This weekend I had a true Sällskapsresan like experience as we headed north for a mini expedition of hiking in the Swedish "wilderness". first of all It might be good for me to explain the concept of sällskapsresan. It's a classic series of movies written, directed and starred my the Swedish icon Lasse Åberg. The movies all star a quite geeky and a bit lost guy who is not always in touch with the times.
Read more about the original movie
here. there are however several follow ups and the one called snow roller is definitively my favorite.
Our mission this weekend was to climb Sweden's tallest mountain, Kebnekaise. Despite only bolstering a 2102 meter rise above sea level it's trickier to climb than one might think due to fickle weather and that it's way into the polar region. There are two essential ways of getting to the top. The west route and the east route. Taking the west one is the technically easier alternative but also more physically demanding, while the east path heads over a nice glacier and sport a short stretch of climbing. I'ts about the easiest climbing one can think of and would most likely be a French 3 on the free climbing scale (basically a ladder or a stair). We aimed for the est path, booked a guide and got ready to get up. After walking up by, not the alarms, but by the wind pounding the canvas over our heads, I had my suspicions. Although out alpine tent managed just fine in the wind it was soon made clear to us that the wind might be a bit rough. Estimating it to be around 15 m/s we figured we'd give it a go. The guide disagreed.
The wind was in fact 25 m/s. It was cloudy and snowing. Although hoping for better weather throughout the day and night so that we might see the top, no such luck was to be found.
The back up plan was walking around in the area, taking in the sites and enjoying trading stories with other hikers. All in all a quite leisurely time spent.
I learned and relearned a lot from this trip and I think it was a great refresher for my trekking experiences. After three days and 54 kilometers my muscles are remarkably ok considering I haven't exercised trekking or any serious attempt at running in years. What I felt was a problem physically was my endurance, my tendons (particularly my paterllar tendon) and my ankles.
On my way up I had just thrown the stuff I could fin on very short notice and some extra stuff that I had managed to get on the way, resulting in a extremely poorly packed backpack and plastic bags. Having struck camp I finally managed to fix this and the rest of the walk was quite different in terms of weight and comfortability of my backpack.
I'm a bit interested in going again as we never hit the top but I might be even more interested in doing it winter time.
during our time in the region we realized me and Stefan where quite like the main characters in sällskapsresan. Stefan sporting shorts and knee socks was obviously playing Stig and me wearing my colorful clothing, taking about gadgets, and to random people, took on the role of Ole, despite not being Norwegian. We even added an excited Brit to our party,
Snowroller style. We met him on our way up to the fjällstationen (alpine station) and he was the only party we did not overtake trekking up there. I think he was the most stoked about climbing the mountain of all the people in the region. As this Scotsman was as hindered as we were from climbing we ended up sharing a few cold ones instead which was not at all a bad way to go when you can't trek.
