If you have only a vague sense of Norway as fjords, cruise ships, snowflake sweaters, and dried fish, it’s long past time to update the internal wiki. Norway, as the talented cover blurb writers at National Geographic Adventure recently put it, is “Europe’s Next Adrenaline Capital”. In fact, Norway will blow you away with its beauty, its open space, and, most of all, its potential for adventure.

My take on Norway is captured in a feature story in the November 2009 issue of NGA, which you can read in its entirety here. Also, there’s a gallery of images from the shoot, along with photo tips on each one–how I got the shot, what I was thinking about composition, etc.–and a guide on how to do Norway on your own.

Click for gallery

A lot of places I visit, I come home and move on, but I can’t seem to shake Norway. It might be all my Norwegian friends taunting me through Facebook with October powder and November waves or it simply might be that no place on earth has the riches, common sense, earnestness, and freaking wild mountains and waters like Norway.

So, here’s a little extra coverage on Norway. If you just want the money shot, go to the gallery (and make sure you enable the full screen mode). If you can hold on a little longer, read the 15 Reasons Why Norway Kicks Ass, then hit the gallery.

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Allemannsretten, which literally translates to “all man’s rights” but in practice means the “right to access”: It’s a tradition that was codifed in 1957, allowing you to camp or travel almost anywhere you want. There are restrictions, but it okays travel through “uncultivated land” at all times of the year, “provided that consideration and due care is shown”. You can camp where you want, as long as you’re 150 meters from an inhabited house and you exercise good judgment.

Such a law would never work in the United States, where it’s likely that more people have seen “Girls Gone Wild: Lake Havasu” than have read the Declaration of Independence.

Norway has 50,000 islands and a coastline that stretches 51,700 miles. Let’s see you get tired of paddling that.

The Gulf Stream keeps the waters surprisingly warm. Well, warm might be pushing it. Let’s say, “not as cold as you think”. When surfing in June in a three-mil wetsuit, I actually got hot.

The ski season lasts from October through May. The summer skiing season lasts from June through late September.

Edvard Munch was a skier who knew that even when the ski season lasts 50 weeks, it’s still not long enough.

For gym class, high school kids go hiking.

73 percent of the population exercises at least once a week. 20 percent ski, tele, or snowboard. 20 percent! In the U.S., that would mean 60 million snow sliders.

Sondre Norheim, father of telemark skiing, came from the town of, er, Telemark. Also, Norheim was one of the first to introduce sidecut to those long boards they called skis.

Norway is the cleanest country in the world and the richest (though the Luxembourgers recently caught up and tied for first). Foreign Policy Magazine ranks Norway last in its Failed States Index for 2009, which is a backwards way of saying that Norway has its act together better than any other country.

While the rest of the globe’s economy was cratering, Norway’s grew three percent. When I last checked, it had a seven percent budget surplus.

It’s uncrowded. While the Alps are crawling with the great unwashed hordes, Norway remains blissfully empty, other than those floating cities known as cruise ships. Its biggest town, Oslo, has about 600,000 living in city proper, while the second-largest, Bergen, has less than half that.

It’s disciplined. Yes, its riches lie in the North Sea oil reserves, from which it extracts more than 70 percent of the revenues, no matter who’s doing the drilling. But all that loot goes into a sovereign wealth fund, which can’t be tapped until the oil runs out.

The Sami people still herd reindeer in the far north, and you can go hiking with them. Not heading that way any time soon? Sofia Jannok sings, records, and performs in her native Sami, plus when you use Google to translate her blog from Norwegian to English, you get charming little malapropisms like “A compact vagg of -20 degree winter air switch emote me.”

Vikings.

The Lyngen Alps might offer the best backcountry skiing in Europe, but there isn’t a chairlift for leagues, all the turns are earned, and UIAGM guide Graham Austick running tours out of the gorgeous lodge he and his partner just built on the shore of Lyngenfjord.

BONUS, 16! One of its most famous 19th century writers, Alexander Kielland, looks like he could be the long-lost cousin of my dear friend and colleague at National Geographic Adventure, Cliff Ransom.

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