A road trip to Norway's best view

By Anthony HamFeatures correspondent

Kjeåsen is famous as one of the most isolated inhabited corners of Norway. And while getting here is a wild adventure, it's the views from the top that truly stir the spirit.

The road to Kjeåsen, a mountain farm deep in western Norway's fjord country, looks like a route to nowhere.

Hugging the shoreline of Simadalfjord, a tiny arm of Hardangerfjord, the road wanders from the village of Eidfjord past wooden waterside cabins and oxblood-red farm buildings. It rarely sees any traffic, which is just as well because the margin for error is measured in inches: one lapse in concentration and you'll be in the water.

Up ahead, the outlook for a road trip is not promising. Sheer rock walls, so steep that they keep the valley floor in shadow for months every year, close the Simadalen valley off from the rest of the world on three sides. Where the fjord ends, the road passes through forests of pine and spruce, crosses a rushing stream fed by waterfalls and then arrives at a fork. Turn right and the road soon peters out in the forest, its onward path blocked by rock walls hundreds of metres high. Turn left in the direction of Kjeåsen and the journey seems equally unpromising for want of any obvious way forward.

I am travelling this road because my destination is no ordinary place. Kjeåsen sits 600 vertical metres above Simadalfjord, and its small collection of farm buildings is famous throughout Norway as one of the most isolated inhabited corners of the country. For most of its long history, there wasn't even a road up to where it sits, perched on a narrow grassy ledge, hidden from the outside world but in thrall of one of the country's most spectacular views.

Back then, it was one of the most difficult, most beautiful places to reach anywhere in Norway. To get to Kjeåsen involved a perilous, two-hour climb, using rope ladders and rope bridges across a landscape slickened with ice. There were once as many as 13 children at Kjeåsen, and their daily commute to the school in Simadal was a dangerous four-hour round trip. Access was so difficult that one of the buildings still extant at Kjeåsen took 30 years to build, back at the end of the 19th Century, because supplies had to be carried up the dangerous mountain trail on the backs of the builders.

To have lived there by choice, cut off from the world, must have been a conscious act of escape or of solitude. From where I am, down below, where Kjeåsen is just a name on a road sign, it's impossible to imagine. In fact, it's easy to wonder whether Kjeåsen exists at all.

There are many theories about the first people to settle here. "One is that it was a soldier who deserted from the Swedish army," said Heidi Kvamsdal, a photographer, local historian and Eidfjord native. "Another theory is that the first ones tried to escape from the Black Death [in the 14th Century]". In its aftermath, said Kvamsdal, people abandoned Kjeåsen for more than 150 years. But "we know that there has been permanent settlement there since early 16th Century."

News of Kjeåsen first reached a fascinated outside world in the 1950s when Swedish writer Bror Ekström visited and wrote a book called Folket på Kjeåsen (People of Kjeåsen). The book told the story of a farm community, unique and tiny, of a world unto itself; of mountain families cut off from the outside world, yet somehow surviving against the elements. It was a story that juxtaposed inaccessibility with miraculous beauty. And their stories of isolation and resilience captured the public's imagination.

In 1967, a woman named Bjørg Wiik moved to Kjeåsen to help her aunt look after the farm, and she was joined by her sister Guri in 1975 when their aunt passed away. The two sisters, formerly from Oslo, lived here alone until Guri's death in 1999. Bjørg lived here year-round until 2019, when she was in her 90s, and she still returns with family members to pass the summer.

The 8km access road was not finished until 1975. But the road did nothing to diminish Kjeåsen's mystique. Instead, it was like an open invitation for the curious. Elin Kvale, a local guide who arrived in Eidfjord in 1975 when her husband worked on the road's construction, would later take the first tourists to Kjeåsen. She remembers how "all kinds of people came; some in wheelchairs, some very old, even people who were blind. They all had a common goal: they needed to visit this place. Most of the people had read the book, some several times. They felt like they were walking on holy ground."

Despite the road, Guri and Bjørg never learned how to drive – they preferred to walk or, if they needed supplies, they asked friends down in the valley to come up. In any case, even a road was no match for the depths of a Norwegian winter. As recently as 1994, the sisters were cut off from the outside world for more than a month by 3m-deep snow. Provided they had planned carefully and stockpiled sufficient supplies, the snows were less of a problem than the strong, icy winds that can rage at these altitudes: to this day, the roofs of all the farm buildings here are held in place by anchored steel cables. And on one occasion when the sisters fell ill with influenza while cut off by snows, a helicopter had to airdrop medicine and food to the stricken inhabitants.

Autumn was always Bjørg's favourite season at Kjeåsen, says Kvale, and when I begin my own drive up here on a cold and cloudy November morning, the road appears deserted. But before I begin, I have to wait. The road is so narrow that a one-way system operates: cars driving up to Kjeåsen must do so on the hour; those descending leave half an hour later.

As the clock ticks over, with not another vehicle in sight, I turn onto the Kjeåsen road and begin to climb. Beneath towering cliffs, the road cuts a sinuous path, hairpin bend after hairpin bend, switchback after switchback, gaining altitude all the while. This part of the road is only 2.5km long, but already the valley is far down below.

Up above, there is suddenly nowhere for the road to go, and so it plunges into a tunnel hewn roughly from the rock, climbing through the inner chambers of the mountain. The tunnel is just 2.5km long, but it seems longer due to the knowledge that this dark corridor through a mountain is all that connects Kjeåsen to the outside world.

As I emerge into the light, it takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust. Clouds swirl through the treetops. A mountain river thunders down off great boulders. There are no signs of life.

Kjeåsen's tight gathering of wooden huts with stone foundations is as deserted as the road. Above the huts, the hillside climbs steeply into the cloud forest. Down below, narrow grassy fields, where Bjørg and her sister kept sheep and grew some of their own food, drop steeply down to a shelf from where… the view!

For a moment, the clouds part and a near-perfect tableau of Norway's fjord country extends out across waters turned turquoise in the sunshine. Impossibly steep rock walls rise into the snows and there is a distant glimpse of Eidfjord. For a moment, I wish that I could live up here on the heights of Kjeåsen and sit for hours on end to gaze with wonder upon this, one of the most beautiful views in Norway.

And then the clouds close in again, as they often do outside the short summer window. The view is gone and I am alone here, cut off from world which suddenly feels a very long way away. I shudder. But there is a wild charm to the isolation, a delicious sensation of being beyond the world and its noise and having this special place all to myself.

For the first time, I understand that, for those who lived here, the isolation was never the enemy and was only rarely an inconvenience. In fact, remoteness was the whole point, a precious way of life that depended on a closeness to nature and seclusion from the wider world.

"Most of the winters were just good days," said Kvale, who knew the Wiik sisters well. "They cared for the sheep, and for all the birds and other wild animals."

And in summer, their lives were the envy of those down below by the fjord: "In Eidfjord, the soil was not so fertile, and the sun stayed away for months at a time," said Kvale. "Kjeåsen has the sun whole year, the soil is more fertile, and it was much closer to the reindeer. That was essential to their life support, as was the fish in the mountain lakes."

It was, Bjørg once told Kvale, "Easy to dream while sitting outside the house on a nice sunny day in autumn. The air is so crystal clear. Complete peace."

On her frequent visits to spend time with Bjørg in her home, Kvale remembers there was "a very special atmosphere of calm and peace". About once a year, Bjørg visited her childhood home in Oslo. "But after a few days, she longed to return to the peace and good life at Kjeåsen. Bjørg said often that Kjeåsen was her paradise."

Up here in silent meadows, it takes very little imagination to understand why.

The Open Road is a celebration of the world's most remarkable highways and byways, and a reminder that some of the greatest travel adventures happen via wheels.

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