Folgefonna is not a single glacier but three: Nordre Folgefonna in the north, Midtre Folgefonna in the middle, and Sondre Folgefonna in the south. Together they dominate the Folgefonna peninsula, which juts into the Hardangerfjord between the municipalities of Kvinnherad, Etne, and Ullensvang. The ice reaches a maximum thickness of roughly 300 meters and its highest point sits 1,662 meters above sea level. The 545.2-square-kilometer national park wraps around all three glaciers and the valleys, lakes, and ridges between them. From above, the peninsula looks like a white fist thrust into the dark water of the fjord, its knuckles gleaming even in overcast weather. The glaciers feed streams and waterfalls that tumble down every side of the peninsula, draining into the fjord system that surrounds them.

The park's ecology follows a vertical gradient that begins at the fjord's edge and climbs into barren alpine terrain. Below the tree line, red deer roam pine forests so abundantly that Kvinnherad Municipality leads the entire country in the number of red deer harvested annually. Black grouse and capercaillie inhabit these same forests, along with one of Western Europe's last populations of the white-backed woodpecker -- a species that depends on dead trees for nesting and feeding. Avalanches, common on the steep slopes below the glaciers, provide exactly that habitat, leaving corridors of toppled timber where the woodpeckers thrive. Above the tree line, the landscape strips down to rock, moss, and wind. Ptarmigan patrol the barren ridges, and golden eagles nest in the high valleys, soaring out over the glacial terrain to hunt them.

The plant life near the glaciers defies reasonable expectations. Arctic cottongrass, mossy mountain heather, and rufine sedge grow right up to the edge of the ice, thriving in soils that barely qualify as soil at all. Hardy species like three-leaved rush, dwarf willow, and stiff sedge cling to the thin mineral layers deposited by glacial melt. Where conditions are slightly more hospitable, purple gentian blooms in striking contrast to the gray rock, and mountain queen -- a saxifrage whose flower clusters can reach half a meter tall -- finds footholds on ledges and crevices. The growing season is brutally short, compressed into the few months when snowmelt exposes bare ground, but the plants that have adapted to this rhythm waste none of it. They flower quickly, seed quickly, and retreat underground before the next winter's snow begins its slow compression back into ice.

Folgefonna's glaciers are monuments to a climate that is changing. Like ice caps across Norway and the wider Arctic, they are measurably smaller than they were a century ago, their edges retreating up the mountainsides and exposing rock that has been buried under ice for millennia. The national park protects the glaciers and their surrounding ecosystems, but it cannot protect them from rising temperatures. What it can do -- and what Queen Sonja's dedication in 2005 set in motion -- is ensure that as the ice changes, the landscape around it remains wild enough for the eagles, the woodpeckers, and the ptarmigan to adapt alongside it. The park is both a celebration of what the ice has built and an acknowledgment that what took centuries to accumulate can disappear in decades.