Kungsleden: One Month in the Arctic
Through-hiking Sweden's King's Trail with a large format view camera
By early June, the water is moving. Freed from winter snow and ice, it runs to the nearest ledge and falls off. It sneaks out from under fields of snow with a hiss, or else it finds a thick tangle of roots and moss to trickle through, or else it gathers in great torrents to crash against the rocks and itself. It stretches out and settles down in large alpine lakes, or sinks into the mud and emerges further down the hill. The water is blue—every shade of it that you can imagine—and gray, or else black, sometimes red and brown, and green. Most often, it’s perfectly clear and just a few degrees above freezing.
And when the water starts moving, so does everything else: ancient coniferous forests shake off another year of snow to stand erect in their uniform of deep greens and browns; young, pale birch sprites shoot up from the ground, scrawny and crooked from birth; the open fjäll—a modestly diverse biome of low-growing dwarf shrubs, berries, and flowers punctuated by scattered boulders and abrupt hillsides—carpets the hilltops and shudders in the wind.
Ptarmigan dig nests in the dirt and hatch dozens of eggs at a time. The reindeer, too, are giving birth. Moose patrol the edges of large meadows. Bear footprints are seen more often than the bears themselves, and the lynx and wolverine stay completely hidden. Wherever the water gathers (i.e. everywhere), insects burst out: fat bumblebees with roaring wings, thick clouds of mosquitos and flies, but also the buntings, warblers, stints, and jays that expect them. Deeper in the valleys, ferns unfurl and moss swells with moisture; soft, leafy undergrowth pushes up in the spaces between; wildflowers amass like confetti. Soon the sun will be shining for 24 hours a day, and the plants are ready for it.
This is Laponia in spring. An arctic region in the northernmost part of Sweden—and including parts of Norway, Finland, and Russia—Laponia (or Lappland) has been inhabited by humans for at least 8,000 years and likely more, probably as far back as when the last great sheets of ice began to recede into the ocean c.12,000 years ago. Just a couple hundred kilometers to the west, the fjords of Norway loom over cold Atlantic waters, but back here on the inland, the mountains roll off somewhat more gently. They top out around 2,000 meters, and most of the area, though alpine in character, is only ever a fraction of that height above sea level. The lower regions, carved through by millennia of glacier activity and fed incessantly by snowmelt, now comprise lush bands and pockets of forests, marshes, rivers and lakes.
The quickness of Laponia’s tumble from spring into summer is matched only by the fecundity of its land; for a brief few months each year, with nearly unfettered access to fresh water and sunlight, every square inch of the place seems to swell. It occurs to me that the magnitude of this annual burst of energy—that is, the amount of life-giving resources it represents as available to sustain a given population—is what has enabled 10,000 years of human activity in the region and is, as yet, to be fully realized. To the indigenous Sámi people who still occupy the region, it is Sápmi.
And it’s the location of Sweden’s King’s Trail—the Kungsleden—which rambles for over 460km (290 miles) through national parks, Sámi villages, and the arctic wilderness of northern Sweden. Earlier this summer, I through-hiked the trail carrying a 4”x5” large format view camera, among the other necessary things for a month-long stay in the woods. All the photographs in this article are taken from a set of 50 total photographs that I made with this camera. You can view all the photos in this piece at their full resolution here at the Gumaverse site, and I hope you do.
I. Preparation
“How do you know about this place?” is the most frequent question that I fielded on the trail. And truth be told, I can’t remember how I first heard about it.
The Kungsleden has been an established trail for over 150 years, and it’s well-known among Swedes. “It’s a thing like, your dad did it, and your grandfather did it, and now at a certain age you are going to go hike on the Kungsleden,” another hiker told me. It was originally established to provide access to Sweden’s only mountainous region for scientific study, and it has been maintained by the Svenska Turistföreningen (STF, or Swedish Tourist Association) almost ever since. It is divided into five major sections, with most major endpoints representing small villages that are more or less accessible by some combination of bus/train/plane. For most of the locals, it’s a trail to visit time and again throughout life, completing or repeating sections as they please. Almost all through-hikers are foreigners. The fact that it’s extremely well-marked and that the STF has a long-established system of staffed mountain cabins where it is possible to book sleeping accommodations, restock on food, shower, and even sauna makes it a very popular trail for short or long stays. Water is ubiquitous and, observing proper sense about collecting it, safe to drink anywhere.
The cherry on top of this well-maintained, accessible trail is Swedish allemansrätten. Allemansrätten, literally “every man’s right,” is a freedom-to-roam concept shared by a handful of other European countries (and codified into law in some cases) that allows any person the “right of access” to all land. Practically the only exception is that you respect a certain amount of distance from a house or private garden—otherwise, go anywhere, sleep anywhere, drink the water, eat what you can find. There are no park entry fees, backcountry permits, parking passes, campsite reservations, or any kind of bureaucracy involved if you simply want to visit the land. For trekkers, this is a huge logistical puzzle disappeared (compared to hiking in the States, at least), and it also opens great possibilities for trekking. As the trail oscillated from remote, unsupported wild camping to the more popular and accommodating entry/exit points, I met people of all ages and types, from wizened solo walkers, to families with young children, to middle-aged folks sleeping in a tent for the very first time. Almost all the Swedish hikers had been initiated into the outdoors with the knowledge and the spirit to roam anywhere on the map, as is their right. Many of them were planning or had completed excursions into protected parts of the region where no trails exist at all—after a few weeks, I started to feel like a square, sticking to my well-marked, well-known trail. The immense amount of freedom (and concomitant responsibility) of allemansrätten means that Swedes grow up with a culture of respect and interest in the landscape of their home country, whether a trail runs through it or not.
In preparation for this trip, I bought a guidebook. I booked (and then re-booked) plane tickets. I bought film and other things. I exercised—460 is a lot of kilometers. I sweated the small stuff (never sweat the small stuff). And on June 23, I left Texas for Sweden.
II. Packing
If you trek once, bully for you. You’ve done something many will never try and stepped into rarer places than most ever will. If you like it enough to go again, you’ll pack less the second time and spend some portion of the hike considering how much nicer it feels. If you like it enough to do it many times, eventually you will be convinced that the best weight is no weight at all, and in trying to square this circle—that you have to carry some things in order to live outside for a week or more—your equipment will necessarily improve toward the lighter (and more expensive) end, and at the same time you’ll begin to nurture a craving to be without. I am by no means an “ultralight” evangelist, though you will find them online and on the trail in running sneakers and daypacks. But since my plan was to carry a camera kit to include a wooden folding camera, heavy lens, and heavy film (not to mention a tripod), the rest of the pack had to stay trim, with strictly the basics for survival. I brought:
A tent, a sleeping bag, a sleeping pad. A butane burner with pot, a collapsible cup and bowl, a spork. A knife, a compass, and a first aid kit. Soap, a toothbrush, and a small towel. Two shirts, one pair pants, two pair underwear, three pair socks. A puffy jacket (middle layer) and a rain jacket (outer layer). One hat and a sleep mask. A pouch for water. One journal, two pens, and the guidebook.
Without food or the camera kit, my pack weighed 16kg (about 35 pounds). This is squarely in the middle, in my estimation: as far from ultralight as it is from too heavy. It’s a workable weight that leaves room for food and that, for me, only required a little bit of physical conditioning in advance of the trip. The weather in the Arctic is unpredictable, and it was important to prepare for lows that could be around freezing and any amount of rain and wetness.
The most important thing about packing for a trek is to make a list and stick with it. Don’t overthink it, and don’t talk yourself into thinking you need extra of anything except for blister tape.
“What about entertainment?” my friend Gary asked me the week before I left.
III. The Camera
I did weigh out the camera kit, and for those who like to see numbers dance as they dream of flitting across 40km in a day, here are those numbers:
Intrepid 4x5 Camera MkV - 1350g
Fuji 125mm f/5.6 Fujinon lens, mounted in Seiko shutter - 221g
(2) Film holders - 361g
Minolta Spotmeter F light meter plus (1) extra AA battery - 302g
Film, in two boxes (70 B&W (Ilford FP4), 20 color (Kodak Ektar/Portra)) - 490g
Misc. tools (dark bag, 2x glass filters, cable release, timer) - 426g
Tripod - 1119g
Total weight of the camera kit - 4.27kg, or about 9.4lbs. With still no food in the pack, we are reaching the upper boundary of what makes for a “comfortable” weight to carry around continuously.
The view camera makes negatives on postcard-sized sheets of film. These sheets are not on a roll—they must be loaded one at a time into the camera using lightproof film holders, and then unloaded from the holders in complete darkness, back into the lightproof box to be stored until processing. I kept two small plastic bags in each box of film that I could discern by touch, and using a dark bag, I developed a system of rotating exposed film out of the film holder to the “exposed” bag at the same time I was pulling a fresh sheet from the “unexposed” bag and loading it into the same holder. I had separate film holders for B&W and color, with the color holder marked by bright orange nail polish—I never mistook the two.
In addition to being heavy, large format lenses have to be mounted to rigid square lens boards that set into the camera body, and the sharp corners make efficient packing difficult. I only had room in my pack for one lens, and I brought the lens that I hoped would serve the most purposes. 125mm in this format is considered slightly wide of normal—I wanted to be able to get broad landscapes, but still do any detail work without the exaggerated framing of an ultra-wide lens. This kind of “standard” focal length gave most of my photographs a classic, proportional feel, but the trade-off was that there were many shots that I considered but ultimately abandoned, short of having a more appropriate lens. For future trips, I will engineer a solution that allows me to pack two or more lenses.
I set out to make two photographs per day, and I mostly stuck to that average.
IV. The Trek
I started my trek in the town of Hemavan, at the southern terminus of the trail. I had been convinced to hike south-to-north by someone online who had pointed out that the unceasing summer sun wouldn’t shine directly into your face as much as it would were you going the other direction.
Hemavan is a small and utilitarian ski town with a central grocery store/restaurant/mini-mart complex, some lodging, and a one-building airport that I think was only staffed for the amount of time it took to unload the three bags from the prop plane and turn it around to Stockholm. As a trailhead, it lacks the touristic charm of the more popular north end, where in Abisko there is direct-from-Stockholm train service and a large mountain lodge, observatory, etc. Being early in the season and at what most hikers would consider the “end” of the trail meant I was in for a quiet start. Indeed the streets were empty at 2:30pm as I found my way from the grocery store to the trailhead and began walking. Despite the backpack’s inevitable full weight with food from the grocery store completing the inventory, I basked in the ease of the first few kilometers. As my nerves relaxed and the stress of two straight travel days faded into the past, I marveled at how actually simple it had been to, as I had described to friends, “show up and start walking.”
I started the trail nearly a week after the STF cabins had officially opened for the season—though the trail is traversable year-round, the cabins stick to a summer and winter schedule, being staffed at the times when the trail is safest and most sensibly traversed by foot or ski. And although I planned to mostly wild camp for free, the cabins were always welcome places to rest, resupply, and get information about the weather and the trail. The hut wardens, who are all volunteers, were always gracious and easy to talk to, speaking perfect English as do most Swedes. Already in the south, reports were coming down to the wardens that unexpected late snowfall on the north end had slowed up many hikers, and many had turned back. I was glad to have started in Hemavan.
Because of the open-ended quality of a long trail like this and the many opportunities to dip in and out, hikers set their sights on a wide variety of goals for completing the trail. Most foreigners that I met were hiking fast because of a work or travel obligation. Many had planned to complete the whole trail in 14-18 days, which would require moving nearly 40km a day. Some that I passed at major endpoints were exiting the trail earlier than planned because they had run out of time. Other hikers carried hugely loaded packs and insisted that they couldn’t do more than 10km per day, in which case they would be on the trail for months (for a reasonably fit person walking with no backpack, 10km probably represents about 2 hours or less walking time).
From the start, I settled into a pace that was between 16-25km per day, moving a little faster than 3km/hour. This was long enough to have me walking for most of every day, which is what I had come to do, and offered many opportunities to speed up or slow down as my energy levels allowed. I finished the trail in 27 days, 5 of which were complete rest days with zero mileage covered.
And what tales I could tell of those days! Of moon-like midnight landscapes; of speechless animal communion; of oneiric mountain villages clad in copper red; of catastrophic equipment failure; of unexpected gifts and small surprises; of complete pain and how to practice smiling; of pure attention; of solitude; of altruism; of trust; of the arresting gratitude that rises to sate you when you remove yourself to such a place in body and mind. In all these ways and more, you just have to be there.
V. Returning
But I can tell one story. The view camera made me some very fast friends. Its wooden standards and bright green bellows attracted astonishment and multivariate lines of inquisition, usually starting with, “Is that a camera??” Sometimes people would approach me on the trail while I was composing and strike up a chat. Other times, after an engaging conversation or encounter, I would offer to demonstrate the camera. I got into the habit of making portraits of people who factored into the trek in interesting ways.
About eight days into hiking, I came into the town of Jäkkvik, which is an endpoint of one of the major sections of the trail. There’s a grocery store, a hostel, and basically a single two-lane road running through where you can catch a bus. There are something like fourteen year-round residents. The road also provides access for day-hikers and families, and it was among this milieu that I pitched a tent on the hostel grounds.
As the afternoon grew long, more and more people started arriving. Some from the trail, some from the road. After more than a week and over 160km of walking, eating, and sleeping in solitude, I suddenly found myself thrust back into the dynamics of social engagement, of politeness among strangers, and of the intimacy of shared spaces. It’s mostly pleasant, if exhausting, and of course it is what normal life is. But under the circumstances—physically exhausted, my mind still breaking on the gravity of my undertaking this trek—it was a lot to handle.
It was in this tender frame of mind that I emerged from a sauna and shower at 9pm, ready to write in my journal and fall asleep, to find a note pinned to my tent. The children were playing with the frisbee, it said, and there had been an accident. I read the entire note twice, and then looked at the tent. There was a four-inch gash in the rain fly. My stomach sank—it had already rained twice in the previous eight days. Pulling the rain fly back, it sank further—the aluminum tent pole was snapped in half.
I felt the low buzz of panic warm the backs of my ears as my mind raced to think of options, almost all of which involved ending the trek. It was an accident, no one is hurt, I am safe and have paths available to me… But to have come so far, to be engaged so deeply in the process of the most satisfying and sparse type of self-sufficiency, only to be derailed by the chaotic inattention of a rushing child? The note invited me to make contact with the family in the orange tent.
They were actually three families—a handful of parents and kids—who were staying for two days. I had a rest day planned and would also have a full second day to work on a solution. As we introduced ourselves, we narrowly avoided stepping into a comedy of manners: the apologetic American (“It’s fine, but…) vs. the somberly socialist Scandinavians (“It’s not fine, we must fix this…’”). I had to accept the frustrating improbability of what had been an accident, and they were sympathetic to how seriously I felt about it. It was clear that we had enough time to cooperate and find a solution, but what? Money? Not useful to me in the moment. Trade tents? Theirs is too big and heavy. Spend the next day driving to where I could buy a new one?
As it turns out, I had a single repair splint in my tent kit for the broken pole, and being at the hostel we were able to find some heavy duty tape to secure it. My disappointment started to simmer down and calcify into a much more manageable dust pile. By some strange miracle, the next morning the patriarch of the family Mikkel discovered an unused patch kit stuffed into one of their tent bags. It started to look like the trek would go on.
As we wrapped the tent splint in yards of tape (which I should say held up for the remaining three weeks of my trek), I turned to Mikkel and said, “you’re going to think I’m crazy, but I would like to ask you for a favor. I want to make a portrait of your family.”
My portrait of Mikkel, his wife, their friends, and all of their kids turned out blurry, but it’s charming. I’m still going to send it to him. So many things can derail a photograph on the view camera—maybe a gust of wind shook the camera by its bellows. Maybe the shutter speed was too slow for the children who were either trying to stifle their laughter or to not turn so red in the presence of the stranger they had wronged.
As I look through my photographs, I notice that almost all of them feature some trace of human activity among all the nature: a building, a bridge, a fence, or a path. It seems that I really favored this type of juxtaposition. There’s an impression, even in my own mind, that solo hiking is intrinsically solitary (and it is), and that the reward of such an effort is hours of “alone time.” But what I experienced on the trail last month, and what I seem to want to say in my photographs, is that there is always and necessarily a social component too: a reckoning with society through the process of extracting oneself from it; a forced interaction with others who are experimenting with the same experience (by any other name, a “society” of hikers). Over and over again on the trail, I witnessed a type of base level, small-c communism: small groups of people with mutually held goals working together, forming impromptu parties, social problem solving (as in my story of the tent), altruistically giving away supplies, snacks, or other limited resources, spilling free advice, and plain old getting along. Most times, all of the above came even before first names were exchanged. The expedition would not have been the same without the people I met along the way.
The trip always ends. You have to come down from on high. My return took three days, included an emergency plane landing in a country that was not even on the itinerary, and provided for at least one screaming baby in each public space. By the time I got home, I was exhausted and couldn’t have felt further from the mountains of Laponia. I buried myself in the process of developing the photographs and tried to ignore the creeping blues. In his notes for the unfinished novel Mount Analogue, René Daumal writes about mountain climbing, “there is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know.”
To that I would add: photography is the process of knowing through seeing, and sharing knowledge is one of the most fundamental human acts. Here is what I know.
Please do check out the large photos here at the Gumaverse site, and keep in touch as I look for opportunities to publish and display some of them at sizes that make the most of their excellent detail and resolution.
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