Kjerag with children

The honest test

Forget the mountain for a moment and answer this instead. Has this child walked for six hours over rough ground, in weather, and been cheerful in the last two of them? If yes, Kjerag is within reach and you know how to manage the day. If they have not, then the first time they find out what hour six feels like should not be on bare slab three climbs from a car park.

The reason I am firm about this is not the boulder. It is the descent. A tired adult on wet rock is a manageable problem; a tired child on wet rock, three climbs from the car, with two adults who are also tired, is how a bad evening starts. And there is no shortcut back, no lift and no other way off the mountain: the trail page.

What to know about the boulder itself

Kjeragbolten is far less frightening than it photographs. You step onto it from the side, a half-metre stride onto a flat top with rock walls on both sides of the crevice, no equipment involved, and there is no recorded death from falling off it in Norwegian history. Plenty of families walk out, look at it, take a picture from the rock beside it and never step across, and that is a complete visit: the boulder page.

What does need managing is everything around it. There is no fence, no railing and no barrier anywhere on the plateau, and there is not going to be one. The edge is simply the edge. With children that means holding hands near it and being the adult who says where the party stops, not the adult who is taking the photograph: the no-fence page.

The ages nobody can rule on

I am not going to print a number, because any number I invent would be doing the job your own judgement should do. What I will say from eleven summers of watching parties come back down is that the children who struggled were rarely the youngest ones. They were the ones who had been promised a short walk to a famous rock, discovered at hour four that it was neither short nor nearly over, and lost heart. Tell them the truth at the car park and the day goes better.

Carrying a small child

Consider what you are proposing carefully. Eleven kilometres, three ascents, chained slab, and a descent that is the hard part of the day, with the weight and the balance of a carrier on your back the whole way. People do it. It makes every risk on this mountain larger, and it removes your hands from the chains at exactly the moments you would like them there.

The alternatives, which are good rather than consolation

Preikestolen. The neighbour on the north side of the same fjord: a flat plateau 604 metres above the water, about eight kilometres, four to five hours, no chains, and an hour from Stavanger instead of two and a half. It is the family answer and it is a genuinely fine day out, with the same absence of any railing to manage: the Preikestolen hike.

The Lysefjord from the water. Three and a half hours on an electric catamaran past Hengjanefossen and the Vagabond's Cave, with goats, sea eagles and Preikestolen seen from directly below. No walking at all, and for a lot of families this is the better memory: the cruise.

Flørli. A RIB out of Stavanger, an hour each way, four hours at a hamlet on the fjord with a wooden staircase of 4,444 steps beside the old penstock. You do not have to climb all of it, and the boat ride is half the point: Flørli 4444.

If you do take children

Start very early, so a slow day still ends in daylight: the start-time page. Carry more food than you think and more warm clothing than the car park suggests, because the plateau sits in fog while the car park is in sunshine. Agree a turnaround time and keep it, even if it means the boulder goes unseen. And decide before you leave who is responsible for the child near the edge, so it is never nobody.

The emergency number in Norway is 113, and mountain rescue is reached the same way.

A guided day with a family

A booked trip solves the driving and sets the pace, which are the two things a tired family most needs handled. Group sizes on these are small. If you want the flexibility to turn round when your own party has had enough, the private option is the one that bends: the private hike.

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