Rock Art and Mountain Biking in Alta

11/09/2025

And so we found ourselves back in Alta, just 10 days after passing through on our blast across Finland. This time we were due to stay over. We had plans.

Norway Road Works

After our day in Hammerfest we yet again had a long drive looking for the right parking spot. Along the way we were stopped at one of the many roadworks that we’ve encountered here. The Norwegian climate and landscape certainly don’t play nicely with road construction. During our trip even the main artery road of Norway – the E6 – has suffered a major landslip and a diversion is in place. Luckily Norway has a very good app – Vegvesen Trafikk – which allows you to check the status of roadworks. Google maps will sometimes claim that the road is closed where in fact it is just restricted. The app will give the full details as well as providing other information about the roads including official rest areas and their facilities – good for finding motorhome services.

This set of roadworks was the first where we’ve had to wait for an escort vehicle – a ‘ledebil’. Just like most roadworks we had advance warning of the wait with a luminous yellow sign followed by a 50kph speed limit.  A worker was standing in the road with a manual stop sign. We were the first to pull up on this quiet road so we rolled down the window to check how long he though we would be waiting. We didn’t have time for a cup of tea but we did have time for a bit of a chat where we found out that he had a contract to work between April and November. During winter, when work on the roads is confined to true emergencies, he and his family would go to Mexico for a couple of months.

Alta Motorhome Parking

During the drive down work had contacted me and asked if I minded shifting my work day to Wednesday as all the permanent staff were in a briefing on the Tuesday. That’s the problem with being so very part time, I don’t hear these sort of things on the grapevine. But there were no issues from me as the weather looked fine on both days.

We’d pinpointed a marina park up on Park4Night which looked good for Paul to entertain himself while I worked. We decided we might as well stay in the marina anyway as it was a good location for the bike ride we had planned and we could get some washing done.

The marina had half a dozen motorhome spaces, separated by picnic benches to comply with Norway’s recommended 4m separation for motorhome parking. We paid on the Go Marina app and got the code to the services building which is shared with marina users..

Inside the building everything is controlled by a code. We had access to the toilet but access to the shower was via a further payment with a different code, and access to the laundry by yet another payment with yet another code. All very high tech and designed to squeeze the pennies out of us. We would shower in the van, but we did need to do some laundry so I paid the required fee and got the code. The bonus here was that the code gave us 2 and a half hours on the washing machine – enough for two loads of washing from one payment.

We had two lovely sunsets here and even saw porpoises offshore. Paul managed to catch a big enough fish for dinner too which made him very happy. Our elderly German neighbours approached us to ask how to get the code for the services building, but I think they were more interested in the fish. We had a long google translate conversation about how we were going to cook it. I feel like we should have offered them some but there was only enough for two.

And then this

A bike ride round Alta

Alta had been recommended as good for mountain biking. It hasn’t got a downhill centre, but we’d been told that the trails around the town are fun. Oddly, we couldn’t find anything on Trailforks which is our usual source of mountain biking inspiration. But there were a few rides on Wikiloc and even a couple of rides mapped out on UT.NO which is a Norwegian map and trails app.

We cobbled together a combination of options to make a circuit from the parking. We started by heading up to the woods on the south of town where we tracked east through the trees. Groups of tabarded school children were running around picking berries and generally having some good outdoors time. There were plenty of signposts here indicating that we were on a cross country ski trail and later we picked up the same trail for our return.

When we reached the river we diverted to cross the road bridge. Then we followed a single track route through the trees along the eastern edge of the river. We squelched through muddy puddles and rumbled over roots and pebbles, occasionally close enough to the river to see fly fishermen standing in the middle of the current. At one point we had to leave the edge of the river to go through a village of prosperous looking detached houses with large neat gardens where robot lawnmowers kept the grass to a regulation length.

We crossed the river again at Alta River Camping and enjoyed the next stretch of river bank which was a little more challenging than the first stretch. At one point the high sandy bank had obviously collapsed a few times into the swirling waters below. We realised at this point that we were doing the best parts of the trail uphill rather than down. Maybe the second half of our planned trail would have been better cycled in the opposite direction. We debated whether we should just turn around but decided we’d carry on. We wanted to see what was around the next corner.

Where the Eibyelva river joined the main Altaelva we turned west and finally north. We had a few route finding difficulties through the forest here and ended up in some very marshy terrain before fighting our way free of the woods and back almost to the mid-way bridge. We’d intended to be a bit higher up in the forest  but it probably made the ride a bit easier as we had a nice smooth climb on tarmac.

Then we were back on a cross country ski route which we followed all the way back to Alta. The path was wide and gravelled, but it went through some lovely rocky terrain where we could venture off piste. The final part of the ride was all downhill, a nice descent back to the van.

Alta Town

We spent our last night in Alta at a free parking spot on the other side of the Kåfjordbrua. This isn’t the same Kåfjord that we’d stayed at after visiting Nordkapp. Kå just means cold and as you can imagine there are a lot of Kåfjords all over Norway.

The following day we popped into the town for a bit of shopping and to visit Alta’s Northern Lights Cathedral which seemed an exemplar of scandi design with it’s bleached wood and polished concrete. Both the inside and the outside have design elements in form and colour that call up thoughts of the northern lights.

Alta town had a lovely vibe. That might be because we’d finally got to grips with mall shopping. It may seem obvious, but a lot of Norwegian shops and cafes are inside malls. Probably for two reasons. One is climate, who wants to be getting cold and wet in the streets for half the year? The other is the war, many towns had to be rebuilt and have been designed for utility with shopping malls and grid style streets. We’re just not very used to this style of town centre and had found it quite sterile at first. Here in Alta we finally got used to the idea and enjoyed an hour or so wandering around the shops looking for new fishing lures (Paul’s favourite shopping) as well as other domestic bits and pieces.

Alta Museum of Rock Art

Our final call in Alta was the rock art museum. This is completely my type of thing. Paul, although interested for a while, quickly got quite bored.

The museum has a conventional set of exhibits about the rock art, geology and local history. It was very good and definitely worth looking at in it’s own right as well as for context. The main event though is the actual rock art. A couple of trails take you around the rocks which are covered in carvings that are up to 7000 years old. Boats of various designs, reindeer, elk with their distinctive humped backs, bears and their tracks, all the things you would associate with this arctic coastal region are found here.

The age of the carvings has been estimated because of the rise of the land after the ice age. It’s thought that the original carvings would have been at sea level and since the weight of the ice was lifted the land has rebounded. A similar process is happening in Scotland. The rate of rebound has been calculated and used to date the carvings which, according to this dating, continued to be engraved in the rocks over a period of four of five thousand years.

There are so many carved rocks here, each picture painstakingly hammered out using stone tools to chip away at the rock, that it has been designated a UNESCO world heritage site. When the carvings were discovered in the 1970s the rocks were cleared of lichen and moss giving the clarity of image you see at the museum, but it is easy to see how they were overlooked and intriguing to think that these images could be hidden on many of the rocks we just stroll past.

I wanted to look at every rock in detail and Paul humoured me for a couple of hours despite not being that interested. It reminded me of our visit to these rock carvings in Italy.