This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

Two fists thud like anvils onto the wooden tabletop, and the old bones of the Rødbrygga pub shudder in protest. Clouded glass bottles clink and lobster pots rattle on their hooks — ocean junk, hung from creaking timber beams — while the owner of the fists in question points, in turn, to each of the large, dark blue tattoos that cover his forearms.

“This is my name,” says Bjørn Olsen, the pub’s grizzled proprietor, signalling the polar bear above his right wrist, floating on an island of ice. “And this,” he adds, indicating the foamy tankard of beer rendered on his other arm, “is what I drink. Bear and beer!”

Bjørn (the Norwegian name for ‘bear’) has been the landlord here for 25 years, but Rødbrygga is much older, the heart of social life in the town of Stokmarknes since 1906. Searching for some common conversational ground, I motion to the dozens of football scarves pinned to the ceiling beams and ask which of the local teams he supports — blue-blooded Tromsø, perhaps, or new upstart Bodø/Glimt? Bjørn shakes his head. “There’s only one United,” he replies, pointing to a snow-white scarf. “Leeds United!”

It’s not a sentence I’m expecting to hear in northern Norway, but it fits with a feeling I’m already getting about Vesterålen: that this is a place out of place. Deep in the Arctic Circle, Vesterålen’s archipelago of 1,330 islands, should, by rights, be a frozen tundra. But, like the neighbouring islands of Lofoten, it’s warmed by the passing Gulf Stream, which thaws the archipelago into a landscape of green mountains, fields of meadowsweet and Arctic poppies, and bone-white beaches visited year-round by orcas and sperm whales.

Unlike Lofoten, though, Vesterålen remains largely off the tourist radar, and its crowd-free character combines with a wide network of hiking trails and epic coastal and mountain scenery to justify its self-given nickname: ‘a hiker’s paradise’. It’s a moniker I’ll test out today as I embark on a full-day, six-mile, multi-mountain hike across Hadseløya, the island on which Stokmarknes sits. But first, I’m brushing up on some local history. Next door to Rødbrygga, overlooking the harbour, is the Hurtigruten Museum, a vast, latticed-glass diamond of a building that’s home to one of the largest museum exhibits in the world: the fully restored MS Finnmarken. The coastal express ship was built in 1956 by shipping company Hurtigruten, whose fleet carries cargo and passengers along the coast of western Norway. Until the opening of Stokmarknes Airport in 1972, it offered the only way to reach Vesterålen.

“She was in a terrible condition when I found her,” says Sten Magne Engen, the museum’s manager, as we gaze up at the hulking ship — 82 metres long, weighing in at 2,200 tonnes and painted in black, white and red. “So much rust. The paint job alone cost one million kroner.” Sten — a spry 80-year-old — was once the captain of this ship, decades before it was retired in 1991 and left to decay in a shipyard.

Sten stepped in to salvage MS Finnmarken for the museum and, since then, he’s made it his life’s work to restore the vessel to its former glory, with designs and even period furnishings chosen based on original blueprints and old photographs. There are antique rocking chairs and pianos, pieces of vintage glassware, recreations of the original flock wallpaper in the smoking lounges — even a 1971 Ford 17M car displayed on the open deck.

As Sten shows me around the ship, he regales me with tales from his life, including the time he spent 72 days at sea, standing on deck frozen in awe at waves 20 metres high and half a mile long — “waves that looked like mountains”. Once, in the absence of a doctor, he had to operate on a shipmate’s eye. Sten’s forearm is covered in a time-faded tattoo of a ship, similar to the one we’re standing on now, surrounded by seagulls. A relic of shore leave in Antwerp. “Many adventures,” he says. “But I always longed to be back home in Vesterålen.”

It’s a sentiment expressed by many of the locals I speak to. Stepping out of the museum into a sunny, balmy morning, I’m greeted by hiking guide Robin Bolsøy, a bright-eyed man who looks much younger than his 60 years. “I left Vesterålen for university, but I came back,” he says. “My children did the same.” He signals towards Hadseløya’s interior, to the green mountains rearing up behind the rows of red fishers’ huts that line the quiet shore. “Why wouldn’t you come back?”

Into the interior

We climb into Robin’s van and he drives for a few minutes to a lay-by beside a forest track, where we begin our walk through a hole in the trees. Low avenues of birch and Norwegian spruce rise to our shoulders. At our feet, bushes overflow with fruit — cloudberries, crowberries, blueberries — which we snack on as we walk, the bursts of energy they give proving welcome as the path begins to steepen. We emerge from the trees onto a shrubby plateau where bright bushes of crimson bearberries cover the surface like spilt blood. Three white-tailed eagles dip and swoop in the sky above, unconcerned by our presence. Robin — despite having lived here most of his life and walked these trails thousands of times — seems startled by the serenity of it all. “The kind of stillness we have here — it’s not normal,” he says. “But we need it. Everybody does.”

Two hours into our walk, we haven’t seen another soul. The presence of human civilisation has only been hinted at rather than directly visible, with sheep bells clinking out of sight. When we see splashes on the surface of a lake in the valley beneath us, Robin explains that they’re caused by jumping trout, transplanted to this remote body of water by people in times past, although “nobody remembers when”. As often happens in sparsely inhabited landscapes, the lack of real-life residents is made up for with mythological ones, reflected in the names of natural features. After a lung-busting climb, we reach the top of Nilssvensktinden, a modest mountain named for Nils, a drunken Swede who, legend has it, went missing here while crossing the islandon a quest to find a bottle of juledram, a spiced Christmas alcoholic drink. I’m glad to be sober as we follow a knife-edge ridge to the next, slightly higher, peak, Motinden, where we sit and eat our packed lunches. We’re perched on the edge of a continent — looking towards the west, there’s no land mass until the island of Greenland, over 1,000 miles away far across the Arctic Ocean.

Given the sparsity of human beings, it’s a surprise — once we’ve descended into a wooded valley — to turn a corner and hear Robin’s name booming out from somewhere over the trees, a sound so clamorous that it sends birds scattering from the bushes. The source is soon revealed: a thin man, in silhouette, on top of a nearby hill, leaning against a shovel. The landscape has suddenly changed, too, the ferns and shrubbery dug out to make spiralling paths that lead up the slope.

We follow one until we reach the thin man, white-bearded and wearing a grubby mountain biking jersey. His name is Bent Ebeltoft and he’s undertaken the mammoth task of carving out a network of bike tracks on the hill that will be free for everyone to use. “I just took my shovel and got started,” he says. “I was retired, so what should I have done? Sat on the sofa nagging my wife or gone out and done something?” This can-do attitude seems to be inherent to the Vesterålen character, As I get out my phone to take photos, Bent drops another wise aphorism. “Staring at your smartphone won’t make you any smarter,” he says, with a wag of his finger.

Prior to retirement, Bent, like so many islanders, worked at sea, captaining chemical tankers around the world. “I visited all kinds of places — Japan, Singapore,” he says. “But every time I got home to Vesterålen, the air would feel so different. It’s like breathing pure crystal.”

Perhaps that clean Arctic air goes some way to explaining characters like Bent, who grew up building makeshift ski jumps in the woods, likes to ride his bike under the midnight sun and took up snowboarding on his 65th birthday. Or maybe it’s just that up here in Vesterålen, in this natural playground on the edge of the world, you have no choice but to make your own fun.

Bent shoulders his shovel and leaves me with one final pearl of wisdom: “Keep as busy as you can,” he says, as we turn to begin the walk back to Stokmarknes, “and you won’t have time to die.”

Published in the May 2026 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

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