Easy The mines are located 8 km up the mountain from Blaafarveværket on Skuterudåsen ridge, reached via the old ore road built in 1836. This is where cobalt was first discovered in 1772 by Ole Witloch, a dismissed miner from Kongsberg. The ore here is over a billion years old and the mineral skutterudite is named after this location.
There are three guided tours. The historical tour takes 1.5 hours and includes Norway's first underground suspension bridge and a glass floor over the mine shaft. Dress warmly as it's cold inside. The 3-hour Mine Safari goes deeper with ladder climbing, minimum age 10.
Outside you can walk the cultural trails past the enormous open pits and spoil heaps where miners extracted millions of tonnes of rock by hand. There's a panoramic viewpoint over Tyrifjorden and Vikersundbakken.
The Kittelsen Museum is here too, in a former miners' residence. It houses one of Norway's largest collections of original works by Theodor Kittelsen, the artist who defined how Norwegians imagine trolls. King Harald opened it in 1993.
DNT operates Koboltkoia, a 12-bed unstaffed cabin built in 1860, right at the mines.