Adrian’s snowboarding technique is improving steadily, and is now actually better than his skiing, I think. He is faster and more stable on the skis, but pretty much just snow ploughs straight down, whereas on a snowboard he gets pretty nice curves in now.

Anyway, he was feeling confident enough that he and Eric also got onto blue slopes. The longest slope here in Stöten, “Mormors störtlopp”, is green and gentle one, and very nice if you want an easy and relaxed ride – as a skier. But the topmost bit is a long, flat, narrow section that is not at all good for snowboarders. Ingrid and I have had plenty of time to explore the pistes, and found a blue run that we thought would fit the snowboarders’ needs as well. So we could all go down together, for the first time this trip. Which was nice – and gave me great photo opportunities.








The weather was no better today than before. Still windy and with low clouds and lousy visibility at the top. Around lunchtime we got some sleet, and while that stopped for a while, it later came back as almost-rain.



One thing we re-learned yesterday is that about 90% of all Swedes head for lunch just after noon. It’s almost like a law of nature. Water flows downhill, fire is hot, lunch is at twelve. Making use of that knowledge, we made sure to be out on the slopes between twelve and half past one, to make the most of the empty slopes and the almost non-existent lift queues. Skiing is best with no other people around.

The weather today was cloudy again, with such high winds and bad visibility at the top that the lifts to the top were shut down in the afternoon. Here’s the staff taking down the fencing around what, in the morning, was the queueing area for one of the two seated lifts.

Like yesterday, Eric and Adrian were snowboarding on the lower, gentler slopes, while Ingrid and I zig-zagged down the blue pistes. Ingrid kindly took some photos of me as well. I was also there.

Here we are, skiing and snowboarding in Stöten.

Adrian went straight to the snowboard option this year and managed it like a pro.

Ingrid wasn’t feeling a 100% so she took an easy day today and stuck to skis – and even went so far as to go down the blue pistes with me, instead of challenging herself on the red and black slopes.

Here’s Adrian gliding past our house in the background (and our car is also among the ones parked in the background). We could probably save money by living further away, but the convenience of being easy walking distance from the slopes is unbeatable. Someone feels tired and wants to go home early? Someone wants to sleep in and join us a bit later? No problem. No driving, no need to manage who’s where when.

Eric and Adrian stayed in the lower, broader, green slopes, while Ingrid and I took the big lift up to the top. This is her:

The weather conditions at the top were pretty bad, with low clouds and a fair bit of wind. At times it was difficult to see where the pistes even started. Aim between the neon orange sticks and assume that the piste will continue without any sudden changes, and hope for the best.


But there were beautiful views as well, and even the occasional moments of blue skies.


All knackered after hours of skiing:

Off for a half-week of skiing in Stöten. Today was mostly a day of driving, and then getting ourselves situated, picking up our skis, etc. I forgot to take a photo, so I’m borrowing this one from tomorrow morning. This is our small apartment in Stöten – a small kitchen/living room combo, and two small bedrooms with bunk beds. It’s OK, for a few days, but with last year’s stay in Kläppen fresh in our memories, this doesn’t really compare. The sofa in particular is uncomfortable no matter how we try to sit in it. But! We’re no more 50 metres from the nearest piste, which is worth quite a bit.


Winter came early this year, and hard. We’ve got plenty of snow and temperatures have been at –10°C or colder. For the first time since forever, we have enough snow for skiing in Stockholm in December.

I took a few hours off work this afternoon and went skiing on Järvafältet. It was perfect. A cold Monday afternoon, almost no people. Fresh snow, and tracks in good shape.

Out skiing in –10°C, I was warmer than I am at home at +17°C. There wasn’t a single moment when I was cold, even though I was wearing about as much as I do when I sit home on the sofa.

My phone was less happy in the cold. It died, showing me a distressed yellow warning triangle with a thermometer icon, before I finished my circuit. Which was a bit of a problem, because it had my photos of the map of tracks. The map was only posted in a handful of locations, and I knew there were none in the north-west corner of the area. The tracks follow the terrain and are nowhere near regular or predictable in shape. But most of the time there wasn’t much choice, just follow the tracks, so I found my way back even without the maps.

I’m hitting my flex bank limit at work, which I had planned to use for my usual autumn hike, but Nysse’s long convalescence made that impossible. Today was forecast to be sunny so I just took the day off and went for a walk. My initial plan was to continue hiking the Sörmlandsleden. However getting to the next stage would have required me to drive through all of Stockholm in the morning rush hour, and then another hour, and then do the same on my way back – which really did not appeal at all. So instead of going south, I went north, to Skokloster. Sweden’s largest private castle, now a museum, but unfortunately closed for the season. I can’t remember if I’ve ever been there, but if I have then it was decades ago and I’ve no memories of it.

The walk started right at by the castle and circled round to the back, providing some lovely views of it.


The forest south of the castle was a surprisingly wild one, all tangles and roots and fallen trees. Both these photos are taken straight along the path, which you can barely even see.


The path was well marked and followed the Upplandsleden trail for the most part. The orange signposts were familiar to me from Sörmlandsleden and were easy to spot.

When the trail curved inland away from the lake, there were some more open landscapes with beautiful autumn colours. This was another reason why I came here and didn’t walk somewhere closer to home: I really wanted some deciduous forest with pretty colours, instead of pine and spruce.



When the trail approached the castle again from the other side, there were signs of the grounds having a noble history. There were old water reservoirs for the castle’s fountains, now overgrown, and boulevards now leading to nowhere.

The land-facing side of the castle was impressive again. Though I found the remains of the park pretty underwhelming, like nearly all Swedish parks. This one barely deserved the name. A lawn, some gravel paths, and a few lines of trees, and that was it. All very large, very straight, and clearly meticulously tended, but so very basic.

The off-centre placement of that ornamental urn in front of the castle really bothered me. I guess only a photographer would pay attention to it.

I had my packed lunch on one of the benches in front of the castle. It felt a bit surreal, especially since there was nobody else around.

Around 15 km in total.

This weekend was going to be a scout hike for Eric and Adrian, and a long overnight hike for myself as well. A weekend with good weather at the end of September is not to be wasted. But then Adrian fell ill and our plans all fell through. He’s much better today than he was yesterday, so I could go out for a day walk at least, and complete the Stockholm Signature Trail.

On Gärdet I saw an interesting apartment building that I’d heard and read about. It was less green in reality than in marketing photos, but was still quite striking. If I had to live in an apartment, I wouldn’t mind having one here.

Kaknästornet is a contrast to its surroundings. It was built as a TV tower in the 1960s and is still in active use for telecom. The top parts used to house a restaurant and viewing platform, but those were permanently closed about five years ago due to security concerns.

Djurgården hosts a pet cemetery. Sweet and sad. The oldest gravestones date back to the 1930s.

At the eastern tip of Djurgården I felt like I was out in the archipelago already.


Djurgården is full of expensive villas with double security gates and private piers.

Southern Djurgården had lots of lovely sculptures. Old and new, whimsical and classical. Wooden sculptures of various kinds around Rosendals Trädgård, and modern, playful sculptures towards the northern side.





My night in the forest was a wet one, and now so is the tent.

Drying hiking gear is tricky with a cat in the house. Dangling straps and lines look like toys. Draping fabric and interesting surfaces are tempting for little cat claws. We’ve lost one inflatable sleeping pad to Nysse’s claws already. It took less than a minute from the pad landing on the floor to him feeling it out.

I’m airing out my sleeping pad in the bedroom behind a closed door, and the tent in the bathroom where Nysse never goes. The sleeping bag is living dangerously over the backs of our dining room chairs, but on the far side of the table, less visible to Nysse. Worst case, I can mend a sleeping bag, and it doesn’t need to be air- or watertight.


The view from my tent was quite different today, with yesterday’s golden sunset replaced by a rainy night and morning. I woke up at six, nipped out for a quick pee, but before I could do anything more it started raining again, so I was forced to laze around in the tent for an hour. At seven there was a break in the rain so I could pack standing up (instead of curled up in the tent) and get on my way.

There were a few brief, light showers later, but most of the time was rain-free. I just got water from below. After a night of off-and-on rain, the forest was all wet, which was especially noticeable on the more overgrown sections of the trail. The undergrowth doesn’t even need to be tall, it just needs to be right next to the path to soak you. It felt like I wiped off and redistributed all the water on all the blueberry bushes in the whole forest. My trousers legs were absolutely dripping.

What can there be to photograph when I am walking the exact same route as yesterday, with nothing new? (Apart from the weather, that is.) What’s new is my eyes and my attention.

The first anthill of the day is nothing special. But when the day is over and I realize just how many they were, and how many stretches of the trail were so covered with ants that I couldn’t stop, I see those anthills with different eyes. They were truly many, and large, and frankly a bit annoying.

Stands of raspberries were also everywhere, and rather more pleasant than the anthills. Truly this section of the trail seems to get very few visitors, because the raspberry bushes were chock full of ripe raspberries, with nobody eating or picking them. I ate my fill, and then some – because how can I just pass such bounty without partaking? – and I barely made a dent. The first two kilometres or so (starting from the stage-19 end of the stage) were especially good raspberry picking grounds. If I ever want to drive an hour and a half and then walk another half-hour in order to get all-you-can-eat wild raspberries, then this is the place to be.

Some views just look better coming from the other direction. I know that as a photographer I should stop and turn around when I pass some interesting landscape feature, but I usually forget. But today I get another chance.

For the last hour of my hike, I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance, and then not very distant at all. Ten minutes before I reached the car, the heavens opened. I was all ready for it, with my backpack rain cover in place and my rain jacket literally in my hand, so it didn’t actually bother me much. Apart from my trouser legs – which I had long since given up on – I was still mostly dry when I got there.

At that point it was absolutely pouring down, and the thunder was right over my head. Instead of trying to pack myself into the car in the downpour, I took shelter in an archway of the farm building behind which I had parked. It got wetter and wetter as time went by, until I had to make a little channel in the gravel to guide the water out at the other end of the archway, instead of letting it spread out sideways towards the walls.

It reminded me of playing in the mud when I was a child. Back then the street where I lived was surfaced with gravel, not asphalt, so it got a bit muddy when it rained. It also sloped slightly, so we got these lovely streams of water along the sides of the street. With a sturdy stick, we could drag new channels to make the streams join up or go the way we wanted. We had no fancy boats, but I remember sending small twigs rafting downstream.

Anyway, the sides of the archway remained dry, so I could sit down and have a leisurely lunch while I waited for the thunderstorm to abate. The good thing about summer rains is that there are usually breaks in them. I could get into the car all dry and nice. There was much more rain later while I was driving home, to the point where the rain hit the windscreen in splats rather than drops and I could barely see the car ahead of me, but I got home safely.


Picking up the Sörmlandsleden project again, after a break of more than two years. I hope it won’t take me two years until the next stage. I have been getting my life back on track after a post-covid slump, so there is hope.

I did make an attempt to get here earlier this summer, but ended up elsewhere due to complications.

Stage 18 is one of those hard-to-reach ones. The beginning is on a road, yes, but that’s about it when it comes to accessibility. There is no parking, even. There is parking at the other end, though, so I walked this stage backwards. (I’ll be walking it forward tomorrow.) Which actually worked out really well – this beautiful lake at the beginning was for me the grand finale at the end of my day, where I put up my tent for the night.

There were several more lakes along the route, almost as pretty. But also a lot of the usual pine-blueberry-mossy-rock landscape, as well as patches of deciduous forests here and there. And clearcuts, but those bring no joy, so they don’t get any photo space here.

Stage 18 is, according to the signs, also one of the very earliest stages of Sörmlandsleden, from 1973. These days it seems to be a less frequented one, possibly because of that lack of accessibility. It was well signposted and the shelters were in great shape, but some parts of the trail itself were rather overgrown.

Had it not been for the orange arrow clearly pointing the way, I’d have struggled to find the continuation of the path here. (It goes right into the greenery, at the slightly larger dark patch.)

Here’s me having a snack break, with a view over another lovely lake.