A Nordic nirvana

With bear, elk, reindeer and red deer and its stunning topography, Norway makes for an exceptional and challenging sporting destination

In parts of Norway we find such ‘friends’ of the sportsman as the polar hare, ptarmigan, capercaillie, black grouse, hazel grouse, and partridge. However, the species of the game most likely to attract visiting sportsmen are the bear, elk, red deer and reindeer.

From the Swedish frontier in the south to the Finnish frontier in the north, the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) makes his way up nearly every river of fair size, besides those small waterways whenever its passage is not barred by insurmountable waterfalls at the mouth. There are something like 200 rivers that contain salmon.

Trout fishing is general and good. Norway, then, affords such excellent opportunities for varied sport as are seldom found in other European countries, while the beauty of the scenery is too well known to warrant description in this short article giving an outline of the type of sport visiting sportsmen may expect.

To give you an idea of the geography of the country I cannot do better than to quote from The Norway Year Book: “Norway is far too long and narrow in proportion to its length. With the exception of Russia, no other country in Europe exhibits such great distances. It is just as far from Lindesnes to North Cape as from Lindesnes to the Pyrenees, to Rome or Moscow, and it is nearly one half of a distance between New York and San Francisco in a straight line over North America. In North Norway, especially, distances are enormous… With the exception of a few polar Eskimos in north-west Greenland, and in the American archipelago, no human beings live so far north as is the case in Norway, and in no other country do civilized people live so near the pole.”