Kjeragbolten

Where it sits. Kjeragbolten is a boulder of about five cubic metres jammed in a narrow cleft near the summit plateau of Kjerag, the mountain that forms the southern wall at the inner end of the Lysefjord, in the eastern part of Sandnes Municipality in Rogaland. The rock sits at the top of a crevice with a 984-metre void beneath it, and the village of Lysebotn lies below at the head of the fjord. It is reached on foot, without ropes or climbing equipment, and it can be stepped onto from the side — a fact that accounts for both its fame and the queue that forms on it in summer.

How it got there. Rogaland lies in a structurally weak zone, and glacial meltwater exploited it, cutting and recutting this valley through as many as twenty-two cycles between the Scandinavian glaciations. The boulder was deposited during the last of those glaciations, roughly 50,000 years ago. What wedged it in place was the aftermath: as the ice sheet melted, the crust beneath rebounded upward faster than global sea level rose, and the walls of the crevice closed on the stone and held it. It is, in other words, not balanced at all but clamped, which is why it has not moved in the thousands of visits it now receives each summer, and why there is no record in Norwegian history of anyone falling from it.

On screen and online. Kjeragbolten's fame is a digital-era phenomenon rather than a cinematic one. It featured in the 2006 viral video Where the Hell is Matt?, in which the traveller Matt Harding danced on the boulder — an image reproduced so many times since that the rock has become a shorthand for a certain kind of travel photograph. A song sequence from the 2011 Tamil film Ko was shot with the leads standing on the stone. The mountain is also one of the world's best-known BASE jumping sites: the Kjerag walls have been jumped since the 1990s, exits are legal, and the sport has a long and sobering accident record here. If you are on the plateau in good weather you will very likely watch canopies open below you.

The hike. The route starts at Øygardstøl — the Eagle's Nest — a car park and café perched at about 640 metres on the mountain road above Lysebotn. The round trip is roughly eleven kilometres and takes most walkers six to ten hours, and the profile is the difficulty: three successive descents and ascents over rock ribs, with fixed chains on the steepest slabs, adding up to considerably more cumulative climbing than the map suggests. The rock is glacier-polished gneiss, which is superb when dry and treacherous when wet. This is a serious mountain day, not a stroll to a photo opportunity, and the weather on the plateau turns quickly; fog here has caused genuine navigation problems. Boots with real grip, wind and rain protection, food and water are all required, and the route is not suitable for young children.

At the boulder. The stone is easy to step onto from the uphill side. The queue is the complication: depending on the hour and on whether cruise ships are in Stavanger, waits of anything from a few minutes to well over an hour are normal, and the etiquette is to be quick about your photograph. The wider plateau is arguably better than the boulder itself — a rolling desert of bare rock and small tarns, with the Lysefjord a blue thread nearly a kilometre below and the Kjerag wall dropping away in one continuous sweep.

Getting there and timing. The mountain road to Øygardstøl climbs from Lysebotn in twenty-seven hairpin bends and through a spiralling tunnel, and it is a genuine attraction in its own right. It is closed by snow for much of the year, typically opening in late May or June and closing again in the autumn, and the walking season follows it: mid-June to mid-September is the dependable window, with snow patches lingering on the route into early July. Lysebotn is reached by car ferry along the Lysefjord from Lauvvika or by road from Sirdal in the east; a summer bus connects the ferry with the trailhead. Set out early. The most common mistake here is starting after lunch, meeting the queue, and finishing the descent in failing light.