‘If you go that way,’ said Anna, smiling brightly, ‘you will go home in a body bag.’
This being the essence of that old proverb, ‘the map is not the terrain’. At the 1:100,000 scale used on Swedish mountain maps, what looks like a shallow, fordable stream can in fact be a six-foot-deep torrent that’ll sweep you to your death. Which is why it’s always worth asking a local to cast a quick eye over your route.
Sarek National Park, in northern Sweden, has a peculiar magnetism. Covering around 760 square miles, it is vast, mountainous and very wild. There are no marked trails and no places to stay. Beneath the forbidding peaks, the terrain is wet and rough, carved up with waterways, glaciers, boulder fields and dense thickets of dwarf willow that make covering ground a laborious process.
And yet this inaccessible place is perversely accessible, particularly from the top end of the park. Major hydro power schemes to the north of Sarek have meant excellent road connections to the Stockholm sleeper train at Gällivare, and a twice-daily bus service makes regular runs from the rail station to the Saltoluokta ferry or the dry entry point at Suorva dam. The travel is so pleasingly streamlined that I could set off from Leeds Bradford Airport one morning and be camped up near Saltoluokta the following evening – after 34 hours of near-constant motion by plane, train, bus, boat and boot.
Established as a national park way back in 1909, Sarek has always been a training ground for mountaineers and back-country hikers – but numbers are regulated to some extent by its remoteness, difficult terrain and mercurial weather.
Elsewhere in the Swedish mountains, you often get buzzed by fly fishermen accessing secluded lakes via helicopter taxi, but since both those activities are förbjuden in Sarek, the thrum of chopper blades ceases at the park boundary. In fact, the only folk allowed to use any form of motorised transport within Sarek National Park are the indigenous Sámi people, who have been herding reindeer there for millennia. This special privilege also means they can run a few useful boat services to help walkers cross the larger lakes.
Sarek’s allure is amplified because thousands of people every year get a tantalising glimpse into its mouth. The Kungsleden (King’s trail) – Sweden’s 290-mile flagship path – runs close to its eastern edge, serviced by a series of Swedish Tourist Association (STF) huts including the charismatic Saltoluokta mountain station. As they tramp this stretch of the Kungsleden, most hikers will take a short diversion to climb a nearby peak called Skierfe (1179m), and the summit view down the lush valley of Rapadalen into the heart of Sarek must surely be among the most Instagrammed in northern Sweden.
I know this because I stood there once too. It was 2015 and I was 44 days and 1050km into walking the length of the Scandinavian mountain range – a route known as the Gröna Bandet (Green Ribbon). ‘One day’, I thought, ‘I will walk into that view’. And so, eight years later, I did.
The plan was for a week-long solo circuit centred around the famous Basstavágge pass. I drew up a rough route, based on assumptions of low mileage, tricky ground, uncooperative weather and cock-ups. In the event, the weather was relatively kind, but the other predictions were fairly spot-on.
By the time I pitched my little MSR tent among peeping plovers at the side of the Kungsleden, I had long since binned off my original ambition to walk into Sarek via Rapadalen. This wide, green valley looks gorgeous from 500 metres up, but the worm’s-eye view is notoriously different.
‘It’s a jungle,’ moaned a pipe-smoking German drum teacher I once met near Kvikjokk. ‘Your feet are soaked and the dwarf willow is up to your chest and there are millions of mosquitoes. Next time I will keep to the high ground.’
He was the first in a long line of people to tell me what a miserable time they’d had schlepping through Rapadalen, so I showed up with a different strategy. I would spend my first day walking south along the Kungsleden from Saltoluokta, then peel off west along the bank of a long lake called Sitojaure.
People wanting to get into Sarek that way usually organise a boat ride 10km up the lake to the tiny Sámi outpost at Rinim, just inside the park boundary. But I was in no rush – and there’s always that appeal in trying to solve a problem without simply paying for a motorised deus ex machina to do it for you. I would follow the shore along, then where a river tipped into Sitojaure, I would turn upstream and ford it at a flatter spot where it spread out across lots of smaller streams (or so I thought). From there, I could walk back downstream to the lake, and the head of the Basstavágge pass would only be a couple of kilometres up the valley
It went pretty well to start with. Bimbling down the King’s Trail, I met a springer spaniel called Sälka who sat down and refused to move until I agreed to walk as far as Sitojaure with her (and her owner). Just short of the lake, I bade them farewell and headed down to the little motorboat that ferries walkers across to the far shore, operated by a local Sámi family called the Blinds. I remembered Anna Blind from the last time I had passed through here, and I asked if she might have a quick look at my route. At which point she deftly burst my bubble.
Fortunately, Anna offered an alternative to death by drowning. I could still get to Rinim by hopping across the lake in her launch and cutting over the mountain plateau beyond. Laying out my map on the boat pontoon, she showed me where to wade the Abbmojåhkå river that bisected the plateau, and where I could descend the cliffs back down to the lake shore. Doable, if not exactly easy.
‘It’s steep,’ she said, ‘but I’ve walked that way. Don’t do it in the rain. And stay high as you traverse the slope down. You don’t want to end up in that.’ She pointed at a wide strip of pretty mottled green on the map. The legend on Swedish Fjällkartor describes this as ‘Dense vegetation, area difficult to cross’. Usually an understatement, in my experience.
‘My parents live at Rinim,’ said Anna. ‘Any problems, go and see them.’
Anna’s boat dropped a group of us on the south shore of Sitojaure. As she waved goodbye and roared back across the lake, a middle-aged German who had overheard the plan told me gently that it was a bad one and suggested I do something easier. Oddly, this is something that’s happened to me a few times over the years. Because our winters in the UK are relatively mild and even our tallest mountains are tiddlers by continental standards, people in Europe can sometimes be a bit protective of Brits. The impulse is to feel patronised (especially since being patronised is an unusual sensation for a 40-year-old man), but I don’t think it’s ever been meant that way.
Set against this reasonable concern for a stranger’s safety, I’d argue that weighing up risk without being led too far astray by fear or bravado is at the heart of most good adventures. There is huge pleasure in doing difficult things, and you have to try and decide not only how your own experience and strength might stack up against the possible dangers ahead, but also whether – to you – the risk is worth the reward. And as Roald Amundsen once said, you have to do all this while being conscious of the fact that ‘no man can grasp all the possibilities of the future’.
I thanked the chap for his advice then disregarded it, climbing onto the plateau before leaving the Kungsleden behind and striking off into the trackless scrub. Rationally, a safer life is a better life, but we all know that isn’t really true.
It took me most of the next day to cross the plateau. Anna’s fording point was a good one, but the stream was still fast and deep enough that I had to keep my boots on and squelch the rest of the day. As the afternoon wore on, the grassy plain turned to gullies and boulder fields, speckled with buttercups and cotton grass. The rain set in and the peaks around me began disappearing into the cloud until eventually I did too. Clagged in, I clung to compass bearings and waterways.
Just short of the plateau edge, near a locked reindeer herder’s shelter that I could barely see through the mist, I found a patch of flat grass. It was absolutely not the time to chance a tricky descent, so I camped up early and hunkered down in my sleeping bag with sweet black coffee and an Inspector Morse novel. If the way down was too sketchy, I had an escape route into Rapadalen, but it was a long diversion and I didn’t much fancy it.
By the next morning, the rain had dropped off and the cloud had lifted high enough to reveal a plunging descent of scree and cliffs. Four hundred metres below me, Sitojaure lay turquoise and still, the views opening ever wider as the mist receded. I sat on a rocky promontory, partly because it was a beautiful place to be, and partly through fear and indecision. Nevertheless, I could see a way down, so I swallowed my nerves and got on with it.
It was one of those heart-in-your-mouth scrambly descents that you wonder about afterwards. Not technically difficult, but steep and awkward, slithering down slippery chutes of tumbled rock and wedging yourself in little hollows for a breather. Awash with relief as it started to level out, I forgot Anna’s warning to stay high, and descended too far into the humid jungle of birch and dwarf willow.
Dwarf willow, if you haven’t encountered it before, is the stuff of dark fairytales. In sheltered spots it will grow into dense thickets as tall as a man, and its twisted, rubbery stems clutch and claw at you like gnarled fingers. It often grows on damp, uneven ground, pocked with mossy hollows that you can’t see until you fall into them. And of course it is usually humming with mosquitoes. It took me several hours to cover barely three kilometres, taunted by regular heaps of elk dung. If something the size of a cow can get through here, I thought, then why am I making such a meal of it?
Sometimes the foliage broke open into wide, rocky channels down which cold mountain streams rushed towards the lake, and I stopped at one of them for a wash and a deep drink. Clean and refreshed, I put a pot of coffee on to boil and lay out half naked in the sun. It was a counterpoint that would characterise much of this trip – that contrast between periods of relentless flagellation and pockets of lazy bliss.
Reluctantly, I dressed again and flogged on for another hour until the terrain softened into marshy reindeer pasture. Hidden down by the lakeshore was the Sámi homestead at Rinim, and hundreds of reindeer watched me warily as I passed. Gentle, elegant creatures, I’ve always found them strangely reassuring. Sometimes you wake up in the night to find whole herds of them drifting through your camp, grunting and cropping peacefully as the herd-leader’s bell clanks under the midnight sun.
By now, I was in Sarek proper. As I pitched up for the night, I met four young Swedes coming the other way. They were tired and weatherbeaten, hoping to persuade the boatman at Rinim to ferry them out at this fairly late hour.
‘What route did you take in?’ they asked.
‘A bad one,’ I said. But if you’d offered me my time again, I still don’t think I’d have taken the boat.
Scything between the Ähpár and Skårki massifs, the Basstavágge pass was the centrepiece of my trip. The pass itself is only about 15km long, but by the time you factor in a fair amount of ascent and numerous streams to ford, it’s a decent day’s walk. Received wisdom is that it’s best to try and get through in one go rather than camping in the narrow valley, where the geography tends to funnel Sarek’s famously unpredictable weather straight into your tent.
Not that I had to worry about that. The day was clear and bright, and my bare legs burned under the sun even as the glacier-chilled breezes kept my woolly jumper on. The terrain was rocky but clear, the views were astonishing, and I scooped mugfuls of crisp water from the mountain streams as I passed. On a fair day like this, it wasn’t far off perfection – and apparently the Sámi agree with me. Traditionally, Basstavágge has always been a special place for them, and there are stories of their holy men traversing the pass alone with a ceremonial drum.
I only came across one fellow walker all day – a young helicopter pilot on his weekend off. His mates had dropped him at the park border, and were picking him up the following night. Like me, he had come for space and silence rather than company, but we swapped stories every now and again when one of us stopped for lunch or a brew-up and the other one overtook him.
At the western end of the pass, the rocky terrain gave way to grass, the ground flattened out and the wind dropped off. Flying free in the sudden stillness, mosquitoes began to snorkel at my hairline. I waded a last stream, thigh-deep but languid, then pitched my tent and cooked up a pan of salmon and broccoli pasta that I managed somehow to taint with insect-repellent. My new friend stalked wearily past me in Crocs and boxer shorts.
‘I am tired of getting wet pants today’, he explained.
I woke up late the next morning feeling lacklustre – muscles aching and feet a bit bashed in from too much rock-hopping in wet boots. But at least I could do something about both those things. A wash, a big breakfast, hot coffee, dry socks, bandaged toes, and the promise of an easy day’s walking ahead. As I headed northeast up the valley, the path was clearly visible on the ground, if not on my map.
This central part of Sarek sees a decent amount of foot traffic – partly because it’s the most direct through route from Suorva to Rapadalen, but also because one of the few bridges in the area is at the south end of Guhkesvágge (‘the long valley’). The raging Guhkesvákkjåhkå river divides Sarek and Stora Sjöfallets national parks, and if you want to get across it, there’s only one place you can. It makes for some pleasant encounters in an otherwise fairly solitary place.
I passed a laid-back Spaniard – still packing up his camp at 11am – then three Swedes cooking up Real Turmat dehydrated lunches on a Trangia. At the bridge there was a German from Cologne with a couple of surprisingly young children, all three of them wearing matching straw hats. Everyone walking the other way had come in via the convenient dry entry point at Suorva dam, but I was greedy for a few more big views, and my plan was to get out via a mountain saddle to the east that would lead me back to Saltoluokta mountain station.
It was nice to walk on a proper path for a while, but in due course I peeled off the track and struck across country, skirting the dwarf willow thickets as best I could and clambering across gritty boulder fields. The afternoon had turned hot and airless, and the bugs came out to play again.
Somewhere along the way I camped up in a mosquito infested hollow, burning with bites and clammy with the grime of the trail. Insect life tends to winkle its way into your dreams, but I surfaced in the morning to find that a deeper bass buzzing had joined the collective whine of the mosquitoes. A wasp, bashing itself relentlessly against the flysheet – driven, I could only assume, by the instinctive malice of its kind. As I packed up in haste, one of its mates darted out of a bilberry bush and stung me
Ascending the rocky saddle between Sluggá and Vuovres, the air started to move again and the bloodsuckers mercifully melted away. I had a long, luxurious wash by a pool, sponging myself down with a pan of hot water then rinsing off with cold. Delicious to be clean. I drank sweet coffee in patchy sunshine, then set off across the plateau, a bandana tucked under my baseball cap to protect my midge-bitten and sunburned ears. I found a camp spot with an absolute bombshell of a view into Stora Sjöfallets national park, and inched my way across last winter’s rotten snow to collect icy drinking water from the bottom of a deep, sunless gully nearby.
As someone more used to high-mileage hiking on well-worn trails, this was a completely different kind of trip, where the challenges were less about pack pony stamina, and more about trying to solve the conundrums of navigation and terrain. Progress was slow but satisfying, full of decisions and consequences. I pored over single grid squares on my map, trying to work out whether a stream or slope would be passable – trying even harder not to miss something crucial that would scupper me later.
As with the rest of the days, so with my last. Following the line of Pietsaure lake below me, I stayed too high for a little too long, and ended up with a steep descent into marshy woodland. Part way down, I perched on a little cliff and watched an elk lead her calf across the clearing below. Considerate beasts, they and their friends had worn a track through the woodland, and when I got down, I found my progress was a lot easier than it had any right to be. I grazed off toxic-looking cloudberries and sat on the rocky lakeshore, dangling my feet in the water as I ate the last of my mashed-up cereal bars.
At the eastern end of the lake was a good deal of reindeer fencing and a compact Sami settlement on the far side of a deep channel. I knew I would have to get across the river somewhere higher up where it spread into lakes and streams, so I bushwhacked four kilometres up the valley through a patchwork of swamp and dwarf willow, trying to stay as high as I could. Just before I descended to the river, I came across a strangely beautiful spot where a series of boulders stood in a circle, like Bilbo’s trolls turned to stone. Under the largest rock was a hidden chamber, big enough to sleep in, with a single bone lying in it.
Rain began to fall gently as I reached the river and waded a couple of slow-moving channels – barefoot despite the rocky ground because I couldn’t bear the thought of travelling the whole way back to Yorkshire the next day in damp boots. On the slope above me, I could see the red crosses on posts marking out the Kungsleden for winter skiers. I stumbled through a last grasping tangle of chest-high scrub, and found myself suddenly back on the path. After six days following mostly my own lines, it felt like the M1.
There was a sense of reaching shore, but also a twinge of something else, and I realised after half an hour’s fast walking through the bucketing rain that I hadn’t checked my map once. For the first time in nearly a week, I’d let myself lose track of where I was. Just short of Saltoluokta, I pitched up at the spot where I’d camped on the first night, and crawled into a warm sleeping bag.
In the morning, I would heat water for a wash, change into clean clothes and walk down to the Salto ferry to begin my journey home, but for a last night I lay tired and happy on the springy earth of northern Sweden.
I once read a novel by Stef Penney where someone said that the secret of happiness is ‘a variation of the general principle of banging your head against a wall and then stopping’. Maybe that’s true, or perhaps it’s more that the uncomfortable bits are the salt of an adventure – a sprinkle of seasoning that helps you savour the good bits more. Every walk is different, and this one felt self-indulgent, even oddly decadent. My pace was slow, I took the routes I wanted to, rather than the ones I should – and for all the biting insects, the awkward terrain and the perpetually wet feet, it was filled with moments of simple, overwhelming contentment.
And I didn’t have to be repatriated in a black body bag, which I suppose was a happy bonus.
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