Qualla: Korgen

Korgen: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Magne Tor Ingvald Aga, CC BY-SA 4.0. The drive takes about six minutes. You go in at Knutli in Vefsn Municipality, follow 8,530 metres of lit concrete under the mountain, and come out at Korgen with the Rossaga in front of you. Since 16 September 2005 that has been the ordinary way through, and it is so unremarkable that most drivers never think about the alternative. Roughly 560 metres above the tunnel roof is the road they no longer have to take - a narrow, winding pass where trucks with trailers regularly stuck fast in the snow and where the region was routinely cut in half every winter. That road has a name, one shared with several forced-labour roads scattered across North Norway: Blodveien, the Blood Road.

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Image: Magne Tor Ingvald Aga | CC BY-SA 4.0

Korgen: The Road Above the Tunnel

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Magne Tor Ingvald Aga, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Germans built the pass over Korgfjellet during the occupation, replacing a ferry crossing between Elsfjord and Hemnesberget. They did not build it themselves. The work was done by prisoners, and one of the barracks camps that housed them stood at Fagerlimoen, on the edge of K...

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Image: Magne Tor Ingvald Aga | CC BY-SA 4.0

Korgen: A Bend in the Rossaga

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arkiv i Nordland from Bodø, Norway, CC BY-SA 2.0. The village takes its name from the river, or possibly from the people who were here before the river had a Norwegian name. One explanation traces Korgen to the great bend the Rossaga makes here, connecting it to korge, a ring of woven withies. The other reaches back into Ume Sam...

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Image: Arkiv i Nordland from Bodø, Norway | CC BY-SA 2.0

Korgen: Two Hundred Metres Under the Rock

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sandivas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Three years after the war ended, Norway started digging into the mountain at Vesterli, just outside the village, for reasons that had nothing to do with the German road. Work on the Rossaga hydroelectric development began in 1948 and started generating power in 1955, and the Nedr...

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Image: Sandivas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Korgen: Nine Hundred People, One Square Kilometre

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sandivas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Korgen is compact to the point of being emphatic: 912 people in 2024 packed into 0.98 square kilometres, a density of 931 per square kilometre. In a municipality with 2.8 people per square kilometre, that concentration makes it the largest urban area in Hemnes, and its administra...

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Image: Sandivas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Korgen: What the Tunnel Changed

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Korgfjell Tunnel cost around 450 million kroner, took four years to bore, and shortened the E6 by 4 kilometres while cutting ten to twenty minutes off the drive. Those are modest numbers for a project of that size. The real return was measured in winters. For generations, Ko...

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Image: Unknown author | CC BY-SA 2.0