five and a half hours on the mountain buys you

The round trip is about 11 km and most people take six to ten hours over it. Five and a half is therefore a working pace, not a stroll, and it is the number I would think hardest about before booking. Fit walkers do the route in around six hours. If you are slower than that on hills at home, you will be slower than that here, and a guide cannot make the mountain shorter.

The route is three ascents and two descents, not one climb. You go up, drop into Litle Stordal, go up again, drop again, and climb a third time onto the plateau. Total gain is somewhere around 760 to 800 metres. Several hundred metres of chain are bolted along the steepest slabs, and they are there because the rock is steep and gets slippery, not for decoration. The trail, in order and the chains describe the sequence properly.

Then there is the boulder itself, which takes about four seconds and is the least dangerous part of the whole day. You step onto it from the side. It is a flat top with rock on both sides of the crevice, and there is no recorded death from falling off it in Norwegian history. What there is, on an August afternoon, is a queue. See crowds if that matters to you, and has anyone fallen if the other thing does.

The group of eight

Eight people is the cap, and on this trail it is the number that does the most work. A guide with eight can stop at the chains and watch each person through them. A guide with thirty cannot. It also means the pace is set by the slowest of eight rather than the slowest of a coachload, which cuts both ways: if that is you, everyone waits, and if it is not you, you wait.

The tour runs in English and Norwegian. Most of what a guide gives you here is not commentary anyway. It is the decision about whether today is a day to go up at all, which is the thing a visitor is least equipped to make. Visit Norway’s own advice is to turn back in strong wind, heavy rain or fog, and on this plateau all three arrive without much notice. I have stood in sunshine at the car park while the top of the trail was in cloud you could not see ten metres through.

Who should book something else

If eleven hours is more day than you have, the Preikestolen hike is six and reaches a plateau 604 metres above the same fjord, with no chains and about 8 km of walking. That is the neighbour, reviewed here. If you want your own pace, the private hike is a longer day with a smaller party. If somebody in your group is not walking, the Lysefjord cruise is three and a half hours on the water, though it does not go near Kjerag. The comparison page puts all of that in one table.

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