Classroom lesson · Trollstigen - the most beautiful drive · 🇳🇴 Norway

Trollstigen - the most beautiful drive

A mountain road with 11 hairpin bends and a waterfall in the middle

The winding hairpin bends of Trollstigen mountain road in Norway

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Trollstigen, or 'the Troll's Path', is a mountain road in western Norway. It zig-zags up a steep cliff in 11 sharp hairpin bends, with a huge waterfall thundering right next to it. It is often called one of the most beautiful drives in the world.

Tell me more

The road climbs 400 metres up the mountain in less than a kilometre as the crow flies. To handle that, engineers folded it back on itself again and again - 11 hairpin bends in total. Each bend is just wide enough for one car at a time, so traffic takes turns.

Right in the middle of the climb, the Stigfossen waterfall pours down beside the road. After heavy rain or snowmelt, it roars so loudly that you can hear it from the top. There is a little stone bridge that crosses the falls. Mist often soaks the road and the drivers.

Trollstigen was opened in 1936. It took eight years to build. The workers had to blast rock from the cliff face, sometimes hanging on ropes, to carve out a path. It is closed every winter because of snow and ice, and reopens each May when the snow finally melts.

At the top, there is a viewing platform that sticks straight out from the cliff edge. From up there you can see the whole valley, the waterfall, and the tiny cars far below crawling up like ants.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01Why might engineers build a road in zig-zags instead of straight up the mountain?
  2. 02What would it be like to work on a road like this, hanging on ropes from a cliff?
  3. 03Trollstigen is closed half the year. What other things in your part of the world close in winter and reopen in summer?
Try this

Classroom activity

On grid paper, sketch a steep hill. Now design a road that climbs it. Choose between straight up (short but very steep), or zig-zag (longer but easier). Compare both - what's the trade-off? Measure the difference in path length.