Vålåstugan to Stensdalen. 18.5 km due to long detours.

The night was incredibly windy. Air vents in all rooms rattled constantly, and the trek to the loo was a struggle, not to mention the longer trek to fetch water.

The weather report promised that the wind would slacken in the morning but this never happened. The gusts were strong enough to nearly blow me off my feet; at times I was literally blown several steps off course and had to plant my pole to stay standing.

Speaking of poles, one of my walking poles stopped working. I couldn’t fix it in the extended position – it just kept collapsing. Forced to walk with a single pole, I realized that I liked this even better. With one pole I still get the balance and support, but at the same time I always have one hand free for the camera or a hankie or a snack. So I’m not going to buy a new pair of poles as I had initially planned – I’ll just keep walking with the one pole that still works.

The weather report also promised that there wouldn’t be any rain. That may have been technically correct; maybe it was just the cloud that was hanging all the way to the ground. In any case I could see sheets of wetness blowing through the air. The air was saturated with water and so was I.


The first half of this walk crosses the same empty plateau that I’ve usually walked across during the afternoon of my first day, but in the other direction. The trail then descends to below the tree line and continues through alpine birch forest.

About halfway there is a river, the Tvärån, to cross. When I got to the river I was immediately taken aback by its size and strength. This did not look like a river to wade through. The water looked deep and was flowing very fast, and there river bottom looked very uneven. I walked upstream along the river for a good while, looking for a better place, but wherever I thought I saw a promising spot, it turned out to be just as bad as all the other places when I got closer. So I gave up searching and went back to the original spot.

A couple of other hikers had just crossed the river there and pointed out the spot where they had crossed. Since I have very limited experience of fording rivers, I guessed that maybe they knew more about this, and maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. So I set out to do wade across in the same place.

I was barely a few steps into the water when I realized that this was not a good idea. The water was up to my hips and the flow of it was very, very strong. Were I to lift just one of my feet to take a step forward, I would simply be pushed off my feet. I have no idea how those other ladies managed to do this, and how they could have thought that this made sense! Once you lose your balance even the slightest bit, when the flow of water is so strong there is no way of regaining your balance. You’ll be off your feet, tumbling down the river between those rocks until they stop you. You can of course slip and fall in shallower water as well, but then at least you’ll be able to keep your head above the water, regardless of which way you fall. Whereas in hip deep water, you’ll be lucky to get a breath at all while you’re tumbling downstream.

Anyway, I turned around and was luckily able to make it back to the shore without falling.

I think I had probably spent about an hour at this river by now, and gotten nowhere. Just as I was feeling rather lost, more hikers caught up with me, and then even more. One of them shared information they had heard earlier from hikers going in the other direction, who had forded the river much further upstream. Based on their description (“small islands in the river”) and our maps, we figured out where that spot was, and then we set out walking upstream again. If nothing else, we agreed, the river would get smaller – based on the maps it seemed to become a stream a few kilometres up.

Nearly two kilometres from where the path met the river, we found the ford that the others had described, and it was clearly a much better place for crossing. The water was still strong and fast but the riverbed was much wider and more even. As a result the water barely reached my knees. Wading still took concentration, but never actually felt like a risky enterprise.

From this point there was first some more trackless walking to get back downstream to where the path was. This was fun: instead of just following the path, I had to think about where I should be walking, both on a large scale (which direction) and a small one (where to actually put my feet). After all, if I was off the path anyway, there was no point in walking back straight along the river when I could instead cut straight across the heath and rejoin the path further along. I even took out my map and compass, which I haven’t otherwise needed and only had with me “just in case”.

The path then went steadily downhill through a birch forest. When I neared the hut, there was another wide river to ford, but here the path met the river at a suitable place and I had no trouble getting across.

The one and only river I had forded before today (which I did two years ago) was so small that I went across barefoot. Here the river was so much wider that I thought that might be unwise, so I waded in my boots, which then naturally got completely waterlogged. The wet socks and boots still kept my feet quite warm, but were somewhat uncomfortable. For next year, I’ll have to buy some kind of extra shoes for wading. I’ve seen some people wade in Crocs, and others have lightweight running shoes.

The weather never got any better and I never stopped for an actual lunch, so by the time I got to the hut I was cold and starving again. I finally got my lunch at half past three.

The Stensdalen hut boasts beautiful views and is quite modern and comfortable. (The old hut here burned down and was replaced, so this one is barely ten years old.) The rooms are large and light and airy compared to the older huts, and the kitchen is very spacious. There’s even lighting, with electricity supplied by solar cells. It’s convenient, but it lacks the cozy charm of the older huts, so I didn’t really feel at home here.

Continuing from Lunndörren to Vålåstugan, 16 km. Beautiful colors everywhere.

There were patches of sparse birch forest here and there but otherwise today’s walk went mostly over bog and open heath. This area is also criss-crossed by a lot of rivers and streams: I counted four actual bridges, one fallen tree, and plenty of small footbridges.

There was a lot of bog to cross, and the plank paths across the bogs were in disgracefully bad shape. Missing planks, broken planks, saggy planks… In the worst places the planks just served as an easy channel for the bog water, so the path became a stream and I was walking through water deep enough to cover the foot of my boots. It was better than no path at all, because at least my feet were not sinking into the mud. But my feet were already quite wet before I had even come halfway.

The weather today was wet and cold – above freezing, but not by much. A light rain fell through the entire day. Around midday the wind started picking up and by the afternoon the gusts were around 20 m/s. Wise from last year’s snowy weather, I had brought my wooly winter hat and thick mittens and was very glad to have them. My waterproof layers did their job so apart from my feet I was mostly dry, but the constant cold wind was chilling. I wasn’t actually cold at any point because I kept moving (and had I been wearing any more layers I would have been sweating) but I could feel my body heat leaking away.

I stopped for a very brief snack break behind the same lone rock as last year. It is so conveniently situated right at the halfway point between these two huts, and it is literally the only thing I saw all day that is large enough to offer shelter from the wind. With its little overhang it even protected me from the rain (which was falling diagonally because of the wind). But it was still far from pleasant there so I kept my break short – just a flapjack and some hot drink – and kept on walking instead. Better to get to the hut sooner and get a proper meal there.

Towards the end of today’s walk I thought several times that I recognized the place and was nearly there, but behind each softly undulating hill there was another, very similar one. By the end I was running low on blood sugar and I was quite happy to arrive at the hut. The first thing I did was to hang up all my wet things to dry; the second thing was to finally eat lunch.

Today’s wildlife: a small group of reindeer, large flocks of what may have been common redpolls, and a beautiful bird that I guess must have been a Siberian jay. In the photos that Google finds for me, the Siberian jay looks grayish brown, but the one I saw had shades of green in its plumage, almost iridescent when the light hit it right. Wikipedia has an old picture of Siberian jays where the birds look a lot more like the impression I got, though, so I guess that’s what it must have been.

Vålådalen to Lunndörren, 12.5 km.

For the third year in a row I’m doing a four-day autumn hike in Jämtland, starting from Vålådalen.

I’ve been here twice already. It’s not like Sweden doesn’t have any other scenic places where I could hike, so I spent quite a bit of time looking for alternatives this year. But if I want a hut-to-hut hike (which I do) that is about four or five days long (which is what I can get from work) and is reachable by train and bus (which is also important to me) then there is not a lot to choose from. And this is a very beautiful national park, and it’s not like I’m tired of it yet, so I’m perfectly fine with coming here again.

I did change around my route though. The past two years I’ve tried to get as far into the high mountains as quickly as possible, which meant walking from Vålådalen to Vålåstugan on the first day. That’s a lot of walking with a lot of uphill, which is rather heavy for the first day, when my legs are not yet used to walking and my pack is heavy.

This time I went for a shorter option for the first day and walked from Vålådalen to Lunndörren instead. This walk is also nearly all uphill, but so is every other option from here. This was the final bit of last year’s hike but now I’m doing it in reverse.

Most of this walk went through alpine forest of spruce and alpine birch, with occasional more open areas of bog and small lakes.

The weather was very changeable and unsettled, like the epitome of mountain weather. One moment the sky was mostly blue and literally a few minutes later it was overcast and snowing. The clouds didn’t so much arrive as appear out of thin air, as some mass of air met some other mass of air and hey presto, precipitation. At times I think there was snow coming out of nowhere, from a clear sky.

There were short moments of dry weather but those passed quickly. Most of the time, some kind of cold water was falling from the sky. There was rain and there was snow and sleet and hail, and combinations of those.

I sat down for a lunch break at one point when I thought the dry weather might hold for more than a few minutes, but it didn’t, and I ate the rest of my boiled egg while walking.

The forest here is quiet, without much birdsong or other sounds. I did scare a bunch of grouse into flight and was surprised by how noisy they were.


The Lunndörren hut is a lovely, cosy hut in an incredibly scenic location, right next to a lake with mountain views across it. The sauna is literally a few steps away from a bathing spot. (Which I didn’t try out, because much of the point of going to a sauna in this weather is to get warm, and bathing in an ice cold lake doesn’t really help with that.)

It’s rare that I buy and read a book that I really don’t like. I usually do my research before buying books. I read reviews and skim the book. In the past half year I’ve read two books that are very popular and highly recommended, that I was really, really disappointed in.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman gets rave reviews by all sorts of reputable sources like The Guardian. It’s supposed to be this warm and joyful story of a traumatized, isolated, socially awkward woman, who finds a friend and comes out of her shell and lives happily ever after.

The big problem I have with this book is that – even though mental health is at the core of the story – it is apparently written with zero insight or understanding of mental health problems. Eleanor is a random jumble of symptoms, picked not because they make sense but because they fit the author’s romantic ideas of what a person with mental health problems should be like. She’s like a collage of one part autistic spectrum, one part PTSD, one part schizophrenia or something like that.

Her thoughts and behaviour and speech likewise are inconsistent, and the author jumps from one quirky thing to another dependent on where her mood takes her. Not Eleanor’s mood, that is, but the author’s. She turns Eleanor’s life into a comedy.

For no apparent reason, Eleanor sometimes speaks like an eighty-year-old lady who’s learned English from antique books – and other times she’s eloquently funny. She clearly has problems relating to people and interpreting emotions, and yet at other times she has deep, poetic insights into human emotions. She’s been to university and worked in an office for years and gets promoted to manager – but cannot use a phone and is clueless when trying to buy a computer… There is no consistent self, and it just doesn’t make sense.

And then Eleanor gets a nice haircut and finds a friend and has a couple of sessions of therapy, and suddenly she’s cured of all her problems! Tada, problem solved, now we can all go home and be happy!

This is a book where mental health plays such an important role, and yet it trivializes mental health problems to such an extent that I find it insulting. I guess the book’s message is supposed to be that we shouldn’t look down at “odd” people because we can’t know what’s going on in their heads. But that message could be delivered with respect, without made-up mental conditions and silly “oh she just needed a haircut” “fixes”.

There are people close to me who struggle with actual, real mental health problems. Therefore seeing this topic treated with such lack of respect and, frankly, ridicule really annoys me. This book deserves none of the attention it has gotten and I wish I had never come across it.

Theft of Swords by Michael Sullivan is a very different book and disappointing in a rather different way. This is a fantasy story about Hadrian and Royce, a pair of thieves for hire, who just can’t help taking on good causes. It is one of the most recommended books on r/Fantasy.

I read somewhere that the author wanted to write a book somewhat like Harry Potter – easily flowing and straightforward, fun and yet with darker elements. And funnily enough many of the problems I have with this book are exactly the same things that I really disliked about about the Harry Potter books, and why I stopped reading them after the first few.

This book is a part of a series, and the author’s main focus is clearly on the big picture and a long story arc. Everything leads toward an ultimate resolution somewhere on the horizon in book six or whatever. The problem is that the author is no good at keeping us entertained on our way to that resolution.

The writing is pretty dull and clunky, interrupted by info dumps. Occasionally Sullivan seems to have felt (or maybe been told by his editors) that he needs to get some more evocative detail in there, so he suddenly stops to describe the coat of arms of some warrior, but he doesn’t do this for any other lord’s or warrior’s coats of arms, so it just feels like he needed to show off the heraldic terms he had looked up on the internet. Or he stops to describe the clothing of one particular person in a lot of detail, in a way that feels technical rather than full of life.

Adversaries stop in their tracks to make long speeches to give us more backstory on Hadrian and Royce. Poor, uneducated peasants stop to make poetic speeches full of wisdom. The pacing is awkward. At times we leave the main story and get long expositions about politicians and their machinations.

The language is often awkward, which I find really jarring. Sullivan has no feeling for the feeling of words; I think he’s sometimes just picked words from a dictionary without understanding their connotations. He can describe a senior barmaid as “a bright and cheery waif”. The woman is bright and cheery and yet looks homeless and neglected? He describes a magical wall of flame as “monolithic” – the fire is a block of stone? Heavy and immovable? The man makes no sense!

He can’t make up his mind about what kind of society this is, and what kind of language the people speak. Is this a formal society with a large social distance between the ordinary people and the high lords? Or an informal one where class doesn’t matter much, and rogues and princes quickly move to addressing each other by first name? Do the people speak modern colloquial English, or is it all “woulda been giv’n” and “I wouldna care ’bout that, no sir”? Both are equally cheesy, but jumping between the two is even worse.

The characters are one-dimensional and utterly predictable. Royce is moody and glum; Hadrian is eternally upbeat. Their supposedly strong relationship is just there without anything to keep it alive. They rarely say anything to each other apart from everyday things like “we should turn left here”, so I really have no idea why they stay together and why they’re supposedly so close to each other. After hundreds of pages, I still know nearly nothing about them as persons.

I’m also really annoyed by Sullivan’s seeming lack of common sense and general knowledge. He describes a dirt poor village where people wear nothing but shirts (and for some reason can’t be bothered to build doors for their houses so they hang canvas in their doorways instead). And yet they cook a hearty stew for our heroes, with leeks and celery and onions and potatoes. Where the heck would poor, nearly starving villagers get celery (which requires frequent watering and rich soil), especially in the spring? Did they find it in their fridge?

The hero walks around wearing three swords, one of them on his back. What on Earth does he need three for? He can only use one at a time. Does he need the sword to match his mood, or the colour of the light? How does he swap them around to make sure the right one is accessible? Because the large sword he has on his back he won’t be able to actually use because there’s no way he can pull it out while it’s there.

This is a book for people who don’t normally read many books and have nothing better to compare it to. Sort of like Harry Potter, then, I guess.

Adrian opened his presents this morning.

We have a habit of reusing boxes for wrapping gifts, so Adrian got (among other things) Happy Socks in a box for a camera lens, and a plush fluffy cat loaf in a shoe box. Hence the initially sceptical face before the happy jumping around.

Tomorrow is Adrian’s birthday. He’s been incredibly excited about it and has been counting down days since it was more than 40 days away.

It was very windy today.

Adrian has been going out cycling with his friends a few times. They gather and take their bikes and go looking for more friends to gather and then they sort of just cycle around. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with them cycling in actual traffic, but the small neighbourhood streets around here are quiet and safe. And the boys (because they are all boys) are so many that they will be very visible for drivers. I just hope they are sensible when crossing the few larger roads nearby.

Anyway, today the gang of friends with bikes didn’t come by, and I guess Adrian missed them and was feeling restless. Usually when he’s been indoors most of the day I invite him to join me for a walk to the supermarket and back. Today he invited me out to cycle with him. The wind was fierce but other than that the weather was good, warm and dry, so we cycled first to Nälsta and then on to Vällingby, and back. Near Vällingby we saw this fallen tree blocking our road.

I heard a couple of women passing comment with shock on how scary this was. I can of course understand that it would be bad to be hit by a falling tree, and quite obviously this one has fallen in a place where it could have hit someone. But still it seems so unlikely. The thought of Adrian crossing busy roads scares me a lot more. But I don’t let it show.

By my nature, I worry. I do my best to quash the worrying when I notice it. And when I do worry, I do my best not to let it affect my actions and especially not to show it and spread it to others. Ingrid is also a worrier – probably I’ve infected her already. But Adrian is much more carefree and I hope he can stay that way.

When I mentally list the things that I like to do, gardening is one of them. And yet I’ve barely done anything in the garden this season. Just like I think of walking and hiking as one of my hobbies, and I’ve done almost no walking this past year. I don’t know where all my time and energy goes.

Today, in any case, I spent much of my free time in the garden. I cleared out a whole lot of weeds from the area I planted with bushes in June, and shovelled out all the soil from two of our planters with strawberries. Or rather, the planters that used to have strawberries but that have since been overrun with a particularly obnoxious weed that is impossible to get rid of because its stalks and roots near the surface are thread-thin and just break when you try to pull them out, leaving behind a well-buried rhizome that soon sends out new shoots. So I’m giving up on those two boxes and will start over with stronger geotextile, fresh soil and new plants.

I’m all sore from yesterday.

Ingrid has been eager to supplement her allowance by cooking dinner. On Thursdays she finishes school early enough to go grocery shopping first and then cook dinner as well. That gives me time to cycle home without thinking of the time all the time.

When I get home, the shadows are already long.

I went to the gym today for the first time since before midsummer. During vacation I’m way too busy with other things to even think about workouts. Since I went back to work I’ve been cycling to and from work about three days a week – the weather has been perfect for cycling – and that’s been enough for me. But the cycling season is going to end pretty soon: in October the mornings will be wetter and colder and most definitely darker. So it’s time to get used to indoor workouts again.

I had somehow thought that, even if the rest of me has gotten weaker over summer, perhaps my legs would still be strong from all the cycling. Nope.