Norway Road Trip Stop 8: The most dangerous road in Norway? (Short film) | Adventure Every Day

The troll ladder

Have you seen this road before? I bet a lot of you have. It's perhaps one of the most photographed roads in the world.

It's name is Trollstigen, which means the troll ladder. Aptly named, given that trolls are everywhere in Norway. Like these rocks, for example. Those are clearly more than just rocks, wouldn't you say?

Think those power lines through the forest are for transmitting electricity? Think again. The main purpose is to keep the trolls in their respective territories.

Just watch the movie the movie Trollhunter if you don't believe me.

Anyways, this ladder for the trolls is located approximately here and looks like this on a map:

Second thoughts

Mom is afraid of heights and "scary" mountain roads.

I knew this before we left on the trip of course, but you can't really avoid it in western Norway, and you have to visit the fjords when you come here, or else you'll think Norway is the most boring place in the world.

So mom gathered up her courage and bravely went forward with me.

She really was being brave to conquer her doubts. I mean, the weather wasn't helping either - rain and clouds so low that you couldn't see more than a few feet/meters ahead as we navigated the heights of the troll ladder. But I was really proud of how she handled it!

You can get a feel for this foggy freefall in the video I put together:

Tragedy strikes

When we finally arrived at the bottom, I saw a perfect opportunity to capture a beautiful shot with my new drone. I launched it and was planning just a quick run up over the waterfall cascading down the mountainside.

Unbeknownst to me, however, our location in the valley and the inclement weather prevented Lil' Sparky from achieving a solid GPS fix. This put the drone into a limited flying mode where it could not rise higher than 100 ft.

What happened next still traumatizes me.

The drone inexplicably took a nose dive as it slowly rotated itself to the left, nearly striking the bank on one side of the waterfall. The sensor seemed to detect the proximity to the ground, as it suddenly stopped and reversed directly backwards...right into the bank on the other side.

I immediately lost signal, and any hope for recovering it went with it, given the inaccessible location.

I felt sick. Lil' Sparky was still a fresh, young drone, barely a couple flight hours into his life. But in the blink of an eye, he was cut down.

The feeling only worsened when I uncovered the flight record stored into my mobile phone that I was steering with. I went through the 57-second clip time after time, and could still not come up with any answers for why the drone behaved the way it did - a lot of it's movements were counter to what I was pressing on the controls.

I'd share the clip with you, commentary and all, but I can't seem to get it to play correctly on my computer.

I filed a complaint with the manufacturer, but of course they concluded it was my fault because the drone didn't have a good GPS fix. I will never accept this verdict as the truth, but what can I do? I'm in a pretty powerless position unfortunately.

The only thing I can hope for is that maybe I can recover the funds for it through Steemit, so that I can keep expanding my stash of gear to create better content. But even that seems like a long shot, given my near complete invisibility to the whales, especially as of late.

So I'll just have to push on without Lil' Sparky, but I promise, I won't let this stop me!