An Urban's Rural View

The Lonely Planet Guide to Norway, 9th edition, describes Alta as a "pitstop for nature lovers" enroute to the nearby Finnmark Plateau. That might have been true 20 years ago. Today it undersells the place.

The book also calls Alta, latitude 69.9689 degrees north, "the northernmost populated city in the world." But despite its population of 20,000 Alta feels more like a town than a city. A small town, even -- the kind of small town that attracts people to small-town life.

Granted, to many a farmer, Alta would be a large town. I once shared a car on a crop tour in Nebraska with a farmer who felt claustrophobic in any settlement with a traffic light. He couldn't understand how I'd survived living in cities as large as New York and Tokyo.

I didn't detect a stoplight during two days exploring Alta; the town uses rotaries to slow traffic. Yet while it may not qualify under some definitions of small it has a small-town feel. The houses are spread out. The few blocks that pass for a downtown feature boxy, modern, low-slung buildings, most no more than two or three stories.

The buildings are relatively new because the town was burned down by the Nazis' as they withdrew in 1945 after five years occupying it. Yet according to one of our guides, 98% of his grandparents' generation returned to the town even though their houses, fields and businesses had been destroyed.

They could have started anew elsewhere. They loved Alta. The guide himself came back after a few years studying in Florida.

Others are coming, too. The population is growing. Tourism is reinvigorating the economy. Alta is a regular stop on Viking cruises up the Norway coast, like the one my wife and I arrived on.

There is much to tour, and though the 9th edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook is dated 2024, the editors failed to mention an important recent addition: The extraordinary Northern Lights Cathedral.

Consecrated in 2013, the nondenominational church has a titanium-plated exterior whose steeple swirls up in tight curves designed to resemble the Northern Lights. Inside it's a model of tasteful minimalism, much of it in light oak. The overall effect is intensely spiritual.

The Alta Museum, which Lonely Planet rightly calls "superb," displays a few of the petroglyphs from the surrounding cliffs, which hold several thousand, and has exhibits on the culture and history of the indigenous Sami people of the region. We could have spent more time there than the hour our tour budgeted.

You can drive a dogsled in Alta, which holds Europe's longest dogsled race every year. We didn't, but a few of our shipmates did. You can stay overnight in Alta's famous Sorrisniva Igloo Hotel, made entirely of ice, inside and out, rebuilt every winter. Some of our shipmates did that, too.

Alta is a great place to view the Northern Lights. It's relatively close to the North Pole, deep within the magnetosphere. The interplay of solar winds with the magnetosphere is what creates the Northern Lights. And the town is small enough there's relatively little light pollution.

My wife and I took a nighttime boat ride from Alta into a nearby fjord. The temperature was 4 below zero Fahrenheit and the wind was blowing but the views of the lights were stunning.

Because we're now at the peak of the sun's 11-year cycle of windstorms and coronal mass ejections, folks don't have to head to the Arctic to see the Northern Lights. In the last few months they've been viewed as far south as Florida. They do tend to be particularly intense at more northerly latitudes, though.

During our cruise we also saw them at points a bit farther south along the Norway coast, though still within the Arctic Circle. But one of these places, Tromso, has blossomed into a real city in recent years, with the population now nearing 80,000.

We enjoyed our time in Tromso but it definitely did not have a small-town feel. It's heavily touristed and the locals say housing is difficult to find. New apartment complexes are going up everywhere but most of the new apartments will be Airbnb's for tourists.

Tourists have discovered Alta's many attractions, too, but so far they haven't overwhelmed it. Having spent two delightful days there, we hope Alta can stay in the goldilocks zone, with enough tourists to keep the economy healthy but not so many that it loses its small-town magic.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanize@gmail.com

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