Finse is Norway's highest railway station, sitting at 1,222 metres above sea level on the Bergen Line. There is no road here. You arrive by train, on foot, or by bicycle – and that isolation is exactly the point.
The station opened in 1908, a year before the full Bergen Railway was completed. The hotel followed in 1909, built partly as a refuge in case trains got stuck in snow, and partly because someone saw potential in tourism. That someone was Alice Lister Fangen, a resourceful woman who had been running accommodation here since 1903, before the railway even arrived. Within years, Finse became fashionable among European aristocracy.
The place attracted more than wealthy tourists. Polar explorers discovered that Finse offered conditions similar to Antarctica without the journey. Fridtjof Nansen trained here. So did Ernest Shackleton before his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Roald Amundsen came too. A century later, people still come to Finse for polar training courses.
Then came Hollywood. In March 1979, a film crew arrived to shoot the ice planet Hoth scenes for The Empire Strikes Back. The original plan was to film on the Hardangerjøkulen glacier, a 90-minute journey from the hotel. Instead, they got the worst snowstorm in half a century – temperatures dropped to minus 32°C, winds gusted at 65 km/h, and avalanches cut off the railway line entirely.
Harrison Ford wasn't even supposed to come to Norway, but schedule changes sent him there at the last minute. He arrived at the airport in jeans, a t-shirt and a light jacket – not ideal for arctic conditions. Getting to Finse proved even worse. The only way in was by snowplough train, which promptly went three hours in the wrong direction before turning around. Ford arrived after ten hours, in the dark, having shared a bottle of scotch with the non-English-speaking train driver.
The crew improvised constantly. The scene where Luke Skywalker collapses in the snow and sees the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi? That was filmed 30 feet from the hotel's back door. As Mark Hamill later recalled: "If you turned the camera around, you saw people on their balconies having hot chocolate while Harrison Ford and I were acting next to a dead tauntaun." The makeup artist would scoop up snow and pack it into Hamill's eyelashes between takes.
Norwegian army and mountain rescue skiers played the rebel soldiers – they spoke little English and acted against an imaginary Empire that would be added later.
Carrie Fisher came to Finse even though Princess Leia had no outdoor scenes. When asked why she was there, she quipped: "I'm only here to irritate the crew." The second unit, scheduled for three weeks, stayed for eight. They returned to London with only half the planned footage.
The hotel still displays photographs and memorabilia from the production. Every February, Star Wars fans gather for "Hoth Strikes Back" – a weekend of talks, glacier treks, and meetings with original crew members. The landscape hasn't changed since 1979.
During World War II, the Germans requisitioned the hotel to test aviation fuel in arctic conditions and build an airstrip on the glacier. One plane landed. It never took off again and had to be dismantled and sent home by train.
Today Finse has a permanent population of about six people. There is the hotel, the DNT cabin Finsehytta, a post office – Norway's oldest and highest, established in 1904 – and the Rallar Museum in the old locomotive shed.