Trollkjeften, the Mouth of the Troll

Sunday was hiking day. I have been biking around islands recently, but it was time to head to the mountains for a nice day trip. Joining my uncle, cousins, and a number of friends, we took the ferry to Tau, and drove to one of my favorite places to hike in this area: Trollkjeften.

I don’t know if this is the official name of this mountain ridge, riddled with caves, but the locals apparently call it that. Thomas heard rumors that there were a lot of caves in some mountain in the area when he was in the Norwegian military but old locals he spoke to had never heard of them. I can’t remember how he finally found them but he has been visiting them ever since. Each time Thomas brings his climbing equipment and we enter the almost hollow mouth of the troll by rappelling into one of the deep chasms on the top.

The Ghost in the Mountain

The last time I joined him here was in high school, on a camping trip with children from Stavanger’s karate club. He sent a friend and fellow climber up the mountain and into the caves the day before to hide the skeleton of a sheep. After we arrived and had all rappelled into the mountain’s interior, we set up candles around the edges of a large cavern. There Thomas proceeded to tell us the (fictional) story of a group of German soldiers who went into the mouth of the troll during the war while looking for Norwegian resistance forces who had earlier abandoned the caves. Thomas claimed that the Germans fled in fear of something inside the mountain but that one of their troops never emerged from the cave alive…

At just this point, and the timing just couldn’t have been better – one little boy suddenly jumped up and screamed at the top of his lungs. All of us turned our flashlights to him and saw that throughout the telling of the story he had been sitting on pile of bones… Only later that night did Thomas tell me that the bones were not human and I don’t think the other children were ever told. As best as I can remember, we all fled the cavern in fear.

Today Thomas told me that the boy was apparently not permanently traumatized by the shock and is now a university student in Oslo. However, he apparently told Thomas that he has never forgotten that moment of complete terror.

The entrance we chose to rappel into today involved dropping down about 23 meters and connected to a medium network of cave passageways. There are hundreds of such entrances and cave passageways, slimy dark granite slits found in a mountain which essentially amounts to a large pile of huge boulders left by the glaciers.

The kids loved this trip, as of course did we. Rappelling is lots of fun, and not something non-climbers get to do much for fun, not to mention cave exploration. We explored the mountain’s interior for a few hours, and then made our way back on a trail taking us through a mossy forest and a refreshing swim in the river below. All of the forests are covered in a bed of heather and blueberry bushes. At any point we could reach down for a bit of sweet blue goodness and like most hiking trips which include a pass through a forest in this region, the adventurer can scarcely avoid returning without fingers stained dark blue. The mountain waters are delicious and as always, we refilled our water bottles anywhere we came across running water.

I posted various pictures from our trip today here:

Trollkjeften Pictures