Key takeaways
- Both walls, all the way along, and more after rain.
- Side glaciers cut less deeply and were left high above the main trough.
- Late spring and early summer run hardest by a wide margin.
- Close enough that the noise takes over and the spray reaches you.
Why there are so many
A fjord wall with a dozen waterfalls on it is not a coincidence of rainfall. It is a direct consequence of how the valley was cut.
The main glacier here was enormous and ground its trough far below sea level. The glaciers in the side valleys feeding into it were much smaller, carried far less ice, and cut correspondingly less deeply.
When the ice went, the side valleys were left ending hundreds of metres above the floor of the main one. Geologists call them hanging valleys, and every stream still draining them arrives at that lip with nowhere to go but over.
So the waterfalls are not decoration on the landscape. They are the seam where two different scales of glacier met, and every one of them marks a tributary that could not keep up.
It also explains why they are so evenly spread. A tributary valley every kilometre or two along both walls means a waterfall every kilometre or two, which is why the fjord never gives you a stretch without one.
How many, and which have names
Nobody has a firm count, because the number changes with the weather. On a dry week in late summer you might see a dozen. After two days of rain the same stretch of wall carries three or four times that, most of them temporary threads that will be gone within a week.
A handful are permanent and substantial enough to be named and known locally. The rest are anonymous, which is a strange thing to say about waterfalls that in most countries would each have a car park.
This is worth knowing before you go, because it resets the expectation. You are not travelling to see one famous waterfall. You are travelling through a corridor where water comes off the top continuously on both sides, and the individual falls matter less than the accumulation.
Water falling straight into the fjord
When they run hardest
Late spring and early summer, without much competition.
These walls hold snow through the winter, and when it melts, all of it has to come down. The falls at that time carry several times their late-season flow, run louder, throw more spray and are visible from much further away. If waterfalls are what you came for, this is the window.
High summer thins them out as the snow above finishes melting, though heavy rain restores them within hours. Autumn is variable and often generous, since this is one of the wetter coasts in Europe.
In deep winter the smaller ones freeze, in whole or in part, and a frozen fall on a dark wall is its own thing entirely. The larger ones rarely stop.
The practical consequence for booking is small but real. If the waterfalls are the reason you are coming, the late spring trip is better than the July one, and the July one is warmer and more likely to be dry. Nobody gets both.
Getting underneath one
This is the part a scheduled vessel cannot do, and it is the clearest argument for the small boat.
A large ship draws several metres and needs room to manoeuvre, so it holds the middle of the channel and everything on the walls is viewed at distance. A rigid inflatable draws almost nothing and turns on the spot, so the skipper can bring it right in to the base of a fall.
Close in, the experience changes completely. The sound stops being background and becomes the only thing there is. The air is colder and full of water. The scale finally registers, because you can see the rock beside the fall and judge it.
You will get wet, which is what the thermal suit is for, and how close the boat goes depends on the day, the flow and the skipper's judgement. Nobody promises a specific waterfall.
It is also the moment that separates the two products on this fjord more clearly than any description. Everything else the small boat does, the large one does more comfortably. This it cannot do at all.
Hanging
The side valleys were cut by smaller glaciers and left high above the main trough. Every waterfall on these walls is a tributary that could not keep up.
Photographing them
Hard, and worth attempting anyway.
The difficulty is dynamic range. A white waterfall against a dark wet rock face is close to the worst case for any camera, and phones tend to blow out the water while leaving the rock black.
Two things help. Overcast light, which this coast supplies generously, compresses the range and is genuinely better here than sunshine. And including something for scale, whether that is the boat's bow, a person or a recognisable tree, because a waterfall photographed in isolation loses every clue about how big it is.
Keep the lens dry between shots and accept that the best one will not be the one you planned. And ask about a dry bag before you board rather than after the first close approach.
Video is the honest medium here and most people work that out too late. A waterfall is movement and noise, and a still photograph discards both. Thirty seconds of shaky footage with the sound on will mean more to you in a year than forty stills.
