Gaustatoppen: the summit that sees a sixth of Norway
1,883 metres, a view over some 50,000 square kilometres, a train inside the mountain and a town below that the sun does not reach in winter. On Gaustatoppen and Rjukan.
Gaustatoppen rises 1,883 metres above sea level just south of Rjukan in Telemark. On a clear day the view from the top covers an area of around 50,000 square kilometres, which is where the old line about seeing a sixth of Norway comes from.
The mountain is easy to pick out from a distance: a long, even ridge climbing to a summit at one end, standing on its own in lower country. That shape is what gives it the view, and what makes it read so clearly in relief.
1,882 or 1,883 metres
The Norwegian encyclopedia Store norske leksikon gives 1,882 metres. Gaustabanen, the railway that takes visitors inside the mountain, gives 1,883, which is also the figure on our nameplate. The difference is a metre and comes down to which survey and which point you go by. Why mountain heights shift like that is covered in our piece on how a mountain's height is measured.
A sixth of Norway
According to Store norske leksikon the view from the summit takes in around 50,000 square kilometres: Jotunheimen to the north, the forests towards Oslo to the east, Hardangervidda to the west and, to the southeast, all the way to the sea. Mainland Norway is a little over 320,000 square kilometres, so a sixth is a generous rounding, but not an exaggeration of scale. Gaustabanen says that on a clear day you can see more than 60 peaks.
The reason is simple geography. Gaustatoppen stands alone, with nothing higher nearby to block the view. The same thing makes the mountain visible from very far away.
The train inside the mountain
If you would rather not walk up, you can ride through the mountain. Gaustabanen was built in 1959 as a NATO military installation and opened to the public in 2010. According to the operator, a train first runs a little over 800 metres horizontally into the rock, then a funicular climbs about a kilometre steeply up inside the tunnel, from roughly 1,150 to 1,800 metres. The trip takes about a quarter of an hour.
The other option is to hike. A kilometre south of the highest summit stands Gaustahytta, a mountain hut built in 1893.
The town the sun does not reach
Below the mountain, in the deep Vestfjord valley, lies Rjukan. The valley is so narrow and the mountains so high that the sun does not reach the town centre for several months each winter.
Twice, the answer was engineering. In 1928 the Krossobanen cable car was built to lift residents up into the sun. And in October 2013 the Sun Mirror was inaugurated: three sun-tracking mirrors, 51 square metres in total, at 742 metres about 450 metres above the square, casting a patch of light of around 600 square metres onto the town square below. The idea dates from 1913 and the engineer Oscar Kittelsen, according to the industrial heritage organisation Industriarven.
Ridge and valley on one piece
The Gaustatoppen piece holds the whole long ridge from Gaustaråen to the summit and, down to the north, the deep Vestfjord valley with Rjukan. The contrast between the two is the subject: the broad mountain standing in the sun and the narrow valley that does not.
More mountains and fjords are among our 3D topographic maps, and if you want a square that does not exist yet, you can make it yourself in FRMD by You.
