The Bomb-Triggered Avalanche at Håvasshütte was a calculated attack by Olav Hole, who detonated dynamite above an isolated mountain hut and made the danger of the landscape serve as both weapon and disguise. Jussi Kolkka died, while Kaja Solness was rescued after spending a long time beneath the snow and taken to intensive care. The event first appeared as a tragic accident and a possible attempt to kill a witness; Harry Hole’s later reconstruction connected it instead to Olav’s appetite for control and theatrical misdirection.

Background and Stakes

The avalanche came amid an investigation whose clues were drawing several women toward the same remote mountain region. Adele Vetlesen, a missing woman from Drammen, had bought a train ticket to Ustaoset for November 7. Borgny Stem-Myhre had bought a ticket to the same destination for that date, and Hävasshütte lay only half a day’s walk from Ustaoset. The records also showed bookings for two beds at four mountain huts, each roughly a day’s walk apart; the final hut was Hävasshütte, where the party was recorded on November 7. Harry assessed the material cautiously: it placed women and a missing person in proximity, but did not by itself establish what had happened. It nevertheless helped make the hut a crucial point in the investigation.

A second strand of evidence gave the hut’s past a more sinister aspect. Elias Skog had told a woman in Stavanger that, on a night at Hävasshütte, he woke to sounds outside his window and saw a man restraining a woman beneath the outhouse roof. He initially understood the scene as sexual activity and went back to sleep. After learning of the murders, he reconsidered whether the woman had been struggling to escape and whether the man had covered her mouth to stop her calling for help. Harry later questioned whether Aslak Krongli had been there. The sighting therefore helped shape suspicion around the hut, but it was an ambiguous recollection rather than a settled account of the avalanche attack.

The Attack and Its Immediate Aftermath

Dynamite had triggered the avalanche. By the time Harry visited the hospital, Kaja had been brought in by rescue helicopter and remained in intensive care because she had been under the snow for a long time. Her survival was uncertain enough that the doctor would not yet say whether she would recover. Harry found her pale and still in bed, her hand cold in his; beside her lay the Aftenposten, whose front-page report described the avalanche and quoted Mikael Bellman on the death of Jussi Kolkka. The report also presented the rescued witness as the Australian woman Kolkka had been protecting.

That public account conflated two women. Harry corrected the assumption: the Australian was in Bristol, protected by her own security staff and hotel service; Kaja, not the Australian, was the colleague who had been caught in the snow. The distinction matters because the avalanche’s apparent target and its actual victims were not straightforwardly established by the first reports. The event killed Kolkka, endangered Kaja, and left the investigation with a dramatic but potentially misleading public narrative about a rescued witness.

Competing Explanations

Harry initially considered whether Krongli had set off the avalanche. The attacker, he reasoned, must have known the terrain and the hut’s connections. Elias’s account suggested Krongli might be a sexual predator, while the avalanche looked like an indirect way to attack a woman and the unarmed policeman with her. Harry also thought the assailant must have known the police were waiting and had chosen an attack that would allow time to escape. On this reading, the culprit was an insider: someone who understood the Hävasshütte theory and had reacted to the police naming a witness at a press conference. Krongli’s receipt of the Criminal Investigation Service’s urgent request for permission to land a police helicopter in the national park seemed to strengthen the suspicion that he had recognized the investigation’s purpose.

Kaja challenged a key premise. The police would not have exposed Iska Peller to that danger by placing her in the hut, so Krongli might not have believed she was there. Harry accepted the correction and revised the interpretation: the avalanche did not need to be a direct attempt to kill Iska. In his view, it continued a pattern of playing with the investigators. This exchange separates the physical fact of the dynamite-triggered slide from the changing theories about its intended victim and the attacker’s knowledge. The investigators were forced to distinguish what the avalanche proved from what its circumstances merely suggested.

Olav Hole’s Plan and the Staging

Harry’s later reconstruction assigned the attack to Olav Hole. Learning from the news that Iska was at Hävasshütte, Olav saw a chance to bring matters to an end, but also suspected that the situation might be a trap. He remembered a snow slab above the hut and the local warning that the site was avalanche-prone. Rather than approach openly, he took Tony Leike as a mountain guide, went to Hävasshütte, and used dynamite to release the avalanche.

The plan did not end with the detonation. Olav intended to drive the snowmobile back, throw Tony—dead or alive—into a ravine, and push the snowmobile after him. If the body were later found, the scene could be read as an accident: someone with burn injuries had supposedly been riding toward help before plunging into the ravine. This projected explanation made the avalanche part of a larger effort to control what investigators would see. The landscape would conceal an intentional act, while the abandoned vehicle and body would offer a ready-made alternative account.

Narrative Significance

The avalanche’s meaning changes as information arrives. The newspaper makes it a tragedy and frames the rescued person as the protected Australian witness; Harry corrects that identification. His early theory treats the attack as an insider’s attempt to kill a witness and escape; Kaja’s objection forces him to revise the theory of what the attacker knew. The eventual reconstruction replaces Krongli with Olav Hole and gives the event a further purpose: it was not merely an attack but a performance designed to make others misread both the danger and the evidence.

That pattern echoes the novel’s wider investigation, in which clues can connect people and places without immediately revealing the motive that binds them. The white mountain setting, whose smoothed snow Kaja experiences as a vast sea beneath the looming Hallingskarvet, becomes more than a remote backdrop: it is terrain whose natural hazards can be deliberately activated and then used to obscure responsibility. The avalanche’s decisive consequence is therefore double. It leaves real casualties and a survivor in critical condition, while also exposing how easily a staged explanation can compete with the truth when violence is made to resemble misfortune.