For hikers, the mountains of Sweden’s far north provide an “overwhelming” sense of freedom, thanks to the country’s right to roam and an almost complete absence of paths. It’s a feeling I wanted my children to experience, said Adam Weymouth in the Financial Times – and so last August, we took them camping in the region.
We travelled by train across Europe to Stockholm, and spent a weekend there before taking the sleeper to Björkliden – a journey of roughly 17 hours. This tiny place lies 155 miles north of the Arctic Circle, beside Torneträsk, a 43-mile-long lake. From the station, you can climb into the hills, and soon feel entirely removed from civilisation; if you kept walking south, you wouldn’t hit a road for 60 miles.
We could pitch our tent where we liked thanks to the right to roam, so we chose a high bluff where there was a decent breeze to keep the bugs away. From there, we struck out on daily rambles across “bare” hills, where summits are as high as or higher than Scotland’s, though they are neither jagged nor particularly craggy.
During long days outdoors, we saw reindeer and golden plovers, and the children climbed rocks, picked blueberries and slithered down the snowdrifts that persist all summer. There were rivers of the “most glacial blue”, and lakes where we swam for “frantic seconds” in water that was “magnificently cold”. At night, the “buttery evening light” bled from sunset into sunrise at around 3am. Despite all the sunshine, the average daytime high in Björkliden in August is 11C or 12C, while at night, the temperature falls to 4C to 5C, making this a distinctly “coolcation”.
The weather was changeable, and after a week, with “damp” children and no food left, we moved into a small log cabin at the Abisko Mountain Lodge, near the village of Abisko (population 150). The meals there were excellent, and the lodge proved to be a good base for further walks, including to the Kårsa Glacier, a place of “alien” beauty that made the kids “giddy” with excitement. But as the glacier has shrunk by 80% since the 1940s, it also left me with a troubling sense of “loss”.