The Tunnel That Brought Preikestolen Closer

I made the crossing to Ryfylke by ferry once, years before anyone in Stavanger talked about a tunnel under the fjord. It’s worth describing, because it’s a piece of the region that no longer exists in the same form, and because I think its disappearance quietly changed what happens at the top of a mountain most people have only seen in photographs.

A ferry, a wait, and a different kind of arrival

The old way to reach the Ryfylke side from Stavanger by car involved driving to a ferry quay, checking a printed timetable, and waiting — sometimes twenty minutes, sometimes closer to an hour if you’d misjudged the schedule or a sailing was full.

Then a slow crossing, engines off, gulls over the wake, before driving off on the other side toward Jørpeland and on toward Forsand and the road that eventually climbs to the Preikestolen trailhead. It wasn’t an ordeal. It was, if anything, part of the appeal — a built-in pause that made you feel like you were leaving one region and entering another, the Lysefjord country, before you’d even started walking.

That pause is gone. The Ryfylketunnelen opened in 2019, and with it the ferry that used to sit on this route stopped running that crossing. What used to require checking sailing times now requires nothing more than driving through roughly 14.3 kilometres of tunnel, at one point close to 292 metres below sea level, and coming out the other side already most of the way there.

Fourteen kilometres under the fjord

I drove it more recently, on an ordinary weekday morning, and the contrast was almost comic. No queue, no timetable, no engines-off wait on open water — just a long, gently descending tunnel, a curve at the bottom, and then daylight on the Ryfylke side. The drive from central Stavanger to the Preikestolen trailhead that used to be built around a ferry’s rhythm is now just a drive, start to finish, on your own schedule.

That’s a genuine improvement for anyone who lives here, works here, or simply wants to get from one side of the water to the other without consulting a ferry app. I’m not arguing the tunnel shouldn’t exist. I’m arguing that a piece of infrastructure built for the region’s own traffic — commuters, hauliers, people connecting Stavanger to Sandnes and the towns beyond — also happened to shave a meaningful chunk of friction off the trip to one of the most visited natural attractions in Norway, and that this side effect is not nothing.

What a shortcut does to a trailhead

Before the tunnel, a day trip to Preikestolen from Stavanger involved building in ferry time, which meant building in a bit of slack, which meant a certain number of visitors either arriving later than a strict 8 a.m. plan or simply deciding the whole thing sounded like too much for a single day and staying an extra night, or skipping it. The tunnel removes that slack. It’s easier now to treat Preikestolen as a same-morning decision — check the weather, drive under the fjord, park, walk, drive back — with the crossing no longer acting as a natural brake on how many people make that decision on the same day.

I don’t think that shows up as a line item anywhere, but I think it shows up on the trail. Preikestolen now draws somewhere in the order of 300,000 visitors a year, and the trailhead parking and the path itself are visibly built for a crowd that a decade ago would have been smaller — more cars circling for a paid space, more people bunched at the same viewpoints, more traffic on a route with, notably, no railing at the plateau’s edge. None of that is the tunnel’s fault exactly. It’s a byproduct: a barrier that used to filter out some fraction of casual, spur-of-the-moment visits is simply not there anymore.

The tunnel didn’t do this alone

It would be dishonest to hang the whole story on 14.3 kilometres of rock and concrete. Preikestolen’s fame predates the tunnel by decades — the flat plateau hanging 604 metres above the Lysefjord, with no railing and a drop on three sides, is exactly the kind of image that travels well, long before a tunnel made the drive there faster. Search interest, guidebook coverage, and a relentless stream of photographs and videos from the plateau itself have almost certainly done more to build the 300,000-a-year figure than any change in the road network. If the tunnel had opened to a site nobody had heard of, it would have changed very little.

What I think is true, and worth saying plainly, is that the tunnel removed the one piece of friction that used to sit between “I’d like to see Preikestolen” and “I’m standing at the trailhead” — and friction is one of the few things that quietly caps demand without anyone deciding to cap it. Take it away, and a site that was already popular becomes easier to visit on a whim, easier to fit into a single day from a cruise call or a short stay in Stavanger, easier to add on without much planning. The reputation drew people to want to go. The tunnel made it cheaper, in time and hassle, to actually go.

A road, not a route plan

None of this is a substitute for actually planning the hike. If you’re weighing when to go, how long the walk itself takes, or what the Lysebotn road situation looks like further into Ryfylke, that belongs on its own page, not folded into an essay about tunnels and ferries. What I wanted to record here is narrower: a specific crossing that used to exist, a specific tunnel that replaced it, and a trailhead that behaves differently now that the drive there has one fewer obstacle in it. If you’ve walked the plateau recently and found the parking full and the path busy, the tunnel under the fjord is a small, mostly invisible part of why.

For the practical side of visiting — timing, crowds, parking, and what’s open when — the Preikestolen how long does it take and Preikestolen best time to avoid crowds guides go into the detail this piece deliberately leaves out, and the two-day Stavanger and Preikestolen itinerary lays out how to fit the hike around the rest of a short stay.

Questions about the tunnel and Preikestolen access

What exactly did the Ryfylketunnelen replace?

It replaced a car ferry link across a stretch of the Boknafjord system that had connected Stavanger to the Ryfylke region, including the road toward Preikestolen. Before 2019, reaching that side by car meant timing a sailing; the tunnel put a continuous road underneath the water instead.

How deep does the tunnel go?

Its lowest point sits at roughly 292 metres below sea level, over a length of about 14.3 kilometres, which is why it’s described as the world’s longest and deepest subsea road tunnel.

Is the tunnel the main reason Preikestolen is so busy now?

No. Preikestolen was already one of Norway’s most photographed natural sites before 2019, and its fame on social media and in guidebooks accounts for most of the roughly 300,000 annual visitors. The tunnel didn’t create that demand — it just made it easier to act on.

Does the tunnel go all the way to the Preikestolen trailhead?

No. The tunnel connects Stavanger to the Ryfylke side of the fjord; from there, ordinary surface roads continue to the Preikestolen fjellstue trailhead. The tunnel removed the ferry, not the rest of the drive.

Did ferry travel to this area disappear completely?

Not entirely — Ryfylke still has ferries serving other routes and islands further out, and fjord cruises still cross this water for people who want to see it rather than drive under it, including the Lysefjorden cruise combined with the Preikestolen hike. What disappeared was the specific crossing that used to sit on the direct road route.

Is there another way to reach Preikestolen without driving through the tunnel at all?

Yes. Several operators run boat transfers from Stavanger or Forsand straight to the trail’s own starting point on the water, such as the boat trip to Preikestolen from Forsand, which sidesteps the road network — tunnel included — entirely.

Where can I find practical directions and parking costs for the hike itself?

This page is about the tunnel’s effect, not a step-by-step route. For the actual trailhead logistics, see the dedicated guides on Preikestolen parking cost and on the best time to avoid crowds, and, if you’d rather let someone else handle the driving and the crowds, a guided option like the Stavanger–Sandnes guided hike to Preikestolen or a smaller local guided hike around the Preikestolen area.

Does winter change any of this?

Yes — the surface roads beyond the tunnel, and the wider Lysebotn road further into Ryfylke, are affected by snow in ways the tunnel itself is not. See what closes in winter around Preikestolen and Kjerag before assuming the tunnel means year-round easy access.