Østerdalen

Drive north from Elverum and the country simply opens and empties. Østerdalen is not a dramatic fjord valley; it is broad, gentle and enormous, rounded hills rolling away under pine forest, and in places the forest floor turns startlingly white — a deep carpet of reindeer lichen that crunches underfoot like fresh snow and is the thing people remember longest. Down the middle runs the Glomma, 621 kilometres long and draining an eighth of Norway. For three centuries that river was a conveyor belt: every winter loggers cut and hauled timber down to the ice, and every spring flood carried it south, with crews of fløtere walking the banks for weeks to break the jams. In 1952 nearly two million cubic metres of logs came down. The last drive was in 1985; the lorries had won.

Halfway up, at Atna, the river Atna comes down out of the Rondane mountains to meet the Glomma. It is a small place — a request stop on the railway, a suspension bridge, a brewery, a gravel airstrip kept in trim by volunteers — but it holds Glopheim Kafé, the only café in Norway protected as a heritage building, its 1950s room and counter and jukebox exactly as they were. A few kilometres south, at the Bjøråa rest area, stands the reason most people slow down here: Storelgen, a bull moose 10.3 metres tall in polished stainless steel, designed by Linda Bakke and unveiled in October 2015. It was not put there as decoration. The straight, monotonous Rv3 had earned the nickname "the death road", and the roads authority wanted something to jolt a drowsy driver awake — in moose country, where a real one can step out of the trees at dusk. For four years it was the tallest moose statue on earth, until Moose Jaw in Canada bolted bigger antlers onto its own moose in 2019 and took the title back.

Turn west at Atna and the road climbs to Atnsjøen, a long, cold trout lake under the Rondane peaks, the marshes at its head now a protected wetland loud with waders. Above the shore, hidden among pine trunks, a concrete platform seems to float clear of the ground: Sohlbergplassen, opened in 2006 and built without felling more than a single tree, framing exactly the view the painter Harald Sohlberg carried away from here — "Winter Night in the Mountains", voted Norway's national painting in 1995. The valley's other memory is harder. On 9 April 1940, with German forces landing across the country, the king, government and parliament fled to Elverum, and a scratch Norwegian force stopped a raiding party sent to seize them at Midtskogen that night. The next day, in the folk high school, King Haakon VII refused the German demand to appoint the collaborator Vidkun Quisling. On 11 April the bombers came for the little village of Nybergsund, and Elverum burned.