A Riverside Stopover

24/08/2025

After leaving our glacier camping we were wanting to push on a little before stopping for the night. The road took us up through the bleak high moorland of Saltfjellet where we buffeted by the wind and were cold enough to turn the heater on. We spotted our first reindeer, but we were on a stretch of road with nowhere to pull over and take a photo.

The Arctic Circle Centre

We felt we had to stop at the Arctic Circle centre to snap the obligatory photo. We made a desultory attempt at browsing in the gift shop, which also had some interesting taxidermy, including a large polar bear. Not to mention some animatronic trolls. In all it was quite surreal although we were a little to tired to do it justice.

It was nice to mark the crossing. This is the furthest North either of us have been as we didn’t end up crossing the arctic circle when we went to Iceland.

Outside the building was a memorial to the Russian and Yugoslavian soldiers who died in forced labour camps under Nazi occupation.

Riverside Parking

A little further along we came to the Nordland national park centre, we pulled in but decided it was too busy and noisy for parking overnight. It felt like a truck stop with noisy generators running.

A quick look on Park4Night indicated there was a much quieter stop just over the road. We drove down a dirt track to a camping spot by the river. It was an area with fire pits (the right to a fire pit seems to be enshrined in Scandinavian tradition) and space between trees, probably more for tent camping but there was definitely room and firm enough ground for vans.

This was a free spot which was very welcome. There was a toilet, but it was basically a hole over a very full bin. Not something I could un-see very quickly and certainly not a toilet we’d be using.

We had swapped the noise of trucks and lorries for the noise of the fast flowing rapids next to us. I didn’t mind, a bit of white noise always helps me drift off to sleep, but Paul was less convinced. However we were too tired to move on now so we settled ourselves in and made some dinner.

Parked up on the very tip top of our levelling ramps

Waterfall Walk

The river didn’t impact our sleep at all, perhaps we were tired enough that nothing would have woken us. We had a nice restful start to the day, but we always get restless after a little while.

A leg stretching walk seemed like a good idea and we could see a waterfall in the near distance that looked like the perfect target. Google maps said it was less than 2km away. Maybe if we’d stopped at the national park centre for long enough we would have realised that this was a popular trail. It became obvious as we reached the signposts that took us onto a well marked path.

The waterfall was Kjemåfossen, a noisy tumultuous cascade that drops steeply into the river. The trail crosses a bridge at its base and another trail can be followed up the side of the waterfall to cross it at the top and descend via a track on the other side. 

Paul vetoed climbing all the way up to the top of the falls but I did manage to persuade him a little way up so that we could really take in the sounds of the water crashing and spilling over the rocks. The sheer force was pretty impressive. We read that there had been a proposal to use these falls for electricity generation. The water would have been squeezed into a pipe and we would have never had the joy of tripping over this little bonus feature on our trip to Norway.  We stood in the spray for a while before descending again.

We continued on our original trail to a bridge crossing the river. This was a bouncy suspension bridge. We didn’t see the signs urging one person at a time until I looked back at the photos. Thankfully I survived Paul’s attempts to shake me off the bridge.

Suspension bridge

 The trail back to our camp spot took us along the other side of the river through woodlands, it was a little narrower and more interesting to walk. Little birds flitted around us and there were many mushrooms in the undergrowth and amongst the rocks.

Back at the van it was time to look for our next stop.