- Details
- Written by: Lucy Hoare
The Group: Lucy, and two kids, Greta (10) and Dulcie (15)
Kvitfjell in numbers:
- Altitude: 185m–1,039m
- Ski area: 39km of pistes
- Pistes: 45% green & blue / 35% red / 20% black
Getting there: Oslo Airport: 157km / 2hr 30min
Indicative prices: *8-day liftpass: £285 / £285 7-17 year-olds / free 0-6 year-olds. Food tends to be more expensive than the French Alps, but on-hill prices are comparable. Alcohol is heavily taxed, and very expensive.
*Kvitfjell offers 8 for the price of 6
Family factor: Winter wonderland landscapes; properly cold temperatures; activities like husky-dog sledding; chance of seeing moose
Don’t miss: The Snow Hotel in the Hunderfossen theme park, based around the Norwegian folklore of trolls. It sits next to a fairytale castle, which is a dead ringer for Elsa’s Arendelle castle in Frozen. IYKYK. “Sleeping on a bed of ice, topped with a comfy mattress, and reindeer skins was an experience I will never forget,” says Lucy.
I’ve always wanted to take my kids away on a proper ski holiday. I’ve worked in the industry for several years, and snowboarded for many more, visiting multiple resorts all over Europe. And yet for various reasons, there’d never been a good time to take the girls. Then suddenly, my daughters were ten and 15 and I realised the window for sharing that magical first experience was beginning to close. It was now or never.
Greta, my youngest, had never set foot on a pair of skis. Mind you, she’d been training for winter all her life. While most children dream of sunshine, she’d always insisted she’d rather be wrapped up in five layers than wearing shorts on a beach. In hindsight, this may have been influenced by watching Disney’s Frozen on repeat at an impressionable age, but snow, she was convinced, was where she belonged. Her older sister technically had skiing experience, although only just.
She’d last skied aged four, when “Pizza!” and “French Fries!” were the shouted instructions for turning and stopping, and one afternoon I collected her from ski school to find she’d fallen asleep on an inflatable doughnut. More than a decade later, those were the only memories she could recall. So when we arrived in Kvitfjell in Norway, a small ski resort about three hours north of Oslo all three of us were starting something new.
The girls were nervous but excited. I have to admit, I was too. For all that Elsa and Anna had taught them to love all things Norwegian, I worried that it might not live up to their image of Arendelle—that the reality of Norway in winter might be too cold, and too frozen. I hoped at the very least, they wouldn’t fall out like the two Disney sisters. But perhaps we should have headed south for warmer climbs in the Alps? At the same time, I had swapped my trusty snowboard for skis for the first time in years. My idea was that we would be able to learn the mountain together, but what if I struggled with the return to two planks?
Fairytale beginnings
It turned out there couldn’t have been a better place to learn, or relearn, than Kvitfjell. Meaning “white mountain” in Norwegian, the resort lived up to its name—throwing open the curtains on our first morning, we were greeted by a scene so perfectly wintery it felt almost unreal. Low clouds hung over the mountains and fresh snow drifted lazily from the sky, dusting an already thick white blanket that stretched across the resort. Families of fir trees punctuated the landscape, separating the pistes as though someone had carefully arranged them for a Christmas card. Disney eat your heart out. If you were asked to picture a fairy-tale ski destination, this would be it. A real-life Narnia, minus Mr. Tumnus.
“The view from the window looked like a real-life Narnia, minus Mr. Tumnus”
Of course the real test of any family ski resort isn’t how pretty it looks, it’s how well it works when your children are standing on skis for the very first time. I was naturally nervous about whether their first experience would be enjoyable. Skiing can be intimidating enough without adding overcrowded slopes, lift queues, and stressed parents into the mix. Fortunately, Kvitfjell avoids the first two, meaning there are far fewer of the third.
The pistes were wonderfully wide, and there was plenty of space for beginners to progress without feeling overwhelmed or pressured. My children spent their first lesson with multilingual instructor Linnea and were confidently snowplough-turning by the end of the session. Within minutes they’d gone from clutching each other nervously to giggling every time one of their new friends ploughed into a snowbank, skis akimbo. By the end of the lesson they were comparing who’d had the most spectacular fall, rather than worrying about taking a tumble.
One of the biggest advantages of choosing Norway over the Alps was that despite visiting during the UK’s February halfterm, the resort never felt busy. Less time queuing for lifts meant more time spent skiing, which is exactly what we all needed. When fingers and noses started feeling the cold, a hot chocolate at Mett restaurant quickly solved the problem. While the girls were discovering skiing, I was rediscovering it. Kvitfjell’s Olympic heritage looms large over the resort.
The downhill and Super-G events from the Lillehammer Olympics were held here, and the famous Olympic black run remains the ultimate challenge for strong recreational skiers. Of course, lots of Norwegians are equal to the challenge. This is a country that takes skiing seriously—as reflected in their almost unbelievable record at the recent Winter Olympics, where they topped the medal table with 41 medals to the United States 33, despite having a population barely bigger than that of Scotland.
Forever young
Standing at the top of the Olympic run, however, none of that felt remotely relevant. I was more concerned about my overly roomy ski boots (I went for comfort`—don’t come at me!) and the potential for a catastrophic injury. My guide, Askild, offered a few final words of encouragement before disappearing down the mountain. Suddenly it was just me, a very steep slope, and the dawning realisation that there was no elegant way out of this situation.
The first few turns were tentative, but then confidence slowly began to return. I fell once, disappearing into a drift at the base of a small tree. Fortunately, Kvitfjell’s famously cold temperatures mean the snow, as a rule, stays incredibly dry and light. The week before our arrival temperatures had dropped to -20°C, and crashing felt less like hitting the ground and more like landing in a cloud. Eventually I reached the bottom in one piece. It wasn’t graceful, but it was exhilarating. Most importantly, I was grinning from ear to ear.
Perhaps the best insight into Kvitfjell came during a chairlift conversation with a local skier called Kim. For much of the year he told me, he lived in Marbella where his neighbours were Kevin Keegan and Gary Lineker (both jolly nice chaps, apparently!) Every winter, however, he returned here for two months with his extended family. Four generations gathered to ski together, with even his 85-year-old mother still spending time on the slopes. “Keep skiing, keep young,” he told me. Watching families of all ages sharing the mountain together, it was difficult to argue with him.
What my family loved about Kvitfjell most was its simplicity. With just 39km of pistes, it doesn’t have the scale of most French or Austrian resorts, but it doesn’t need to. What the girls talked about, long after we’d left, wasn’t how many runs they’d skied, or which colours they’d ticked off. It was the silent forests, the thick snow, the hot chocolates, and how Kvitfjell felt “like living in Arendelle.” Pure Norwegian magic.
Snow how
Our trip
Lucy and her family were guests of Ski Safari, who offer a range of packages in Norway and elsewhere designed to suit all budget and ability levels.
Where to stay
The Gudbrandsgard Hotel, where Lucy and the girls stayed, combines traditional Norwegian architecture with modern touches—like the living roof, that’s covered with green grass in summer. Most packages include half board meals at the delicious Gildestua Restaurant.
