Home / Journal / Trollstigen in opening week
Dispatch · Møre og Romsdal · 1,400 wordsEleven hairpins, a 9% gradient, and snow walls still standing two metres above the roof of the car. The pass in late May is a different road from the one on the postcards.
The barrier at Sogge bridge came up on a Thursday. By Friday morning we were the fourth car of the season on the road, behind a delivery van, a county maintenance pickup and a man on a motorcycle who had clearly been waiting in Åndalsnes for a week to do exactly this.
Trollstigen closes some time in October and does not reopen until the Norwegian Public Roads Administration has cut a channel through drifts that can reach eight or nine metres on the upper bends. The work takes several weeks. Rotary ploughs chew inward from both ends, then a survey team assesses the slopes above the road for cornices and hanging slabs; if the avalanche risk is judged too high, the opening slips regardless of how clear the tarmac looks.
The result, in the first days, is a corridor. On the fourth and fifth hairpins the walls stood well above the car on both sides, cut clean and blue-white at the edges where the plough had sliced them. You drive between them and see nothing but sky and snow until the road turns and the whole Isterdalen valley opens up beneath you.
From Åndalsnes the approach runs 15 kilometres up Isterdalen with the Trollveggen rock face — the tallest vertical wall in Europe, a kilometre of overhanging gneiss — on your right. The valley floor is flat farmland and then, abruptly, it is not: the road tips up and starts turning back on itself.
Eleven bends, each numbered and each with a stone retaining wall built by hand between 1928 and 1936. The bends are tight enough that a coach needs both lanes, which is the single most important thing to know about driving the pass. Meeting one on a blind hairpin is a reversing exercise. In opening week there are no coaches, which is the whole argument for going then.
Halfway up, the Stigfossen waterfall drops 320 metres directly beside the road and across a bridge you cross at bend six. In late May, with snowmelt at full volume, it does not so much fall as detonate. The car was wet on the left side for the rest of the day.
The summit plateau at 858 metres holds the visitor centre and two architect-designed viewing platforms by Reiulf Ramstad, one of which cantilevers out over a 200-metre drop with a glass parapet and a floor that ends in nothing. In opening week the centre was still shuttered, the car park half snow, and the walkway to the platform ankle-deep in slush. Nobody minded. There were six of us up there in an hour.
By mid-July the same car park holds two hundred vehicles and the platform has a queue.
The pass is not difficult to drive. It is difficult to drive while looking at it. Stop at the marked lay-bys; there are enough of them, and using them is the difference between a memorable morning and a scraped wing mirror.
| Window | Conditions | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Opening week, 07:00–10:00 | Snow walls, empty road, wet surfaces | The best version of this road |
| June, before 09:00 | Full waterfall volume, light traffic | Excellent |
| July–August, 10:00–16:00 | Coaches, campervans, full car park | Avoid if you have any choice |
| September, any time | Quiet again, autumn colour, closure risk rising | Very good; check road status |
| October onward | Usually closed | Do not plan around it |
Yes, without hesitation, and we would accept the same trade-off: closed facilities, patchy weather, a wet car and the slight nervousness of driving between walls of snow. What you get in exchange is the road as a piece of engineering rather than as an attraction — a thing eleven times folded into a mountainside because there was no other way over.
The broader driving context, including tolls, ferries and the other seventeen National Scenic Routes, is in our road trips guide. If you want it inside a full week, it forms day seven of Fjords in Seven Days.
