Senja is Norway's second-largest island, up in Troms at 69 degrees north, and it has two sides. The outer coast is ice-ground rock rising sheer from the water in sails and spires; behind it the island goes round and soft, into forest and farms. The sail is Segla, and the photograph everyone has seen of it was not taken on it. The path out of Fjordgård climbs to a saddle and forks. One branch goes up Segla itself, an airy scramble along the top of the cliff. The other goes to Hesten, where the wall stands opposite you across the gap, with the fjords, the ridges and the open Atlantic below. From the shore of Mefjorden first, the mountain reads as its name says — a sail raised off the sea — so the scale arrives twice in one day.
Tungeneset works the same way. A wooden walkway runs out over glacier-polished rock to the tip of the headland, and Okshornan's row of spikes rises out of the sea across from you. There is no route-finding involved, which counts after dark: from September to March the aurora works above those same peaks. The road from Botnhamn to Gryllefjord threads 102 kilometres of ledges, tunnels and hairpins, and every bend hands you another fjord. At Bergsbotn a platform puts you out in mid-air above the water. Husøy is a whole village pressed onto a rock in the middle of a fjord, tied to Senja by a causeway, with cod on the drying racks and boats sliding in and out late into the bright night. Inland, the pines of Ånderdalen are small, gnarled and very slow, and some of them are over six hundred years old. One thing here has no viewpoint. Some winters humpbacks and orcas follow the overwintering herring into these waters, and some winters they do not. The shoals keep changing where they spend the winter, and the whales go where the fish go. The operators say so plainly and run no whale trips; a whale here can only be a surprise.