About this site

Who writes here

My name is Ingeborg Tysdal. I grew up in Jørpeland, the town three kilometres below the Preikestolen car park in Strand, and I still live there. When I was small, the walk up to Hyvlatånnå — the plane blade, which is what the rock is called in dialect here — was a Sunday thing you did with a thermos and mentioned to nobody. Stavanger Turistforening had put a 44-bed cabin up there in 1949, a road reached it in the 1960s, and that road is what turned a climb into a day walk. Now roughly 350,000 people a year come up, and the two car parks between them hold about a thousand cars.

This site exists because of one conversation, repeated for twenty years. Somebody stops me in Jørpeland and asks where the ticket office is. There is no ticket office. Then they ask how long the viewpoint takes, and I have to explain that it is not a viewpoint: it is about 8 km of uneven ground and four to five hours of their day. Nobody had told them, because the photographs that brought them here were taken from a drone or from a boat and never show the boulder field.

What this site is, and what it is not

It is not official anything. I do not speak for the landowners, for Strand municipality, for Preikestolen Fjellstue or for the trekking association whose volunteers paint the red T on the rock. I am not a guide, I run no tours, and I have no arrangement with any operator beyond the affiliate links described below. Nobody sees a page here before it goes up.

What I do is narrow. I say plainly that nobody sells a ticket to Preikestolen (is the hike free), so everything bookable is therefore something else: the ride out from Stavanger, the guide, or the boat that shows you the cliff from below (the bookings page). I am exact about how hard the walk is (how hard is it) because that is where nearly all the disappointment comes from. And I do not soften the fact that there is no railing at the top, which is a deliberate choice by the people who manage the land rather than an oversight (is there a fence).

How it is written

In the first person, because a person wrote it. Where I describe what reviewers say, I describe what recurs across many of them rather than lifting a sentence out of one, and I name a guide only where a reviewer named one. Ratings and review counts are the figures I noted at my last reading; the booking modules show the live ones, and they move. The five reviews are on the reviews hub.

I publish no prices. They change every season and a figure left on a page is wrong within months. What does not change is the structure of the day: what is free, what is unavoidable, what is optional. That is the costs page, and it has no numbers in it on purpose.

I also promise nothing about the weather, the view or your safety. The plateau is often in cloud, hikers have to be helped off this mountain every year, and people have died here. Those pages are weather and rain, how safe is it and has anyone fallen, and they are written as plainly as I can manage without being lurid about it.

How it is funded

Through affiliate links to GetYourGuide. If you book a hike or a cruise through a link here, the site earns a commission and you pay no more than you otherwise would. It costs me nothing to tell you that the trail is free, that a guide is optional in summer, and that with a car you need none of it, and I have said all three on most pages of this site. That should tell you what the commission does and does not buy. The full statement is on the disclosure page.

Corrections

Bus timetables change with the season, the car park changes its staffed hours, and I get things wrong. If you have just been and something here is out of date, write to me at [email protected] and I will fix it. The contact page says what is useful to include.