One Night in Snøhetta’s Remote Hiking Cabin in the Norwegian Wilderness

Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

This past spring, my friend Kevin and I were tossing around some ideas of where we could take a summer trip. "How about backpacking in New Hampshire?" I suggested. Easy drive, little to no planning, low cost. 

"Or we could go to Norway," he said, clearly thinking in a different vein. 

As it turns out, a new budget airline, Norse Atlantic, was running mouthwateringly cheap promotional summer fares. I hadn’t been out of the country since before the pandemic and was itching to go. We got two other friends on board. Who cares how expensive Norway is when you’re saving so much money on airfare? we justified to ourselves and one another with each purchase and reservation we made. Right?!

Kevin had just graduated from Yale with an M.Arch and, eager to gorge himself on some Scandinavian design, learned that Snøhetta—a Norwegian firm he admired—had recently reinstated a complex of hiking cabins, called Tungestølen, on the edge of one arm of Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in continental Europe. (After a 2011 cyclone destroyed the original Tungestølen cabin, the local community raised funds for a rebuild that resulted in an international design competition Snøhetta won in 2015.) 

Tungestølen, one of many cabins in a national network maintained by the Norwegian National Trekking Association, was more or less along our road trip route, Kevin said. Should we stay for a night? 

And how could we not.  

Saturday

8:45 p.m.: One of the benefits that comes with traveling to a high latitude Scandinavian destination in July—other than the chance to crack plenty of stale Midsommar jokes—is that you can squeeze a lot more into the daylight hours. My friends and I have been ambitious with our scheduling for this road trip, and so we aren’t due to arrive at Tungestølen until late in the evening.  

At the town of Hafslo, our path turns off a main "highway," the road narrowing into one lane barely wide enough to let a single car through. Hugging the shore of a fjord, we drive into the dark maws of several tunnels cut through rock, where the threat of another oncoming car leads us to grip our arm rests. But we make it through, past a small structure with a tiny credit card reader (an honor system for the $2 road toll) and the isolated village of Veitastrond. A few more miles north along the now-unpaved gravel road, and we spot it: The complex of pentagonal wooden cabins sits on a rocky hill, seemingly in conversation with the mountains and glaciers around it. The vertical, gray-brown pine paneling recalls a dense alpine forest; the doors are painted a green that’s lighter and softer than the vibrant valley grasses.  

We trundle up the road, past a few unaffiliated campsites and small cabins, with little sense of what awaits us. Supposedly, dinner tonight and breakfast and lunch tomorrow are included in our stay, but the translation on the booking site had been poor—the lunch description simply read, bewilderingly, "four slices"—and because our foreign SIM cards only include data, we hadn’t been able to call reception to let them know we’d be arriving late. In the past several days, I’ve developed an unhealthy attachment to Nugatti, Norway’s (admittedly subpar) answer to Nutella. I imagine digging into it by the spoonful for dinner when we’re inevitably told the kitchen is closed.

9:00 p.m.: As it turns out, our worries were for naught. The Tungestølen chef and manager are there to greet us at the main cabin, where we leave our shoes by the door and pad out into the communal space. The Norwegian Trekking Association’s 550 cabins range from full-service (manager or ranger, chef, rentable linens) to rudimentary (simple lean-to structures). I imagine Tungestølen is one of the nicest, yet it’s clear that many of the other guests are still using it functionally, as a hiking stopover.

The main room is long and open, the floor, walls and ceiling all a consistent light timber, with exposed beams and generous windows, one of which overlooks the edge of the glacier at the end of the sprawling valley floor. Cushioned built-in benches run along two walls. The cabin feels quintessentially Norwegian: clean and spare, yet undeniably cozy.

These cabins are clearly designed to have a porous border with nature; though angular, they’re devoid of loud features or colors that distract from the valley around.

The other more punctual guests have already eaten dinner and are laying around in the lounge reading and playing board games, but a table is quickly set for us. The fresh wildflowers arranged on the rough-hewn banquet table bring to mind the atmosphere of a farm-to-table restaurant more than a rustic, isolated glacier cabin. We aren’t complaining.

The chef sounds stricken while he shares the menu: the beef bourguignon, he tells us grimly, is not up to his standards. When it arrives, it’s delicious, and we trip over ourselves to tell him so. But this only seems to upset him more: clearly our palates are not to be trusted.