Most large ski resorts sit in a valley with a mountain on one side. Trysil sits on the mountain, and the mountain stands on its own.
Look at the elevation map above. Trysilfjellet rises as a single dome out of an otherwise fairly flat forest landscape in Innlandet county, close to the Swedish border. There is no range around it, no valley dictating where you can build. Just a mountain.
The shape explains the resort
That shape is the entire reason Trysil could become Norway's largest alpine resort.
When the mountain is a dome, there are slopes in every direction from the same summit. The resort could therefore grow around the whole mountain instead of being squeezed into a valley, and today it consists of several connected areas on different sides. In practice it also means there is nearly always a sheltered side, which is unusually valuable on a windy day.
The flip side of the same thing: the vertical is what it is. A lone mountain cannot borrow height from its neighbours.
The numbers, and why they differ
The summit sits at 1,132 metres above sea level. The largest vertical drop in the resort is 685 metres according to Store norske leksikon.
When it comes to the number of runs and lifts, the answer depends on who you ask and when. Store norske leksikon gives 68 runs totalling 78 kilometres and 31 lifts. SkiStar, which operates the resort, gives 69 runs, 41 lifts and 81 kilometres of prepared piste, with the highest lift-served point at 1,100 metres and the longest run at 5.4 kilometres.
Both are reasonable. The lift count includes or excludes children's lifts and carpets depending on how you count, and a resort is rebuilt continuously. The point is not which figure is right but that figures of that kind age. The vertical and the shape of the mountain do not.
What a relief shows that a piste map does not
A piste map is drawn to make the runs clear, and it therefore distorts the terrain deliberately. Slopes are straightened, distances compressed and the whole mountain twisted into a view that does not exist in reality.
An elevation relief does the opposite. It does not show where the runs go, but it shows why they go where they go: where the ridges sit, where the valleys collect snow, and how steep it actually is on the different sides. If you have skied there, you recognise your own side of the mountain in seconds.
On the wall
The Trysil piece covers a slightly tighter area than most of our subjects, precisely because the mountain stands alone. Zoom out too far and the dome becomes a small knob in a sea of forest, and then the place disappears. More on that trade-off in the article on vertical exaggeration.
If you ski on the Swedish side instead, there is Åre, and further north Hemavan.