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The town of Lillehammer contains twelve or fifteen hundred inhabitants, whose principal industry consists in the lumber business. Immense rafts are towed down the lake every day by the returning steamers, and carried by rail from Eidsvold to Christiania. The logs are drifted down the Logen River from the interior, and cut up at Lillehammer and Eidsvold.
I sometimes saw as many as forty or fifty of these little arable patches perched up among the rocks, hundreds of feet above the roofs of the houses, where it would seem dangerous for goats to browse. The log cabins peep out from among the rocks and pine-clad cliffs all along the course of the Logen, giving the country a singular speckled appearance.
Passing numerous thriving farms in the full season of harvest, the road winding pleasantly along the hill-side to the right, the foaming waters of the Logen deep down in the valley to the left, we at length reached the entrance of the Gudbransdalen that beautiful and fertile valley, which stretches all the way up the course of the Logen to the Dovre Fjeld, a distance of a hundred and sixty-eight miles from Lillehammer.
Across the river, which here dashes with frightful rapidity through the narrow gorge of the mountains, the country wears an exceedingly weird and desolate aspect; the ravines and summits of the mountains are darkened by gloomy forests of pine, relieved only by hoary and moss-covered cliffs overhanging the rushing waters of the Logen.
Soon after leaving Storkterstad, a station about two days' journey from Lillehammer, on the main road to Trondhjem, I passed through a very steep and rugged defile in the mountains, with jagged rocks on the right and the foaming waters of the Logen on the left, where my attention was called by the skydskaarl to a small monument by the roadside hearing an inscription commemorative of the death of Colonel Sinclair.
An abrupt mountain on the right, abounding in immense masses of loose rock, furnished the means of a terrible revenge for the ravages committed by the Scotch on their march from Romsdalen. The road winds around the foot of this mountain, making a narrow pass, hemmed in by the roaring torrents of the Logen on the one side and abrupt cliffs on the other.
Only at one point between Kringelen and Laurgaard a wild and barren district exceedingly savage in its aspect, situated in a narrow gorge of the mountains near the head of the Logen was I solicited for alms. A portion of this route, after passing Sinclair's Monument, is rudely fenced in, so as to render available every foot of the narrow valley.
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