The usual pattern repeats itself. After a week of hanging around at home and eating too much, we’re restless, so we go out walking. Eric and Adrian went geocaching in Ursvik for a few hours. It was all muddy and slippery and started raining towards the end of our walk, but it still felt pretty good.

Sörmlandsleden stage 16, there and back, 10 + 10 km.

Walking the same stretch of the trail there and back again feels somewhat boring. But even though I considered all sorts of variations, I couldn’t come up with any better alternatives. With all the restrictions in place I can’t use public transport to get to and from the hike. I could ask Eric to drop me off and pick me up again, but so much driving for just a one-day hike would feel like wasting his time. I could do a longer hike with an overnight stay but with the short daylight hours I would spend way too much of the day in my tent in the dark. So I just made the most use of those daylight hours: got up at 6:30, left the house at 7 and was out walking shortly after 8. By the time I started driving home at 16 it was near dark.


The day was fine and sunny and pleasant for walking, even though the sun barely got high enough to reach me. I knew it was there, though, and I could see it gild the treetops here and there. And the mere presence of bright daylight and a blue sky did a lot to cheer me up.

The ground was sodden and muddy everywhere after the recent rains and the footbridges (which are many on this part of the trail) were incredibly slippery. I fell down once quite painfully and decided to be more careful. There’s a certain way to walk on slippery surfaces with some reasonable speed still, rolling from heel to toe, never pushing away. But as soon as I don’t think about it, I forget and revert to a normal brisk walk. After falling again for a second time, hurting my bum and unpleasantly jarring my whole spine and head, I crossed them very, very carefully.

For some reason that made sense yesterday when I was packing, I left my macro lens at home. I think I didn’t expect anything photo-worthy at this time of the year. It’s all mostly rotting leaves and brown grass.

That was a mistake. I walked past some really odd-looking funguses thriving on all that rotting vegetation. I know I could have taken better photos with the right lens.



I also spotted the remains of a dead animal right next to the path. I first noticed the tufts of coarse gray hairs spread out a few paces. Then a vertebra, then another, and then many more bits and pieces, including both halves of the lower jaw. All were clearly old and thoroughly cleaned by scavengers big and small, so the ick factor was very low.

A cervid of some kind, clearly, with a jaw like that. Moose? Deer? The jawbones were quite large, as long as from my fingertips to my elbow, so perhaps a moose?



Bones remaining intact after a long time are no surprise, but I hadn’t expected hair to last so long. It makes sense, though. Hair is tough, made to last for a long time on your body, and it’s not digestible (other than by fungi and bacteria).

Now I had to go google about the decomposition of hair. I found out that human hair can take two years to decompose, and is considered a problematic type of waste. I also found an article specifically about microbial decomposition of keratine which was mostly too technical to be interesting to me, but I did learn from it that:

• the word for “hard to break down” proteins is “recalcitrant”,
• keratin is the third most abundant polymer in nature after cellulose and chitin, and
• it is a component of not just hair and nails and horns but also fish teeth.

I had planned to cycle out for some more errands today. But the covid-19 related measures were just ramped up in Sweden, and all non-essential contacts with other people and non-essential visits to indoor places are strongly discouraged. So no more errands for me for now. Instead I simply cycled to Ursvik and back (via Rinkeby and Järvafältet).

Before corona I had very regular exercise habits. I booked my Friskis sessions well in advance, and never allowed myself to cancel a booking.

Working from home, I’ve struggled with keeping up physical exercise. I’ve had periods when I worked out regularly, without much of a struggle even. But I’ve also had periods when I became lax and let go a bit. And periods when I lost the habit completely.

The gradual decline always looked the same. “I don’t have time right now, I’ll do it later.” and then “I’ll take a rest day, I can work out tomorrow instead.”

This workout challenge has taught me what I need to keep up the habit. The trick is to work out every single day, so it happens on autopilot. Instead of rest days when I do nothing, I have rest days when I do some other kind of exercise. This way there is no room for hesitation about whether I really need to work out today of all days. The answer is known in advance with full certainty. Yes, I do.

Thinking is reduced to a minimum; the room for excuses and postponement is minimal.

I didn’t take a photo today, apart from the phone selfie for the workout challenge. Just forgot.

This photo is from when I was preparing for my hike a few weeks ago. These are my dinner baggies. I measured and packed the ingredients for each meal separately in advance to make things as easy as possible. When I was out walking and wanted a meal, all I needed to do was to pick a baggie and cook its contents. The kitchen looked a bit like a drug lab, with rows of little plastic bags on the table…

Breakfast is easy. Always porridge for breakfast on a hike. I make my own grain mix for porridge – about half rolled oats and the other half is a mixture of spelt, rye, flax seeds, and wheat bran. There’s a big box of it in the pantry; for the hike all I did was measure and bag it.

Now I think I’ve found the perfect hiking dinner recipe, so dinner will be almost as easy going forward.

0.75 dl of grains
0.75 dl of lentils
~30 g of dried vegetables

Pick any kind of grain that cooks in about 10 to 20 minutes, and combine it with any kind of lentils that cooks in about the same time. It doesn’t matter too much if one of them ends up slightly overcooked. Add vegetables. I prioritized convenience this time and used a ready-made mix of dried “Swedish vegetables” from Friluftsmat.

I made three dinners, all following the same basic recipe but with different details. Cous cous, wheat grain, oat grain; red lentils, puy lentils, black (beluga) lentils. And when it was time to cook them, I added curry powder to one but used bouillon powder to season another, so they ended up tasting like completely different dishes.

I’m very happy with this solution. Great results with very little effort!

Gössäter to Råbäck station, 11 km.

Following the familiar pattern: wake shortly after 7 as the sun comes up, pack, walk. Stop for breakfast when the sun is properly up and I am properly hungry.

The morning was sunny but very windy. I could see on the map that the path would take me to the coast of lake Vänern around mid-morning, where I would meet the full force of the westerly wind. Breakfasting in that wind would be cold and unpleasant. I kept looking for a place to stop more and more urgently as I got closer to the lake, but it was all forest everywhere, and the sun was not high enough yet to reach down between the trees.

Finally just half a kilometre short of the lake I came across the perfect place: a large, flat meadow/field thing, wide enough that the sun reached halfway down the trees on the western side. It took a while for the sunlight to get all the way down to me at the bottom of those trees. But I have loads of time today, so I could wait. For planning purposes I counted today as a half-day, but since my train leaves late in the afternoon, I have almost a full day to spend on half a day’s worth of walking.


Onwards to lake Vänern, and here it was windy indeed. In a different season, on a different day, perhaps the beaches would have been inviting. Today I was not at all sad when the path turned away from the lake shore again.

The Kinnekulleleden path then passed through the grounds of another manor, with an impressive manor house, stables, tennis courts and so on. Apparently this place is owned and inhabited by people with serious money – the kind who take a drive on a Sunday morning in what looked to me like a 1960s Rolls Royce.

After some zig-zagging through a hilly forest, I came to a large quarry. Not for the first time I was struck by how well-planned this hiking path is. The path proper carefully avoided the less pretty end of the quarry with abandoned industrial equipment (which I only saw because I was curious about what was being hidden from me) but made sure I got a good view of the picturesque end with its large lake.


Looking at the map, I realized I was about to run out of path before I’d run out of time, so I decided to even things out. It was perhaps a bit early for lunch but I stopped anyway when I came to a suitable open place. I’d rather hang around for a while here in the grass and sit and read in the sun, than hang around at the train station all afternoon. With a two-hour breakfast and two-hour lunch, this was my most leisurely hiking day yet. A real Sunday outing. I’m glad I had my Kindle with plenty of good books to read!

Råbäck station is a small one. The station building is now a residential one, and the part that actually functions as a station looks more like a bus stop than what a train station is supposed to look like in my mind. A platform, a sign on a post, a small shelter. Also a very nice, solid wooden bench, which I dragged into the sun and then gladly used.

Råbäck is a request stop, so the station’s most important feature was a yellow circular sign for flagging down the train. Here I’ve turned the sign to face the train’s direction to request a stop. When the train stopped, I turned it back before boarding.

From the path near Sandtorp to Flyhov and back, 7 km. Then to Gössäter, 14 km.

Last night’s camping spot was very deliberately chosen to be as close as possible to the Bronze Age rock carvings at Flyhov. They are not on the Kinnekulle path but they are close enough that I decided to make a detour to go and see them. So I got up again with the sun this morning, packed my rucksack but left it in the tent, and went off the path, across fields and along lanes.

The first thing I noticed when I got out of the tent was the frost on the ground. I rather suspected it would be there, already before I’d seen it, given how cold the night was. I slept with my fleece jacket as an extra blanket on my upper body and I was still feeling cold much of the time.

But the payoff was incredible. The morning mist and the frost made the world so beautiful. The days have been sunny and warm so the field edges were still full of lush plant life, not just dry grass: daisies, thistles, nettles, dandelion seed heads. And all of it decked out in thick, sparkling crystals of ice.





This early in the morning there were other creatures around than just humans. I scared a hare into flight and saw a fox at the edge of a field. On the way back I saw not just one but two herds of fallow deer. At home I’m used to seeing the occasional red deer or two, or maybe three, but the herds here were twenty or thirty strong at least.

The rock carvings were well worth a visit as well. They’re nicely presented, with a walkway that allows visitors to get quite close, and signs explaining what is what. Ships, wheels, men with swords and axes, mysterious networks of lines.





Most of the carvings are filled in with white paint to make them easier to see, but one section has been left unpainted so you can see what they originally looked like. And the carvings were all in surprisingly good state: I think some may have been uncovered only quite recently. At another site I read that some carvings get covered up for winter, to protect against the weather and especially ice I guess. Perhaps this is done here as well.

My quick packless 7 km walk, which could have taken an hour and a half, took nearly twice as long because I kept stopping for photos. By the time I was back the sun was well up and I was quite starving. I made my usual porridge breakfast and finally started walking on the Kinnekulle path at around 10.

My tent was, of course, dripping again this morning. Condensation on the inside, melting frost on the outside. I’ve started unpacking it every time I make a slightly longer stop. I choose a flat, sunny, dry spot; spread out the tent in the sun and weigh it down with a couple of stones, and rearrange it occasionally to expose new parts to the sun and the wind. By the evening, after several such stops, the tent is more or less dry again, both inside and out.

I take several long breaks every day. Like hobbits: elevenses, lunch, afternoon snack. For lunch I cook a hot meal; the others are cold snacks. I eat and I read, and perhaps make some photos. It’s very pleasant to sit out on a rock in a quiet sunny meadow and just read. I have no reason to hurry, because if I get “there” too early then all I get is a long evening of sitting and reading next my tent. Better to spread out that sitting and reading through the day.


Today’s walking was much like the past two days: interesting and varied. Pastures and limestone meadows and forests of various kinds.

In the afternoon I reached the peak of Kinnekulle plateau mountain, which I’ve been circling since Thursday afternoon. There was a viewing tower, unfortunately closed this late in the season. But even without the tower, just looking out from on top of the hill, the views were wide.


As evening approached, I realized I was running out of water again. So I kept walking for a bit longer than I had perhaps otherwise planned, all the way to the easternmost tip of the circular path, where it gets close to Gössäter. There I left my pack behind a pile of logs, left the path and aimed for civilization. Crossed the main road, knocked on the door of the first house I came to, and got my water bottles filled up again.

I pack as light as possible and my food is all dry and lightweight. I don’t want to undo all that scrimping by carrying too much water. But the drier the food, the more water I need for cooking, of course… On the whole, though, I’d rather carry fewer kilograms but walk more kilometres. This evening’s extra kilometre to get water, walked without any pack, was hardly noticeable – but an extra litre of water, carried all day, would not have been.

By now evening was approaching and it was really time to stop and set up camp. But I was in on a gravel road in a dense, scruffy spruce forest, full of tangled undergrowth, with no room anywhere to put up a tent. Finally I came to a rectangular, flat, cleared patch of ground next to a by-road – probably someone’s parking spot.

Såten shelter to a glade north of Sandtorp, 17 km.

I woke with the sun shortly after seven in the morning. This was an unexpected benefit of hiking late in the season: I can sleep without earplugs and eye mask, and still not be woken by birdsong or sunlight at an ungodly hour.

The tent was cold and nearly dripping with condensation. I tried to not touch the walls as I crawled out and pulled out my gear.

Outside was also cold. The sun was well hidden behind trees, far from reaching down into the small clearing around me. So I did as is becoming a habit for me: packed everything up and started walking straight away. It was much nicer to eat breakfast on a sun-warmed slope an hour later.

My surroundings today were very varied. The Såten nature reserve, in the morning, had grassland on limestone. After a while the path crossed the railway and entered a sparse, light oak forest. But mostly it was a mixture of pastures and deciduous forests.

Hiking in this kind of landscape feels quite different from e.g. Sörmlandsleden. Sörmland forests – both pine and spruce – are relatively close. You can’t see very far and the nature along the path is mostly unchanging. There is not much to look at and walking becomes a meditative activity. After the first few hundred pines, they meld into a kind of a peaceful curtain.

Along the Kinnekulle path the landscape is more open and more varied. The eye reaches farther and there is always something new to catch the eye. I was much more alert and present when walking here.

There is a sort of a cave house, Lasse i bergets grotta in the forest near Sandtorp, built in the late 19th century. A man and his wife lived there for thirty years. It has been abandoned and vandalized and then built up again roughly in its original shape.

A municipal water pipe passes here, and I was very glad to find the tap that the water company has kindly installed next to the picnic tables here. I was close to running out of water by now. This is the one and only potable water source along the entire Kinnekulle path.

In the Fells, access to fresh water is never an issue. In the woods in Sörmland, miles away from civilization, I have used lake water for both cooking and dish-washing and occasionally for drinking. Here I’ve seen small springs and brooks, but they’ve all been shallow and muddy. And there are pastures with cows and horses absolutely everywhere so I really don’t trust the water in the springs at all.

On the other hand, the nearness of civilization means that there are plenty of people and houses nearby. If I do run out of water, I can leave the path and make my way to the nearest village and knock on doors.

Lunch was late because I couldn’t find a good spot. I was looking for some open ground where I could set up my stove, and hopefully get some sunshine as well. I haven’t met many other people on the path but lunching right on the path would still feel awkward and uncosy.

I finally came to an empty cow pasture with lots of nice tree stumps for seats. Just as I was in the middle of cooking my food, a whole bunch of cattle arrived from over a ridge I hadn’t investigated. Apparently the pasture was larger than I had thought, and not at all empty. Oops.

I couldn’t easily move out, with the stove burning and my lunch half-cooked. What to do? Cattle are large and heavy and could trample me quite badly if they decided they don’t like me. But on the other hand these cows (and at least one bull) looked more curious than bothered, so I took my chances and stayed. I finished my cooking and eating closely surrounded by seven or eight cows. They were rather nosy and I kept having to shoo them away from my stove to avoid accidents.

The path continued mostly through deciduous forests, interspersed with meadows and pastures, and one manor.


I had hoped to see vibrant autumn colours, maples and aspens in orange and red, but they were almost all yellow here. Perhaps it’s a regional thing, or maybe somehow due to the weather.

Towards the end of the day I passed the Martorp waterfall. This time of the year it’s more a trickle than a waterfall – I can imagine it looks a lot more impressive in early spring. But the rock formations were interesting. The layers of limestone look almost unnatural in their even, smooth arrangement. I found a stump of a man-made wall nearby. I wonder if the rocks have been shaped entirely by nature, or if it might be partly due to quarrying.

Like many of the spots I’ve passed, with traces of past inhabitation and human use, it looks like a fairy tale world. One can almost expect hobbits and dwarves to appear around a corner, or perhaps trolls.

Råbäck to Såten, 8 km.

My autumn hike in the Fells was just beginning to turn into a tradition when I had to interrupt my streak. I’ve hiked in Jämtland three autumns in a row now. This year won’t be the fourth. Spending my nights with strangers – first in a sleeper train and then in cramped mountain huts – does not seem like a good idea, given the increasing numbers of people testing positive for covid-19 in Sweden.

So I had to come up with alternative arrangements. And perhaps this is a good thing, pushing me to try new things. I took one step outside my comfort zone with the three-day hike of Sörmlandsleden in September. That worked, so I’m doing a similar thing again: packing my tent and food for a few days, and hiking on my own with no huts or such.

This time I’ll be walking the Kinnekulle path. I’ve seen it mentioned several times as a lovely hike especially in autumn, and it’s reachable by train, and it’s a three-day hike so I can do it in a long weekend – perfect in all ways. Plus it’s in western Sweden, so it’s hopefully going to look rather different from Sörmlandsleden, which is beginning to feel a bit monotonous by now.

The Kinnekulle path totals 45 km according to official stats. At a reasonably leisurely pace, that’s a three-day hike for me. But the train rides there and back add another day. I arrived in Råbäck shortly after two o’clock this afternoon. I’ll do half a day’s worth of walking today, then two full days, and another half-day on Sunday.

Råbäck train station has one of those lovely old station buildings, loudly proclaiming that this station has been more important in the past. Now the station building has been turned into a residential one, and the village mostly consists of summer cottages. You can see some old postcards from the station’s heyday here.


The path first winds along country lanes through the grounds of Råbäck manor to Råbäck harbour. Again a place that clearly has seen more activity in the past. The harbour is large and solid, clearly built for substantial traffic. It was used for shipping out limestone from the local quarries. The old stonemasonry workshop right next to the harbour, closed since the 1970s, is a museum now but was unfortunately closed today.



From the harbour the path goes through deciduous forest, following the tracks of an old tramway, straight like an arrow, to an old limestone quarry.

There are ruined limestone walls here and there in the forest, and various other signs of past habitation: gate posts, cellars, traces of the foundations of buildings, the remains of limestone quarries and kilns.

It felt strange to be walking among so many traces of history. Slightly sad, that all this is now come to nothing. But then again, what else would we do with old buildings that are no longer needed? It’s nice that there are still traces of them, so they aren’t completely gone.



I was really lucky with the weather! Mid-October can bring anything – I could have been walking in freezing rain. But I had bright sunshine most of the afternoon and evening, with only light cloud cover some of the time, and beautiful autumn colours to look at.

I camped for the night next to a shelter near the Såten nature reserve. It wasn’t even twilight when I stopped, but by the time I was done with dinner, it was full dark. I sat and read outside the tent for a while, but moved inside when it got colder, so I could cover my legs with the sleeping bag. It got really cold at night. Every time I turned the other side, I woke of the cold, and had to tuck the sleeping bag closed around my neck again.

The most memorable moment of today was seeing the night sky when I went out for a last trip to the loo. The sky was clear – and so full of stars! I hadn’t realized that Kinnekulle was so far from lit-up cities. I could even see the Milky Way, which I haven’t done since our stay in Mercantour in 2016. Had I not been shivering with cold, I could have watched the stars for a long time.

I valued my creature comforts too much to go to the photo meetup yesterday, but I made up for it today. One of the most valuable parts of a meetup is that someone has scouted out a great location – and I don’t need to be there on the day in order to use that! So I just drove to the same place today on my own.

Stendörren turned out to be a popular and much-photographed nature reserve right on the sea coast. A very civilized kind of nature reserve, with amenities everywhere – from bridges and walkways to loos and benches and picnic tables. The bridges and walkways are one of the main draws of this place: they take you to small islets just off the mainland, so you can get that archipelago experience without a boat.

Adrian would have liked this place, I think. It’s the kind of place where walking feels more like exploring. Any time you turn a corner, there’s something new. Even the largest islets are so small you can circle them in half an hour.

Off the rocky coast in one spot I found a whole bunch of jellyfish of all sizes. The smallest would have fit in the palm of my hand; the largest ones were like dinner plates.

They were hard to photograph – the water was anything but clear, and a wobbly, semi-transparent jellyfish is hard to focus on.


The forest was full of large mushrooms, especially some kind of boletus-like ones. The largest ones were often lying in pieces – I guess their size and shape invites kicks. But I also found this lovely family of fly amanitas. With actual flies on them (in the last photo)!

The school term has started and so has the scouting season. Today we had a meeting/workshop for the leaders and functionaries. In a normal year this meeting would have taken place in the scout group’s own building. Now with the coronavirus, we were outdoors on the meadows near Gåseborg. Slightly less convenient perhaps, but much more pleasant and energizing. Fresh air and greenery and standing meetings instead of rows of wooden chairs – and lunch in the sun with views over Mälaren.