qupkene / Hikes / Gaustatoppen

Telemark

Gaustatoppen

A big view, a field of boulders, and a funicular built by the military.

Gaustatoppen stands alone above the surrounding country, which is why the claim attached to it is that on a genuinely clear day you can see something like a sixth of mainland Norway from the top. Clear days that good are rarer than the claim suggests, but the isolation is real and so is the view.

The walk

From Stavsro it is roughly four kilometres and six hundred metres of ascent, almost all of it across boulder field. This is slow ground: ankle-turning, tiring, and much harder in poor visibility because the route is marked rather than trodden into an obvious path. Allow more time than the distance suggests.

Gaustabanen

A funicular runs inside the mountain, originally built for military communications during the Cold War and later opened to the public. It is a genuinely odd piece of infrastructure and it is also a legitimate answer if the boulder field is beyond someone in your party.

Navigation in cloud

A marked route across featureless boulders in fog is exactly the situation where people follow the wrong line of cairns. This is a good place to have actually practised taking and walking a bearing rather than assuming the phone will handle it.