Senja, an island in Norway, is a staggeringly beautiful place. The Atlantic side is wild, full of steep cliffs and bottomless crevasses. Among those mountains is a couloir called the King’s Gate, and it is not for the faint of heart.
Appropriately named for the rock arch at the top, the couloir is incredibly steep. In March of 2020, Nikolai Schirmer and Krister Røhme Kopala found themselves on Senja with their faces turned towards the towering peaks above them.
“The terrain is steep, exposed, and technical,” Schirmer said. “It’s kind of scary, to be honest. But 2020 brought record snowfalls, though, filling in all those tight, technical couloirs. Krister and I — we love tight couloirs.”
Tight and technical is a perfect description of the King’s Gate. “It’s like a 60-degree drop into a mandatory air to this snakey tight section under the portal, which, unless you’re able to hammer that turn right after it, will shoot you straight into that wall,” Schirmer described.
But once they saw it, they knew they had to do. It wasn’t an easy mission, but the best ones never are.
