Briksdalsbreen

Where it sits. Briksdalsbreen is an outlet arm on the northern flank of the Jostedalsbreen icecap, in Stryn Municipality, Vestland. It lies at the head of Briksdalen, a side valley reached from Oldedalen, about 25 kilometres south of the village of Olden on the Nordfjord. The glacier tongue ends above a small meltwater lake, Briksdalsbrevatnet, at roughly 346 metres above sea level, inside Jostedalsbreen National Park. Jostedalsbreen itself is the largest icecap on mainland Europe, covering roughly 470 square kilometres, and Briksdalsbreen is the most accessible of its arms, which is why it has been the standard glacier excursion in western Norway since Victorian tourists began arriving by steamer.

The walk in. From the car park at Briksdalsbre Fjellstove the path climbs about three kilometres and 300 metres of height, taking 45 minutes to an hour at an ordinary pace. It is a graded track rather than a mountain route, crossing the Kleivafossen waterfall on a bridge where spray soaks everything in high melt season. Horse-drawn carts carried visitors up this path for over a century; since 2004 they have been replaced by open electric buggies known locally as troll cars, which run in season and shorten the walk considerably for those who need it. The final approach to the viewpoint over the lake is on rock and gravel.

A glacier that keeps moving the goalposts. Briksdalsbreen is one of the most closely watched glacier fronts in Norway, and its behaviour over recent decades is unusually dramatic. Through the late 1980s and 1990s it advanced, pushing forward several hundred metres in response to a run of heavy-snow winters on the icecap, an anomaly that made international news at a time when glaciers elsewhere were shrinking. From about 2000 it reversed sharply, retreating hundreds of metres in a decade and losing contact with the lake it had previously calved into. The result is that photographs taken twenty years apart from the same spot show what look like two different places, and the viewpoint has been moved more than once.

On screen, honestly. Briksdalsbreen has no landmark feature-film credit, and it would be a disservice to invent one. Its screen life is documentary and reference: glacier fronts in this valley have been filmed for climate reporting for decades, and the Jostedalsbreen ice is one of the standard European locations for that kind of work. In the animation context, the fjord and glacier country of western Norway is the material Disney's art department studied on its 2012 research trip before building the ice and snow of Frozen. Nothing was photographed for the film here or anywhere else in Norway, since the film is entirely computer-generated, but the blue of compressed glacial ice that recurs throughout it is a real optical property visible at this front.

What is actually there today. The ice reads as blue-white and heavily crevassed, streaked with dark bands of trapped rock. The lake below is opaque grey-green with suspended rock flour, and small icebergs float in it when the front is calving. Walking onto the ice is not permitted without a certified guide, and the area immediately below the tongue is roped off because of icefall and rockfall; the risk is real and the closures are enforced. Guided glacier walks operate on other arms of Jostedalsbreen, notably Nigardsbreen on the southern side, which has better access to walkable ice. The valley sides on the approach carry the marks of the ice at its Little Ice Age maximum in the eighteenth century, when the front reached far enough down to threaten farms; parish records from that period document compensation claims against advancing ice.

The wider valley. Oldedalen is a long, narrow farming valley with waterfalls dropping directly onto the road, and it makes the drive as much of an attraction as the destination. Nearby, the Loen Skylift, opened in 2017, climbs to 1,011 metres at Hoven in about five minutes and gives an aerial view over the Nordfjord and the peaks around Lodalen. The Kjenndalsbreen arm, in the neighbouring valley, is quieter and reached by a road that ends at a lake beneath the ice. That lake, Lovatnet, has a grim history: rockfalls from the Ramnefjell face in 1905 and again in 1936 generated waves that destroyed the lakeside farms and killed more than 130 people in total, and memorial stones stand near the water.

Getting there and timing. Olden is a cruise port and road junction on the Nordfjord, about four hours from Bergen and five and a half from Oslo. The Briksdalen valley road is open roughly from May to October and closed by snow in winter; the troll cars, café and facilities operate through the summer season only. July and August bring cruise coach traffic in the middle of the day, so early morning or after five is markedly quieter. Waterproofs matter here more than warm layers: the valley is a rain trap, and the path is exposed to spray at the falls even in fine weather.