
Photo by by Céline Clanet
By Jennifer Kahn
Jun 7, 2016
From the July/August 2016 issue
Photos by by Céline Clanet
A trek through the awe-inspiring countryside of northern Sweden can put everything into perspective.
On the third day of our six-day hike in Swedish Lapland, time stopped. We had crossed the 3,700-foot Tjäktja Pass and were making our way down the Tjäktjavagge, a vast, high valley worn smooth by the creep of ancient glaciers. Although it was summer, low clouds hid the peaks, and a biting headwind made us tuck our chins inside our jackets.
If ordinary wilderness can make you feel small, the Tjäktjavagge shrinks you into nonexistence. Though my husband, Nick, and I had been hiking for hours, we were no deeper into the valley, which continued to open before us in an endless grassy chute. Even a small waterfall that we’d judged from the pass to be perhaps an hour’s hike away, remained stubbornly distant—like a virtual reality simulation that had frozen at some point while we walked. The effect was so disconcerting that I began checking my watch every few minutes, just to reassure myself that the hands were actually moving.
I’d hiked the mountains of Colorado, British Columbia, and New Zealand, but this hike on the Kungsleden, a 275-mile trail that starts above the Arctic Circle, seemed to promise something more rare: an ancient wilderness that is still a working home for its earliest inhabitants. The Sami people had first come to Lapland (or Samiland, as it’s now officially called) 7,000 years ago, a small band of tough-minded nomads who migrated each season along with the reindeer across a swath of what is now northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia—outlasting both the endless arctic winters and several centuries of colonial invasion. Even now, when many Sami own guesthouses or lead snowmobile tours, they can strike the outsider as uncannily tough. One local cheerfully mentioned that he had once run in a single day the entire route of our six-day, 54-mile hike.
Still, he acknowledged, some things have gotten better. The Sami Parliament has given them more visibility, and there is a growing appreciation in Sweden for the value of wilderness. There are also some signs that the Sami culture, which has dwindled after centuries of repression, may be slowly reviving. Sami-language schools have opened in five towns, and an ancient form of Sami song known as yoik is on the rise. In the town of Jokkmokk, a local Sami chef holds seasonal bear-meat dinners, with the promise of “initiating diners into the mystery that surrounds bears.”
Though the appeal of an all-bear-meat dinner seemed to perplex Berg (“I ate bear once. My grandfather slaughtered it and boiled it. It was awful.”), he saw it as evidence of a promising trend. If people were willing to pay good money to eat bear meat, after all, the reindeer-meat market was sure to rebound. (“Reindeer is very healthy meat. Very low-fat!”) Even the fact that a growing number of Sami were choosing to live in the city didn’t seem to worry him. “There are other careers besides reindeer herding that let you stay in touch with your cultural values,” he said. Gesturing toward a large mine in the distance, he gave me a dry smile. “We need a lot of good lawyers, for example.”
After a fitful sleep, we caught the morning train to Abisko and started our hike. At first, the trail was easy and flat, unfurling through a forest of stunted white birch. While I had expected the landscape to be tundra-barren, it was improbably lush: full of shady glades and mossy pools. At this latitude, the trees were small and curiously twisted; some trunks had grown sideways in sprawling corkscrews, or upward in tight, vertical loops, as though pruned by a dizzy Cirque du Soleil arborist. Overhead, the sun wandered around the sky like a lost hiker, never quite managing to find the horizon.
As we hiked, we steadily stripped off layers. Though some online posts had warned about summertime crowds, after 10 miles we had passed just three other couples, plus a lone Swedish woman in her 60s who exclaimed over the good weather. We reached our overnight hut just in time to see a double rainbow arc brightly over the receding trail, and spent the afternoon swimming in a placid lake nearby and foraging in the hut’s tiny store.
The soreness of our feet became the only way to tell whether we’d been walking for an hour or a day.
Over the next few days, we fell into a rhythm, rising early—often around 4 a.m.—and reaching each hut just as most other hikers were leaving. (A Canadian couple later admitted they had started calling us “the mysterious Americans” for our tendency to vanish while everyone else was still asleep.)
Though the arctic sun was always up—in July, it set for just a single twilit hour each night—the mornings were quiet. As we picked our way across the stony ground, we regularly startled ptarmigan, chicken-like birds that would burst out of the bushes, haplessly trailed by their fluffy chicks. Higher up, the ptarmigan vanished, replaced by lean, white arctic terns, long-distance flyers so sleek and angular they seemed to have been cut from a fresh sheet of paper.
At times, the emptiness could be disorienting. The valleys we crossed were wide and so straight that, with binoculars, we could often see our entire day’s journey from our morning start. In the unvarying daylight, the soreness of our feet became the only way to tell whether we’d been walking for an hour or a day. It felt as though we were hiking through the world as it was 10 million years ago.
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The hut warden, Lena Lopate, poured us cups of bright red lingonberry juice, then left us chatting with a Slovakian father and his three teenage sons, who had come in from the rain for lunch. Though the boys had spent much of their lunch break taping up blisters, the family seemed happy to be having an adventure. After packing a heavy thermos of boiled coffee, the eldest son shook my hand and earnestly wished us a good trip, then merrily followed his brothers back out into the drizzle.
We changed into dry clothes and climbed a high ridge behind the hut under a freshly blue sky. With no trail to follow, our trajectory was steep and occasionally treacherous, shot through with slick summer snowbanks. The climb took almost an hour, but when we finally crested the ridge, the view opened as though we’d stepped through a celestial door. To the west, we could see all the way to Norway, where a panorama of towering mountains sprawled, pillowy with snow, above a vast floodplain trailed through by a sinuous pale blue river. Looking out, I felt an inexplicable urge to kneel, as though before an immense and ancient presence. For the first time, I understood why the Sami once believed their mountains to be inhabited by gods.
The next day, by contrast, was a slog. After a long hike over a rocky trail, we reached our penultimate hut, Sälka, a little after noon. Since that first sleepless night with Captain Underpants, I’d become as territorial as a badger: We would arrive early to secure the room with the fewest bunks (usually four) and anxiously shut the door to deflect would-be roommates. That strategy had paid off. For two nights running, we’d had a room to ourselves. In the process, though, we had remained stubbornly outside the huts’ cheery United Nations culture, a chatty fraternity where strangers shared stories over instant pasta dinners. We had become the North Korea of hikers.
But now, with the bulk of the route behind us, I felt bolder. Lingering in the kitchen, we chatted with a Canadian TV producer and his Swedish wife, then were joined by Johan and Cathleen, a young couple from the Swedish coastal city of Gothenburg. Cathleen seemed cheerful and earnest, Johan entertainingly gruff and dour. When I mentioned how delightful it was to be able to drink water straight from the streams without filtering it, Johan replied flatly, “Unless a reindeer has died upstream.” Gradually, though, he warmed up. After Cathleen remarked that Thursday is the traditional day for Swedish families to eat pea soup and pancakes together, Johan added that he spends Friday evenings with his family, as most Swedes do. “We call it Fredagsmys, Friday Cozy Time,” he explained bashfully.
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