This is one of those walks everyone has seen in a photograph and very few people have read in figures. The photograph lasts a second; the walk, an entire day.
01 The figures, before the photograph
The classic route leaves from a car park at valley level and is 27 kilometres round trip with 1,100 metres of cumulative climb. The usual estimate is ten to twelve hours, breaks included, and it is not a conservative estimate.
The climb is not evenly spread. In the first kilometre and a half you gain some 450 metres, and then, after a breather, there is another steep section of about 330. In other words, the bulk of the effort is in the first four kilometres.
What comes next is a long plateau, with gentle ups and downs, crossings of dry streams and potholes cut by ice. It is beautiful and it is monotonous, and it is where the hours go: the rock is some 13.5 kilometres from the start.
Thirteen and a half kilometres out for a ledge of rock. And then the other thirteen and a half.
02 From eight hundred a year to eighty thousand
Until 2010, fewer than eight hundred people came up here each year. In 2016 the estimate was over eighty thousand. That is a hundredfold jump in six years, and no new road or campaign caused it: shared photography did.
That figure is worth keeping in mind because it explains everything else: the paid car parks, the online booking, the warning signs, the steps built on the hard sections and the emergency cabins spread across the plateau.
It also explains a tension you feel on the ground. A demanding mountain route designed for a few hundred walkers has had to absorb tens of thousands, and the infrastructure has always lagged behind the numbers.
03 The queue at the end
It has to be said plainly, because almost nobody says it: on a clear summer day, when you arrive you find a line. People wait their turn to step onto the slab, take the photograph and come back, one or two at a time.
The wait can stretch to a long hour in the middle of the day, and it has to be added to the ten or twelve hours of walking. If you are tight on time or light, that queue is the difference between coming back in daylight or with a head torch.
It is also worth knowing that the rock is not the only place the landscape can be seen from. Half the plateau overlooks the same valley, and if the aim is the view and not the portrait, you can skip the line entirely.
04 There is nowhere to shelter
This is the part most underestimated. Across the 27 kilometres there is nowhere to buy water or food, and no serviced mountain hut. Everything you are going to drink and eat, you carry from the bottom.
There are two emergency cabins along the route, meant for exactly what the name says: shelter if the weather turns or if someone cannot go on. They are not a planned stop in the day.
The other factor is weather. You are at eleven hundred metres in a region where it rains two days out of three, and the plateau is open ground without a tree. Fog can close in within minutes, and then the painted waymarks are all you have.
05 The season lasts four months
The window to do it on your own runs from 1 June to 30 September. Outside those dates, October to May, the official recommendation is to go with a guide, and it is not a formality: the plateau fills with snow and the route stops being obvious.
The logistics have a calendar too. The upper car park, which saves the four hardest kilometres of the climb, opens from 8 June to 30 September, and between 1 June and 15 September a place has to be booked online.
Nothing is charged for the route itself; what you pay for is parking. The valley car park has been around five hundred kroner in recent years, and the toll on the track up to the upper one is paid separately. It is worth checking prices and bookings before you set off.
06 How to put it together
The sensible version is to sleep in the valley the night before and set off at first light. In June, with the day practically endless at this latitude, you can start at five in the morning and have light to spare for whatever goes wrong.
The decision that changes the day most is where you park. From the upper car park you save the four steepest kilometres and the route drops to some twenty, which turns a punishing day into a long but ordinary one.
And one calendar recommendation: if you can, go in June or early September and on a weekday. You gain light, lose queue and move away from the August peak. What does not change in any case are the kilometres and the climb: you pay those either way.
