Hægefjell

🛣️ 🚗 ✅ The road is open!

This is an overview drone-topo, to find parking, trails, route locations and to plan and tick your adventures. The routes that the authors of this guide has climbed is drawn in topo and route/pitch description is added. You can use these descriptions to climb the routes, but we recommend supplementing them with other, more detailed guidebooks for a more accurate description of routes and topos. This is intended as a source of inspiration, not as a complete climbing guide. We recommend the guidebook "Hægefjell Nissedal" from Gryttr Forlag (ISBN 978-82-691287-3-4), which contains detailed descriptions of the 16 most popular routes on the mountain. If you have climbed a route that is not well described in this guide, please contact us with supplementing information so we can draw it in the topo and make a better description.

Hægefjell today stands as a mountain for all who love climbing clean, solid granite over multiple pitches. Located inland in Southern Norway's Nissedal municipality, it sits fairly centrally placed. The wall sees many visitors from across Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Outside of Lofoten, few mountains in Norway attract as many traveling climbers. Mobile reception beneath the wall is almost nonexistent, making evening conversations around the campfire even more lively. Watching the sunset bathe the face of Hægefjell in golden light is a fitting reward for sore toes and aching Achilles tendons.

The mountain offers routes from 7b to 4+, with lengths ranging between 200 and 550 meters. Hægefjell is naturally divided into three sectors: a steep left-hand side, a central section, and a right-hand side with more moderate grades. Most routes are partially bolted, but four great classics take you from bottom to top entirely on trad gear: Via Lara (the most climbed), Sternschnuppe, Mot Sola, and Hegar. The rock quality is excellent and solid throughout.

If you're looking to experience one of Norway's finest and most accessible multi-pitch trad routes, this is the place. And if you're ready to take a step further and challenge yourself, you'll find inspiring routes at every grade.

The safest and best descent is to walk north along the summit ridge back down to camp — a beautiful hike taking about an hour at an easy pace. We strongly recommend walking down rather than rappelling; it is much safer and part of the Hægefjell experience.

Routes on the mountain were climbed with aid techniques in earlier times, but free climbing really began toward the late 1980s and early 1990s. The two most important figures from this era were Øyvind Moss and Götz Wiechmann. Independently of each other, they climbed many of the most obvious lines on the mountain—several of which are today considered the greatest classics on Hægefjell.

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, more lines were established, requiring the placement of fixed bolts. German climbers in particular contributed several hard, high-end routes. Some of the activity from the early 2000s is captured in the legendary "Olsen Driver" blog—highly recommended reading for those who can understand Norwegian. Bolts were placed only where natural protection was impossible, and usually with some spacing. On easier routes, bolts tend to be a bit closer together. This bolting ethic has been maintained on newer routes and remains the norm on the mountain.

Grading on Hægefjell
Götz Wiechmann collected many of the route descriptions and published the guidebook Gå Telemark in 2006. Many routes were established by German climbers, and for a long time, the standard was to use German UIAA grades with a three-part system inspired by grading systems in the Alps. For example, in the handwritten topo for "Grenlandsekspressen," the route is graded 7+/8- N, B+, E2+. The first grade (7+/8-) is the technical grade in Norwegian scale. "B+" represents the adventure grade, ranging from A (safe) to D (serious). "E2+" indicates the seriousness: E1 means all protection is solid with no big runouts; E5 would imply long runouts and questionable protection (and belays).

Depending on which guidebook you read, you’ll find a mix of grading systems at Hægefjell: UIAA grades with adventure and seriousness ratings, and Norwegian grades are the most common. In this guide, we’ve chosen to translate all grades into the French system. Sometimes the translation is not straightforward, so please see the grades as a rough guideline. If you find any grades that seem clearly wrong, we appreciate your feedback.