Preikestolen is a square platform of granite, about twenty-five metres to a side, that ends in an unfenced drop of 604 metres straight into the Lysefjord in southwest Norway, and there is nothing between you and the edge but a warning sign. The name means the pulpit, and the rock does look like one: a flat-topped block pushed out from the cliff, with the fjord below it a narrow band of dark water between mountain walls. People walk out to where the granite stops and sit with their feet over the air. From the low rise just behind the platform you see the other half of the picture: the pulpit shrinks to a small square ledge and the people on it become specks against six hundred metres of cliff. Along the back edge of the plateau runs a deep crack, watched by geologists since 1930; the rock is stable for now, and the crack is part of the view.
The walk in is about four kilometres each way from the car park, climbing 350 metres over rock and bog, and most of the path was rebuilt from 2013 by Sherpas from Nepal, who laid stone steps and bridges across ground that the crowds had worn to mud. On the right mornings the reward is doubled. Cold air pools over the fjord, a sea of cloud fills the trench below the terrace, and the rock stands alone above white with the water hidden entirely; it happens most reliably on clear dawns in autumn, when the fjord is still warm from summer, and it cannot be counted on. From late September the slopes turn yellow and red, the last colour before the dark half of the year. The clifftop fight that ends Mission: Impossible – Fallout was filmed here in 2017, though the riskiest stunts were shot on a replica built elsewhere. The film needed a copy; the fjord has only the one.