From Främshyttan to just past Morbyn, 20 km.

A day of lovely lakes. I spent the night on the shore of lake Storsjön (“Big lake”). Wikipedia lists 79 lakes in Sweden with that name, by the way. It mentions no interesting features for this particular Storsjön.

I did see something swimming in it this morning just as I was packing up. Larger than things I usually see swimming in lakes, so not a snake. Sort of dog-sized, but with a rounded head. I couldn’t immediately think what it was. I barely had time to grab my camera and get a single photo of it before it dove underwater.

I got my answer soon after I finished packing and started walking, and spotted a large beaver’s nest on the other side of the road where it crossed a stream debouching into the lake. Of course the dog-sized swimming animal was a beaver.

The morning’s walking took me across several very depressing clear-cut areas. I cannot comprehend how this kind of forest management can be allowed in this day and age. It’s disgraceful. A dozen trees remain, and a few stumps still stand here and there, but they’re barely enough to mark the trail across the clear-cut. It’s all churned-up, barren ground, bleak and sad.

Luckily most of the trail went through actual forests, and even nature reserves where the trees get to fall wherever they fall, and are only removed where they completely block the trail. Often the path just adjusts and rounds the fallen tree, or simply keeps going across it. There were quite a lot of fallen trees here due to spruce bark beetles.

There were several beautiful lakes along the Bruksleden today.

The last one I passed in the afternoon was called Abborrtjärnen or Perch Tarn, which is among the top five most common names of lakes in Sweden and had clearly been set up with fishermen in mind. There were plank walks around its boggy edges, leading to various nice fishing spots, and even a wide wheelchair-friendly boardwalk right across it. The fishing spots also made for nice snack break spots, now that there were no fishermen around.

I ran out of water in the late afternoon. Abborrtjärn was the last body of water I passed, and as close as it was to civilization (with even a small car park next to it) I definitely didn’t trust its water for drinking. I kept walking for longer than I had originally intended, until I came to the village of Morbyn where I could knock on doors and ask for drinking water. The first house had barking dogs and a man sleeping whom I happened to see through the front door window, but he wasn’t woken by the dogs or by my knocking. The second didn’t open either, but the third one had a friendly lady who filled my flasks with fresh well water.

At this point I was feeling quite ready to make camp, but I couldn’t put up my tent in someone’s back yard so I had to keep walking past the village. Then I crossed both a railroad and a large road and I didn’t want to sleep next to those either. By the time I got away from the main road and the smaller road after it, and the path turned into the forest, it was rather late. No scenic lakeside camping spot for me today – as soon as I got 20 metres away from the road and found a flattish patch of ground, I put my stuff down. I got the tent up in daylight but finished dinner by the light of my head torch.

Bruksleden loop north of Skinnskatteberg. Today I walked from Skinnskatteberg to Främshyttan (ish), 15 km.

Before I could start walking, I had to drive to Skinnskatteberg and find the trailhead and park. By the time I’d done all that, it was 10:30 and I was hungry. I don’t normally eat breakfast on weekdays any more these days, but that won’t work for a full day of hiking. After half an hour, when I felt I was in the forest rather than just off the parking lot, and I had found a lovely lingonberry patch, I stopped for a porridge brunch. It was delicious.

The trail was very well marked, with orange painted rings on trees and orange-topped posts where there were no trees, with the occasional signpost where needed. Very easy to follow. Even so, I missed my first turn-off. The trail was following a forest track and the walking was easy so I wasn’t really paying attention, and suddenly I realized I couldn’t see any orange markings anywhere. I only had to backtrack about 200 metres though.

The forest around me was relatively similar to what I’m used to from around Stockholm. Pine forest, spruce forest, or pine and spruce with some birch and aspen mixed in. It’s nice to walk through and pleasant to look at, but doesn’t make for good photos, because it all looks very much the same and there’s nothing much for the eye to focus on. So my photos of today are of the highlights, the things that weren’t just forest, and thus not entirely representative.

The one thing that was new and unusual to me was the mushrooms. They were everywhere. Walking around Stockholm this time of the year, you might spot one or two large fly agaric mushrooms and take notice. You might even see a whole clump of them. But here, today, I saw hundreds along my path. And loads of other kinds of mushrooms as well, of various species and colours and edibility. I’m going to have to do a whole separate mushroom blog post, otherwise the mushroom photos would totally overwhelm everything else here.

On a cloudy Thursday in late September, there was nobody else on the trail. I saw two walkers near the parking lot, but on the trail itself I was entirely on my own. Which I like. I like hiking on my own and I am honestly not the least bit interested in meeting any new people on the trail.

The trail went past several lakes, and those views were the best parts. Bog lakes look so tranquil and also kind of spooky. Especially these ones, with their abandoned hunting blinds and dilapidated jetties.

Packing for a long weekend of hiking. Adrian and Eric will be on a scout hike, so I thought I’d take the opportunity and go on a hike as well.

This will be the inaugural hike for my new high-tech lightweight rucksack. It felt a bit strange to pack nearly everything in one giant compartment, but wasn’t as awkward as I had feared. The pockets on the hip belt turned out to be larger than they looked and swallowed a lot of the small stuff, as did the top pocket. And the camera, as always, goes in my not-at-all-stylish but very practical waist bag.

I had vaguely thought I’d go back to the fells again this year, but the Knowabunga threw those plans out of whack by occupying a long weekend in the middle of September, and after that the mountain huts were all closed. Looks like they had a shorter season than usual for some reason.

So it’ll be a lowland hike again. The Kinnekulle trail two years ago was stunning; Kuststigen last year was rather a disappointment. This year I’ll be walking a chunk of Bruksleden. It’s within easy reach (less than 2 hours by car) but far enough to feel like “not home” I hope.

Adrian finished building the massive Lego set he got as a birthday present. Sanctum Sanctorum is from the Marvel cinematic universe and is the location many an important scene and battle.

This was Adrian’s first 18+ build. It had a more intricate construction than the models he’s built in the past, and was less stable and robust than the models for younger builders. If you’re not careful, you can knock things off.

It’s also modular – you can lift off the top floor, and the second floor, and parts of the interior, to access other parts. There are chunks that can be moved from one floor to another, or from the inside to the outside and vice versa (notably a large tentacle monster, which I see I didn’t capture on any of the photos.)

Another aspect that Adrian really liked was the large number of attachment points that allows for the staging of elaborate fight scenes.

The embroidery course I signed up for as one of my habits and commitments started today. The theme of the course is “free-form embroidery”, i.e. embroidery without a pre-prepared design. Making things up as you go.

For this first session (out of five) our teacher threw us in at the deep end and tasked us with embroidering a self-portrait. Take a selfie with your phone and then translate it into embroidery – as if we were drawing a picture with needle and thread instead of a pencil. The task felt very challenging beforehand, since I don’t think of myself as particularly good at drawing even with a pencil. But we were there to have fun and, as the teacher kept reminding us, it’s not like middle school where we will be graded on our work. Nobody will check the tidiness of the rear of our embroidered piece; nobody will comment if the stitches are uneven.

We had just over an hour of stitching time and by the end of it I just had a few contours. No eyes, no mouth, no hair. But it’s clearly the beginnings of a face, and a reasonable likeness – if a stranger had to pick the model out of the whole class, they would likely pick me. So I’m pretty pleased with it. I had expected to get much further in the time we had. I’ll have to finish it at home.

I volunteered to help at the Spånga scout group’s annual “autumn fixer day” where parents and other engaged folks help out with various maintenance tasks. This time around the task list included everything from deep cleaning the freezer and disassembling old desks so that they can be transported to the recycling centre, to removing thistles from the yard and mending tents.

It won’t surprise any of you to hear that I signed up for mending tents. However the notes about tents needing attention were hard to interpret, and much time and attention went to figuring out what the problem even was. That task required a fair amount of expertise and experience with the tents themselves, so the mending crew spent a lot of time just sitting and waiting. Whenever an actual rip was found, there was almost a queue of us waiting.

Looking back at my blog post about the scouts’ mending day two years ago, the situation was the same. Maybe someone could learn something from this experience. Who knows.

All in all I felt that I contributed much less than I had hoped. When I came home, dissatisfied with my morning, I picked up my own pile of mending and fixed up six pairs of tights. And felt much better about the day afterwards.

All this mending reminded Adrian that he had a list of homework tasks from his home economics class, one of which was to mend a small hole or sew on a button. My backlog of mending was now empty – except for a shirt waiting for a sleeve button to be re-sewn! He came just in time; had he mentioned the homework an hour later, I wouldn’t have had anything for him. I guess we could always cut off a button and reattach it, but it would have felt like a waste.

Adrian, being of the age of frequently outgrowing things, has outgrown his rain jacket. He’s also outgrown all of Ingrid’s past rain jackets that I had hoped he could inherit. So I now have 4 kids’ rain jackets in sizes 140 to 158 in various colours, but not a single one that Adrian can use. (Honestly the one that he says he last used, in size 140, is ridiculously small for him – it’s a wonder he hasn’t complained earlier.) He has a scout hike coming up in a week, and it’s very unlikely we’ll get an entire weekend in September/October with no rain, so we’re emergency shopping for a new rain jacket.

This season’s colour is clearly dark yellow. All the three brands that had rain jackets for active use in “junior” sizes had all chosen to make theirs dark yellow or orange. Black and gray were also available, as usual, but Adrian doesn’t even look at those. (Helly Hansen also had some eye-wateringly garish neon colour combinations, which were too loud even for Adrian’s tastes.) So I guess we’ll take a yellow one, then.

Sometimes I test stuff at work by making things up. Right now at Urb-it, this means pretending to deliver imaginary parcels to made-up addresses, and taking proof-of-delivery photos. Or pretending to fail at delivering them and making up reasons for why I failed.

At my previous assignment at a specialist insurance company, I was making up details insurance cases for mobile phones – imaginary scenarios detailing exactly how my imaginary phone happened to get run over by a car, or damaged by water, or stolen.

I could just do the minimum necessary – always use the same options, or always point my phone’s camera at whatever is in front of me – but after 20 rounds or so it gets rather boring. It’s more fun to have fun with it. So I take photos of random objects around my home office.

If I get no other exercise in, I do my daily half-hour of brisk walking. I almost always follow the same route, with some nice steepish hills here and there, and a decent-sized park at the far end that I take a big loop through.

The part that goes along streets is not very exciting. I’m not interested in other people’s houses and gardens. I usually read while walking and treat it as pure exercise. But the park is strikingly nice to look at, in almost any season and any weather. Swedish parks are – unlike English ones – generally devoid of flowers or anything else requiring more maintenance than the occasional mowing. They’re all just grass and trees and large bushes. But the large open space and the mostly uninterrupted greenery still feels very good.

The weather is getting colder and wetter and Nysse is spending more time indoors, even entire nights. During the warm season his usual routine was to go out late in the evening, and whichever human in the house woke up first would start their day by opening the doors towards the wooden deck just wide enough to let him in – and within 5 minutes he’d come galloping.

He’s warm and dry in the house, but apparently also a wee bit bored. For the first time ever he’s shown interest in my balls of yarn. I’ve been knitting right in front of him for months and as long as I don’t dangle something in his face, he just ignores it. Today, all of a sudden, he was attacking my yarn. I confiscated my hand-dyed merino wool very quickly, but he could borrow the cheap orange acrylic that I use for miscellaneous stuff (like tying things together, or lifelines).