Qualla: Folgefonna National Park

Folgefonna National Park: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Espen Skaar, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name gives it away, if you know Old Norse. Folge means a thin layer of snow, and fonn means a mass of snow -- or a glacier made of snow. Folgefonna is snow upon snow, compacted over centuries into 168 square kilometers of ice that make it Norway's third largest ice cap. When Queen Sonja opened the national park surrounding it on 14 May 2005, she was dedicating not just a park but a monument to accumulation: the slow, patient work of precipitation in one of the wettest corners of a wet country, where an estimated 5,500 millimeters of rain and snow fall each year.

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Image: Espen Skaar | CC BY-SA 3.0

Folgefonna National Park: Three Glaciers on One Peninsula

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:BIL, Public domain. Folgefonna is not a single glacier but three: Nordre Folgefonna in the north, Midtre Folgefonna in the middle, and Sondre Folgefonna in the south. Together they dominate the Folgefonna peninsula, which juts into the Hardangerfjord between the municipalities of Kvinnherad, Etne, a...

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Image: User:BIL | Public domain

Folgefonna National Park: Where Eagles Hunt Ptarmigan

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Svein Harkestad, CC BY-SA 3.0. The park's ecology follows a vertical gradient that begins at the fjord's edge and climbs into barren alpine terrain. Below the tree line, red deer roam pine forests so abundantly that Kvinnherad Municipality leads the entire country in the number of red deer harvested annually. ...

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Image: Svein Harkestad | CC BY-SA 3.0

Folgefonna National Park: Flowers at the Edge of Ice

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PeltonMan, CC BY-SA 3.0. The plant life near the glaciers defies reasonable expectations. Arctic cottongrass, mossy mountain heather, and rufine sedge grow right up to the edge of the ice, thriving in soils that barely qualify as soil at all. Hardy species like three-leaved rush, dwarf willow, and stiff ...

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Image: PeltonMan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Folgefonna National Park: Ice in a Warming World

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aqwis, CC BY-SA 3.0. Folgefonna's glaciers are monuments to a climate that is changing. Like ice caps across Norway and the wider Arctic, they are measurably smaller than they were a century ago, their edges retreating up the mountainsides and exposing rock that has been buried under ice for millenni...

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Image: Aqwis | CC BY-SA 3.0