Fjaerland Glacier Tour on Fjærlandsfjord
A fjaerland glacier tour follows the meltwater route from the village of Mundal to the blue snouts of Bøyabreen and Supphellebreen, both outlet arms of the Jostedalsbreen ice cap. Guides from the Norwegian Glacier Museum explain moraine ridges, crevasse formation and how the ice has retreated since the village first recorded its position. Booking fjaerland glacier tour tickets in advance is sensible in summer, when the fjord arm draws walkers heading for the Book Town and the Fjærlandsfjord shoreline path.
Ice quarried from Supphellebreen travelled to Lillehammer in 1994 and was carved into the victory podiums of the Winter Olympics. It had begun as snow on Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier on the European mainland, spread across roughly 480 square kilometres of high plateau.
Two of its arms descend toward the head of Fjærlandsfjord, and they are the reason a Fjaerland Glacier Tour exists at all. The fjord itself runs some 26 kilometres north from the Sognefjord, a drowned valley carved by the same ice.
Fjærland had no road until 1986. Before the tunnels of Riksveg 5 broke the isolation, the village of Mundal was served by fjord steamer, and the ice was a neighbour rather than an attraction. Farm records from the Little Ice Age describe Supphellebreen advancing over pasture around 1750, when the glacier fronts reached their historical maximum. Jostedalsbreen National Park was established in 1991, the same year the Norwegian Glacier Museum opened beside the river. Four years later Mundal declared itself Den norske bokbyen, the Norwegian book town, and second-hand shelves now line the old ferry buildings.
The glaciers have not stood still. Bøyabreen surged forward through the 1990s, then withdrew sharply after 2000, leaving the meltwater lake Brevatnet where farmers once cut hay. National survey work records Jostedalsbreen losing mass in most years since, which is why Fjaerland Glacier Tour tours are now framed as much by climate science as by scenery. The Ulltveit-Moe Climate Centre, added to the museum in 2007, sets the retreat alongside global comparisons — the same questions that send travellers searching whether Franz Josef Glacier is worth visiting, or whether the glaciers in Glacier National Park are gone. Here the answer is visible from the road: ice still hangs in the cirque, smaller each decade.
Architecture answers the ice. Sverre Fehn, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1997, set the Norsk Bremuseum as a low concrete wedge with a stair climbing its roof, so visitors ascend toward the moraine rather than away from it. Inside, cores and instruments explain how a Fjærland brevandring — the local phrase for a glacier walk on foot — differs from the roadside overlooks that require no equipment at all. Two arms remain the draw: Supphellebreen, whose lowest ice sits about 60 metres above sea level, and Bøyabreen, filed under the postal address 6848 Fjærland. A guided fjord and glacier tour to Fjærland arrives by water, as everyone once did; a fjaerland glacier hike takes the older path uphill; and Fjaerland Glacier Tour tickets simply record which route a traveller chose.
4 hr 30 min
