A lady in middle-age, unabashedly nude and unquestionably Nordic, emerged from a thicket at the edge of Wastwater and waded stiffly out into the lake. ‘Swede or Finn?’ I wondered to myself as I lay on the shore, drying my damp skin in the September sun. Further out, a resourceful Korean was using his air mattress as a lilo, drifting lazily under the cloudless sky as his sun-hatted friends watched from the shore. In the camping field behind us, an unseen flautist began playing the hobbit theme from The Lord of the Rings.
Welcome to the convivial and slightly eccentric world of the Fjällräven Classic UK. Essentially a multi-day hike organised by one of Sweden’s best-known outdoor brands, it’s part challenge event, part Scout camp – and a unique melting pot of international outdoor culture.
A regular fixture in the calendar since 2005, the original Fjällräven Classic is a 110km hiking challenge in Swedish Lappland, running from Nikkaluokta to Abisko through one of the most popular and eye-poppingly beautiful areas in northern Sweden. It takes place in mid-August each year, and around 1,500 people walk it – most taking between three and seven days to complete the route.
As the brand’s global reach has extended – with Fjällräven gear aficionados as far afield as Asia and America – they’ve developed Fjällräven Classics in six more countries. There are now events in Denmark, Germany, Korea, the UK, the US and most recently Chile.
Part of the genius of the Classic is that it manages to be a lot of things to a lot of people. For those undertaking their first long-distance route, it needs to feel challenging but fundamentally safe and manageable. Others might be overseas walkers, looking for a curated introduction to the landscape and culture of a new country. Then, of course, you’ve got the seasoned trekkers who are in it for the fun and friendships.
It all adds up to a bit of a headache for those running the events – but the two main organisers of the UK Classic, Clare Dyson and Rich Smith, didn’t seem to mind too much. As Rich told me,
‘Even the challenges feel fun most of the time. We want participants to have a great trek and experience the atmosphere, community and challenge that comes with a Classic event – so we have to make sure we tick all of those boxes.’
This was only the second UK Classic – the first one having taken place in the Cairngorms in emphatically Scottish weather back in 2022. For 2024, Fjällräven decided to take the show to the Lake District – partly because Clare and Rich knew they could stitch together a superb trail there.
‘The route in the Cairngorms was spectacular, but we’re both based in the Lakes, so it was great to bring it home and be able to show people this beautiful little corner of the UK.’
And so, on a Tuesday evening in mid-September, around 250 walkers assembled at Muncaster Castle, near Ravenglass on the Cumbrian coast. As I drove up, I had an idea that it was going to be the sort of thing that people walked with cliquey gaggles of mates like a school sponsored walk – but that wasn’t the case at all. While some of those coming from abroad had understandably travelled in larger groups, I was surprised to find many walkers showing up alone and keen to make friends.
That first evening in the old stable yard at Muncaster had a faint whiff of Freshers’ Week about it – tables filling up with pints, pizzas and people. In a side room, friendly volunteers issued trail passports, rubbish sacks and bog rolls, while Firepot founder, John Fisher, doled out stacks of unusually tasty dehydrated meals devised through trial and error in his own kitchen.
I made my first friend within a few minutes of joining the registration queue. She was a Cumbrian local from Kendal, and rather a rarity in such international company. The next guy I met had flown in from Singapore.
‘When I finish here,’ he said, ‘I’m going to Gleneagles to play a round of golf.’
Hats off, I thought, to whoever decided that this jet-lagged mob’s first impression of the United Kingdom should be a Grade 1-listed castle, occupied by the same family for over 800 years. Even the camping field had a spectacular view over the three-river estuary at Ravenglass, and after the evening briefing I sat outside my tent as a hundred selfie sticks recorded the sun’s glowing descent into the Irish Sea.
After breakfast the next morning, a fleet of coaches set off east, pinballing along serpentine country lanes and eventually delivering a slightly nauseous crowd to the start point at Langdale. As the backpacks came out of the hold, many of them bore rows of finisher’s badges from previous Fjällräven Classics.
This being fundamentally a Swedish event, everyone immediately stopped for coffee and pastries, then groups of walkers gradually drifted off along the valley path, beginning the three-day, 50km walk back to Muncaster.
The Classic isn’t a race, and while some people will always struggle without a competitive element to get their teeth into, most seemed to revel in the slower pace. With average days of around 17km (10.5 miles) and plenty of time to walk them in, it was the kind of route where you didn’t have to worry about stopping for a paddle or putting on a second pot of coffee after lunch.
Which isn’t to say it wasn’t challenging at times. The first morning featured a sharp 430m climb up Stake Pass, made no easier by the unseasonably hot sun. Part way up, I passed two slightly older American ladies. One stood on an outcrop with her arms spread wide like a cormorant, having discovered a faint breeze. The other gestured wearily at the distant figures of walkers higher up the pass.
‘The young and the fit,’ she declared, ‘showing off.’
At the top, a crowd of walkers brewed up on camping stoves and unpacked their damp tents, flapping dew-soaked flysheets gently in the midday sun. Most, though, pushed on down the other side towards the checkpoint at Black Moss Pot, where a small crew of volunteers sheltered from the heat under a blue awning, ready to stamp our trail passports.
You could argue that it takes a particular kind of optimism to include so many swimming spots in an event taking place in the Lake District in September, but fortune does occasionally favour the bold. As it happened, we hit the jackpot, with three days of wall-to-wall sunshine. The swimming hole at Black Moss Pot had a festival atmosphere.
I sat at the edge of the plunge pool with my feet in the cool water, watching tattooed bodies cannonball down from the ledge above me. Jetboils and Pocket Rockets roared to life, as people began sampling the stash of dehydrated meals we’d picked up at registration.
And that’s another thing about the Fjällräven Classic, because they do an awful lot of the legwork for you. Quite apart from devising the route and setting up campsites with portaloos and water stations, they also provide food and fuel canisters for your time on the trail. There are free bus transfers for those arriving by plane or rail (in this case from Manchester Airport and Lancaster Station), plus secure luggage storage and a pop-up shop at the start for any bits of gear you’ve forgotten.
All of which must be hugely appealing if you’re coming from overseas. You don’t have to bring heavy supplies from home or worry about where you’re going to get camping gas for your stove (which you obviously aren’t allowed to take on a plane). You don’t have to navigate public transport in a language that you might not speak, and you don’t have to learn a whole new set of outdoor laws and etiquette (though one fellow walker did take me quietly on one side to ask about British attitudes to wild wees).
‘We have a hero among us,’ announced one of the Americans at camp in Rosthwaite that night.
In a prophetic briefing at Muncaster Castle, Matt Stapley – one of the professional mountain guides overseeing event safety – had told us all to look after not just each other, but anyone else who was out on the trails. This, as it turned out, included an elderly man from Norfolk out strolling with his wife, who lost his balance somewhere along Stonethwaite Beck and whacked his head. On any other day – under the blazing sun and without much food or water – this might have been very bad news, but fortunately he’d picked an afternoon when a couple of hundred walkers from all over the globe happened to be descending after their lunchtime dip at Black Moss Pot. A gallant Maltese found the casualty, bandaged his head, and escorted the shaken pair back to their hotel in Rosthwaite.
‘His balance isn’t very good these days,’ confided his wife as I walked with them for a while, ‘but they really should take better care of these paths…’
Later, at camp, our Maltese friend graciously acknowledged his little round of applause from the surrounding tents.
‘He blamed his wife,’ he said, offering the American a pot of spicy seasoning to jazz up his Firepot meal. The couple had been lucky, of course, but it was also an interesting little lesson in the communal nature of the outdoors. You don’t necessarily carry a first aid kit for your own benefit.
Over at the other end of the field, volunteers had got a campfire going, and a group of walkers were sitting painting postcard-sized watercolours of the fells above. Someone somewhere was playing snatches of music on what sounded like a recorder, answered robustly by a chorus of farm collies.
Route-wise, the second day followed a similar formula to the first. A stretch along the valley out of Rosthwaite, a long, hot pull up Styhead Gill, and a lazy lunch with some by-now familiar faces at Styhead Tarn. As I was leaving, I ran into my Cumbrian friend from the first evening.
‘I met someone who told me it was their fifth Classic,’ she said, ‘and I really wanted to say it was my sixth. I don’t know why, because it’s not…’
Anyone who made it up to Sty Head early enough could do an optional side trip to bag Scafell Pike, but most of us stuck to the main route, dropping down into Wasdale and finally making camp in a farmer’s field on the shores of Wastwater. It was another scorcher, and once the tents were pitched, we drifted down to wash in the lake and laze in the sun.
By now, pace and circumstance had sorted us into loose little tribes, and I camped with the same group as the previous night. Along with our Maltese hero, this included two brothers from the Netherlands, a Swedish product designer working for Primus, and three endlessly curious Americans who tapped me up for potted histories of the drystone wall and the British national parks movement. They also traded me their most colourful new-world obscenities in exchange for old-world equivalents that one of them wrote down carefully in his notebook. These cultural exchanges are so important, I always think.
Sitting around a hurricane lantern after dinner, we swapped stories and nosed around each other’s gear, bonding over common ground and differences. Another of our little gang – also Dutch – lit a slim cigarette with an illicit grin, safe in the knowledge that her kids weren’t going to catch her at it.
The ambition to run these Fjällräven Classic events came from the company’s founder, Åke Nordin (1936–2013). A lifelong outdoorsman, Nordin cobbled together his first rucksack at 14 years old using his mum’s treadle sewing machine, and went into business producing outdoor gear in 1960. Like so many entrepreneurs, some of his greatest successes came out of a knack for solving other people’s problems. Fjällräven’s famous G-1000 polycotton, for example, was developed after members of a 1966 scientific expedition to Greenland complained to Nordin about their ill-fitting and not very weatherproof jackets, while the iconic Kånken backpack – the brand’s bestselling product of all time – was a response to a 1978 newspaper article about Swedish schoolkids suffering with back pain as a result of carrying heavy textbooks in unwieldy shoulder satchels.
Nordin also knew that people needed more than just the right gear to equip them for the outdoors. He recognised that multi-day expeditions could be intimidating if you didn’t have the pocketful of back-country skills he’d grown up with, and he envisaged an event where less experienced walkers could bite off a fairly big adventure with a bit of gentle help. It was another problem for Nordin to solve, and that first Swedish Classic in 2005 was the answer – a way for novice walkers to build a connection with the outdoors.
The last morning, my usual crowd was up and away like so many scalded cats. They offered to wait, but I was in no rush for it all to be over. Instead, I had a leisurely start and another cup of coffee while I let the sun dry my tent a bit.
As I began the pull up to Burnmoor Tarn, I fell into conversation with a Scottish mountain guide walking with three friends he’d made on the first night.
‘We’re the fellowship of the flute,’ explained one of his mates, pointing to the wooden flute sticking out of his backpack. Here, then, was the source of the music I’d been hearing off and on for days. He never really explained whether the instrument was part of his standard backpacking load-out or brought along specially for the Classic.
I walked all day with them, over the boggy tops of Eskdale Fell and on through the sun-dappled woods and lanes of Eskdale itself. Up near Low Longrigg stone circle, we noticed some strange little formations in the mud, like tiny termite mounds. Outdoor life is full of these little mysteries, but it turned out one of our number was a post-doctoral researcher in microbiology.
‘I’ll put it on the departmental WhatsApp’, she offered.
In some ways I was glad to have left my start a little later that morning, because this little group – sorry, fellowship – offered a different view on the Classic. All four were seasoned walkers with experience of year-round mountaineering both in the UK and abroad. For them, it was a relatively easy route in a familiar part of the world, but there was a huge appeal in the atmosphere and companionship.
‘I was never in the Scouts’, said one, ‘so it’s nice to do something like this.’
And actually, it wasn’t a bad parallel – the Classic did feel a bit like a mini World Scout Jamboree. Spread along those last 15 or so kilometres to Muncaster were hikers from more than 20 different nations – and with an age range from pensioners right down to a three-year-old walking it with her mum and dad.
As the final afternoon wore on, 250 people trickled through the flower-bedecked arch at Muncaster Castle that marked the finish line. Volunteers stamped our trail passports for the last time and the veterans got another finisher’s patch to sew onto their backpacks. Pitched on the castle lawn was Fjällräven’s famous ‘Trekkers’ Inn’ – a large, open-sided marquee with long communal tables and a bar serving pints of Lakeland ale. The smell of a hog roast tantalised stomachs that had spent the past three days on dehydrated rations.
Eventually, organiser Clare came round to tell us that the last walkers were about to cross the line, and a crowd formed up to cheer on two immaculately attired Asian influencers with their phones held high, torn over whether to film the impromptu honour guard or their own tears of victory.
As the sun went down and most of the company began gearing up for the ceilidh that would take them late into the night, I said my goodbyes and slunk off back to my Land Rover to make the long drive home. Part way down the castle drive, my phone pinged to notify me that I’d been added to a WhatsApp group called ‘The Fellowship of the Flute’. I wondered if I might see any of them again at a future event, because – for someone who usually chooses to walk alone – I was entirely sold on the Fjällräven Classic.
Old Åke Nordin might have conceived it as a way for budding adventurers to build a relationship with the mountains, but 20 years on, the Classic is just as much about friendship and common ground. A reminder that wherever you’re from and whatever your experience, a love of the outdoors gives you a powerful shared connection with kindred spirits from all over the globe.
The Fjällräven Classics have limited places available and tend to sell out very quickly. For the best chance of bagging a ticket for upcoming events, sign up for notifications here.
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