Seeing a few topics about various ice climbing venues I thought I'd give a shout out to the Lillehammer region of Norway as an alternative to the usuals (Rjukan, Cogne etc.). A friend and I went in March 2016 for 10 days and had a great time. In 10 days (9 days on and one rest day) the closest we saw to another climber was some harness imprints on the snow, and climbed 2000+ metres of ice in that time.
It's closer to Rjukan in terms of the ice thickness and separation of venues (we drove up to an hour most days but intentionally to explore what was around), but there are many more long routes in much more appealing surroundings. Having said that we did go to two gorges which could rival Krokan for single pitch cragging possibilities (again much more scenic though, despite one being called 'Hell').
We stayed by the lake in Lillehammer in some cabins which weren't too dear, and hired a car from Oslo to drive around. We did several routes over 300+m which seemed to go on forever with great variety and amazing views.
Some of the walk-ins would have benefited from skis or snow shoes, which I would definitely take/hire if I went again. For rest days there's loads of cross country skiing tracks around and we went snow sledding in the old winter Olympic park (reaching over 55 mph on the GPS!).
There's a free .pdf guide to the area in Norwegian which I have a poor attempt at a translation of if anyone is interested, but we got by with it.
Sadly we didn't get a chance to do any of the more remote routes from the mountain huts, but that would definitely be on my hit list if we returned (again you'd really want snow shoes or skis).
I've made my facebook album posted if anyone is interested:
https://www.facebook.com/robin.woodward.75/media_set?set=a.1073972459325523...
Just thought I'd offer up another option (we organised everything fairly last minute) vicariously as I contemplate our decision to dedicate this winter to skiing.
