The bare plateau
Rock and clear pools with no trees and no houses.
G.Lanting — CC BY 3.0 · Aconcagua — CC BY-SA 3.0 · W. Bulach — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Davide Mauro — CC BY-SA 4.0
The longest road tunnel in the world: twenty-four and a half kilometres under the mountain between Aurland and Lærdal, opened in 2000 to link Oslo and Bergen by a road open all year. Its problem is that half an hour of driving in a single tube exhausts and disorients a driver, which was answered with three wide caverns along its length lit in blue and yellow to imitate a sunrise and break the monotony. The tunnel is free, and it is what you use in winter when the Snow Road above it is shut — the difference between the two being the difference between crossing the mountain and seeing it.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
The Snow Road — Snøvegen in Norwegian — crosses the Aurlandsfjellet plateau between the villages of Aurland and Lærdal, forty-seven kilometres climbing from sea level to above the tree line and then descending the other side. The name is a literal description: the road is cut open each spring by ploughs slicing through the accumulated snow, which they leave standing as two walls that can be higher than a car well into June. And on the plateau there are no trees, no houses and almost nothing — bare rock, clear pools, and snow lying in the shadows all summer. The scene belongs more to the Arctic than to western Europe, and it is half an hour from the green fjord below. The road is **closed by snow from roughly October to May**, and its only winter alternative is the Lærdal tunnel, which runs twenty-four and a half kilometres under the mountain. The Stegastein viewpoint sits at its southern end, so the two are naturally taken together.
Rock and clear pools with no trees and no houses.
Cut by the ploughs in spring and standing into summer.
Between Aurland and Lærdal, Aurlandsfjellet