I feel the same way too. I think the claim of non-existence is fundamentally motivated by the desire for the path not to exist, rather than the realities on the ground. That is why my sense is that the counterpart’s claim of local knowledge can’t be taken at face value.
I will explore my take on the legality of access next.
To be clear; even though I primarily request support from the Norwegian community, I think the rest of you are fully entitled to have your opinion heard. At least with regards to the “existence” question. There are no special or diverging practices regarding the way we map paths in Norway, so your intuition about what constitutes a path should be as good as ours.
The question that is perhaps best left to people with at least a strong understanding of Norwegian language and law, wherever they might live and map, is the question of how to tag access in this case. I can try to dig up translated primary sources if I can, but I can’t promise much in that regard. At least I’ll keep my lines of reasoning in English, beyond a few hard-to-translate terms like “innmark”, “utmark”. The former is the name for land that has potential restrictions on public access (though there are subtleties here as well), while the latter is land that, independent of ownership, should be kept accessible for the public.