Torghatten and caves, Jun 4 2026

A fun round trip and exploration of caves

Index

Date	Peak	Height	PF	Location	WCP/FP	MAP
04.06.26	Torghatten	258m	258m	Brønnøy, Norway	WCP	MAP

Thursday: This afternoon, I was invited to visit some caves on the Torghatten mountain outside Brønnøysund, by my buddy Kjell Iver Johansen.

I was not aware of any caves, so I looked very much forward to this “guided tour”…

The first caves – “Svartholan” was located near the trail up to the legendary hole.

Soon, I could see the opening in the first cave.

Kjell Iver led the way, I followed.

The first thing I noticed was that the ground was not muddy and the moss wasn’t slippery. It’s been dry for at least a week, so that’s maybe why. This made moving around in the cave much easier.

Unfortunately, the headlamp I borrowed from mom was OK for navigating inside the cave, but not for taking pictures.

Then, Kjell Iver noticed something he hadn’t expected…

Someone’s had a laugh…

We moved on…

Then we came across a “treasure chest”. Kjell Iver was very, very interested in understanding who had placed this here.

Caves should in general be respected and handled with care, and I agree that leaving a chest here wasn’t very respectful. But I must admit it was a little funny…

We followed the cave until its end. It felt quite long, but none of us had any feeling about how long it actually was.

Then we moved over to the second cave.

We were now roughly below the pass between Torghatten and Lisjhatten.

The entrance was easy enough…

… but the inside was a tad trickier than the first. But there were no “Hail Mary” moves….

This cave was darker (less daylight flowing in) and taking OK pictures was difficult.

Next, we sat course for the Torghatten hole.

It was only 5 days since the last time I was here, but it’s always nice to be here.

The tourist season was still not peaking. There were few people inside the mountain.

It was a wonderful day to be here. The weather was just superb and temperature in the low 20’s (°C)

Kjell Iver told me that his family owns the buildings down on Ytre Hatten and invited me on a tour.

I mean … what a place and what a view!

Clearly, this is paradise for both children and adults.

I felt envy when Kjell Iver he had done the Geitrabbin route several times. That’s the kind of route I would love to try out. Maybe my body has gotten too old, but not my mind.

I was invited into the main building and fell in love with a picture with all the local names.

Then it was time for more exploration, and we followed the “Aksle” ridge upwards. It was really, really windy. I had to put my hat in the pocket. Otherwise, it would have blown to sea…

The summit would have to wait…

We followed a “balcony” above the Torghatten parking, looking for a “phallus rock” and another cave.

Across the fjord, I could see some familiar mountains…

We didn’t find our phallic rock, but we hoped to find a cave…

First, we found a pond that isn’t on the map. Kjell Iver was very happy. He hadn’t been here before.

What was ahead of us, looked promising…

But we wouldn’t call it a cave, though. Not sure what to call it. A blind corridor? A fissure? A fracture zone? In any case, fractures in the rock mass, exploited by erosion.

I just had to visit a nearby hump…

From up there, I had a good view towards the big pothole, near the main trail to the hole.

On our way back, we did find the pointy rock feature…

Now it was time to get to the top…

This was fun, but I also wanted to go kayaking…

We had a short break on top. Kjell Iver and I go a long way back – on the internet. We were both early adopters to describing mountain hikes on the internet. His site is still online (kjiver.no)

But this was the first time we did a hike together. Very nice!

It was getting late in the afternoon, and we moved on. We followed the visible path down the north side.

But instead of taking the rightmost route (across Lisjhatten) – which I did 5 days ago, we went left.

After a while, we left the path and sat course for a cave that was on other side of the Svartholan caves.

This was a smaller cave, but maybe there was not a whole lot of rock between the caves? Kjel Iver thought this cave was called “Millaholet”, but talking about it later on, he was not so sure.

We talked about the possibility of people living in these caves. Kjell Iver had heard experts say “no” to this question. Too much rockfall. I could understand the argument…

We moved on, now going off-trail. That is always an interesting exercise in this landscape. You cannot just assume that “It’ll be fine to go this way” …

All of a sudden, we had crazy rock formations around us. It was like the whole mountain was a big treasure chest.

As we had hoped, we joined the Lisjhatten route below the tricky section. No scrambling needed today!

After nearly 4 hours, our journey came to an end. We agreed to do this again, as there is so much more to explore here…

Many thanks to Kjell Iver for a fantastic afternoon!

Trip statistics: 7,7km, 600 (est.) vertical meters, 3h:54m