A bit of stage 13, most of stage 12 and all of 12:1. From lake Stora Envättern to Mölnbo, 15 km.

My day followed the same basic pattern as yesterday. Up early, pack and get walking. Porridge stop after an hour or so. Lakes, pine forest, spruce forest.

I walked stage 12 before, quite recently even. Some bits of the trail – with the nicest lake views – I definitely recognized. A few hills and roads were vaguely familiar. But as soon as the path went through just plain forest, I could have been anywhere.

Knowing that I am heading home inevitably made me think of train timetables and such things, and the walking did not feel quite as mindfully relaxing as yesterday. It’s a good thing that I made this a three-day trip rather than just a weekend: now I had that one perfect day of hiking untouched by ordinary days or ordinary concerns.


When I reached Mölnbo and civilization, an older man I met asked me if I had run across any wolves. I found out that a couple of wolves have their territory in the area between Läggesta and Mölnbo, and they had been spotted recently quite near Mölnbo. The man seemed to be trying to get a scared reaction out of me, but I was more disappointed. I realize that the odds are small but I’d have loved to see a wolf.

Half of stage 14 and most of stage 13. From lake Glådran to lake Stora Envättern, 15 km.

I woke up shortly after six. I’m never hungry early in the morning, so I postponed breakfast and instead just packed up and started walking. Breakfast tastes much better when I am properly hungry. I stopped for a porridge breakfast around eight.

The Sörmlandsleden trail has been split into stages based on some kind of logic, but that logic is not always very obvious to me. Sometimes a stage ends (and the next one begins) by a road, which makes sense if you want the starting points to be easily accessible; other times it seems to be a random point in the middle of nowhere. The stages are not much use for planning an overnight hike: shelters and other suitable campsites are rarely near the end of a stage.

Instead I planned my days around lakes. Lakes are nice to look at, of course, but more importantly, they have water – which is most useful for doing the dishes and for cooking. This part of Sörmland is dotted with small lakes, so with a little bit of planning, it wasn’t hard to end each day near one of them.


For drinking water there are freshwater springs, well marked on the maps and clearly signposted. Unfortunately, all of the springs I passed today were dry, or nearly so, with just a muddy puddle at the bottom. I had filled up my water bottles at a spring yesterday, but when that water ran out today, I had to switch to lake water.

Most hikers agree that water in mountain brooks is safe to drink. Opinions about the potability of lake water in Sörmland vary. Some say you should boil or purify it; others say it’s OK to drink without treatment. I look at these lakes and see them all surrounded only by wild, clean nature – untouched by industry, agriculture, beaches or summer cottages… so I just went ahead and drank the water as is. A little bit of fish poop won’t kill me. The water had a slightly metallic taste, but didn’t cause any problems.


The hiking today was much like yesterday’s. Up and down rocky hills, through pine and spruce forest. Wonderfully wild and peaceful.

On top one of the hills there was a viewing tower, built by a local orienteering club back in 1969. It had a cute little money box for donations, dating back to the same era. The vintage sign exhorting visitors to donate to the tower’s upkeep was now accompanied by a much more modern sign with a Swish number. I didn’t climb the tower – I’m sure I would just have seen more of the same forests and lakes I’ve seen already – but donated anyway, because I liked the look of the sign so much.

The path down from the viewing tower passed through wonderfully rich lingonberry fields. After eating bilberries off and on all day yesterday, I was getting heartily tired of them and was more than happy to switch to lingonberries and the occasional bog bilberries.

If I went out to pick berries, I’d probably want the berry bushes to be on flat ground, but when I’m hiking, I like them best on uphill stretches of the path. That way I don’t have to bend all the way down to reach them (because bending with a rucksack can be awkward) and can just scoop them up without really stopping.

By now I’ve gotten properly into a hiking mood. My thoughts drift. Sometimes I notice the trees and bushes and rocks and roots around me. Sometimes I just walk without really noticing or thinking about anything in particular. Time passes, and I can’t say how much of it has passed.

I take a lot of breaks. After snack breaks, I sit and read for a while, instead of hurrying onwards. I started early and I don’t want to stop until around dinnertime, because once I’ve stopped and set up camp, there won’t be much to do. I’d rather spread my walking over a large part of the day than have a long empty evening.

There were several camping spots around Lake Envättern, so I could find one without any other campers and more or less pretend that I was out there alone.

Just as I had finished cooking dinner, it started raining. I’d gotten hit earlier in the day by a very sudden rain shower – it took just a couple of minutes to go from tentative drops to pouring rain, and I had to really scramble to get my rucksack covered and my rain clothes on. This time I knew what to expect, which helped a little bit, but I still only had a few minutes to get all my things into the tiny tent. It was a total jumble in there.

The tent fabric seems so incredibly flimsy that it’s hard to imagine it withstanding any kind of weather, but it kept me nice and dry.

Wildlife today: one heron flying above a lake. One vole, larger than a mouse but smaller than a rat, that ran across the path. Splashing noises from fish in the lakes. Bumblebees and grasshoppers. Thrushes and various unidentified tweeting birds.

Stages 15:1, half of 15 and half of 14. From Läggesta to lake Glådran, 17 km.

The connecting trail from Läggesta conveniently starts right in front of the train station. The first kilometre of the trail unfortunately goes right alongside a noisy main road, but soon after the trail turns off onto a smaller road, and then from that onto a lane. Quite soon I was on a pleasant shaded path, leaving civilization behind.



After that my surroundings were the usual mixture of Sörmland nature. Rocky pine forest with white mosses and heather; spruce forest with green mosses and ferns and bracken; mixed forest with spruce, birch and aspen. And bilberry bushes everywhere, with tons and tons of bilberries.

I’d walked half of stage 15 in 2017 and had most of the other half ahead of me today – but I realized now that there would be a gap between the two parts. I don’t know if I ever will walk all of Sörmlandsleden, but I want to keep that possibility open, so a gap here would leave a real itch behind.

I hid my pack behind a rock (not because I worried about thieves, but because I thought other hikers might worry if they found an abandoned rucksack) and just walked that missing bit back and forth, so I could check it off my list.

I felt like a gazelle walking without a rucksack. So fast, so easy!

The contrast was extra strong when I picked up my pack again, because the path went steeply uphill from there, up to a high cliff with views over the whole area, with all its forests and lakes.

Today was an excellent day for walking. Warm and summery still, but mostly cloudy, so it didn’t get too hot. And because it’s a Friday, there were very few other people on the trail.

I like hiking on my own, and having the forest to myself. I love the peace and quiet. Hearing nothing but the wind, the creak of my rucksack, the occasional bird call and the buzzing of bumblebees.

The first day of a hike, it usually takes me a while to get into the groove. I tend to worry about whether I’m walking fast enough to get to my planned destination by the end of the day. Mentally I’m partly still in my everyday life, with plans and times to keep. It takes time to let go of all of that, and some conscious effort. I forced myself to not think too much about the time, to take breaks, to be present in the here and now.

Macro photography always helps me relax. I tried to capture the bumblebees in the heather, but it was hard, because they never stayed still! The heather flowers are so tiny that a bumblebee empties one in the blink of an eye and is always moving on to the next flower.



I stopped for the night at a nice little camping site next to lake Glådran. The site was very small, but unexpectedly luxurious. Not only did it have a fireplace and a picnic table, and a flat area for putting up a tent: there was also a bucket for water, and even a rake for clearing the ground of the inevitable pine cones.

What with the coronavirus, I’m not going on a hike in the mountains this autumn. They all “take precautions” but really, sharing a sleeper compartment in a train with random strangers all night, or cooking dinner shoulder to shoulder with random strangers in a mountain hut (or worse, trying to cook dinner while dancing around them at a two-metre distance) just does not seem like a sensible idea right now.

So, alternative plans. I’m taking tomorrow off for a three-day hike along Sörmlandsleden. It’s not as scenic and doesn’t offer the wide vistas of the Swedish Fells, but the forests of Sörmland offer some pretty nice hiking. And it costs nothing (now that I’ve paid thousands for a tent, haha) other than a day’s worth of flex hours, so I could actually do several of these.

I’ve checked off stages 1 through 12. The Sörmlandsleden web site suggests walking next few stages in reverse, starting with 15:1 in Läggesta and ending with one of the various connecting trails in the area – Nyfors, Mölnbo, Gnesta, or even walking all the way to Järna. I guess it’s because walking in this direction gives you more choice regarding the length of the trip. Or maybe because it’s easier to catch a commuter train back from Mölnbo/Gnesta/Järna than to time your arrival in Läggesta to fit in with the regional train schedule. Whatever the reason, I’m going to follow their suggestion, starting in Läggesta tomorrow, walking stages 15:1, half of 15, 14, 13, 12 and 12:1, and finishing in Mölnby some time on Sunday.

The official estimate is 45 km; reality will be several kilometres more, I’m sure. It always is.

My pack weighs 16.5 kg with everything except my toothbrush and my keys, both of which I will add tomorrow morning, and my camera, which I don’t pack in the rucksack but keep in a waist bag for instant access. A bit on the heavy side, but I really can’t think of anything I would want to be without.

The hardest thing to pack is food. How much do I actually eat in a day? And how much extra will I eat because I’m walking up and down rocky hills and carrying this pack? At home I just cook food and eat food without worrying much about precise amounts. If I make too much, I’ll have leftovers for lunch the next day. If dinner was too small, I can have a piece of bread later in the evening. In the mountain huts also I can just buy more if I have too little of something. But there are no huts or shops of any kind along Sörmlandsleden. I really don’t want to be carrying leftovers, and I really don’t want to go hungry, either.

It rained most of the day yesterday, and part of today, too, but in between we had a half day of warm sunshine. Eric and I cycled to Gåseborg to do some advance scouting for a scout hike. Here we stopped on the way back to eat some late-season bilberries.

The evenings are getting darker and the days grayer. It feels like we’re on a downward trajectory now, and I have to grab hold of each beautiful moment that I get.

Since Adrian’s and my last camping trip was not entirely satisfactory, we went out again today. Eric and Ingrid were less interested and stayed at home.

(I heard afterwards that they had spent the evening watching a horror movie. Mother-son bonding: camping in the woods. Father-daughter bonding: watching a horror movie.)

This time I made a focused effort to avoid crowds. Firstly, we’re going on a Friday evening instead of Saturday. Hopefully most people will do their camping during the weekend itself.

We went to the Paradiset nature reserve instead of Tyresta – it’s less well known and generally less crowded (though no harder to reach). Plus the rules about where you can put up your tent are less strict in Paradiset, so we won’t be all crowded into a single small spot. And since we’re not actually putting up a tent nor making a fire, we could technically stop and sleep just about anywhere we like!

We got a late start and didn’t get to Paradiset until close to half past six in the evening, so we kept the walking to a minimum and aimed for the east side of lake Trehörningen. It’s a lovely little lake with pleasant views and evening sun. There were some tents there but, to my relief, no big crowds and no loud groups.

We picked a flattish spot off to one side and set up camp.

First things first. Bathing! The day was hot and even though we had walked no more than maybe a kilometre and a half, we needed cooling. The lake water was wonderful – cool enough to be refreshing, warm enough so that I could swim without getting cold. The surface layer was warmer than I remember swimming pools being. I swam a few turns back and forth while Adrian splashed near the shore.

When we were done bathing it was quite late already and we had a lot left to do. Get the hammock up for Adrian, cook dinner, eat… It still takes me a while to get the hammock properly adjusted. After dinner it was bedtime for Adrian, while I stayed up reading for a while.

Now that nearly two months have passed since midsummer, it actually gets properly dark at night so you can see the stars. I thought I’d lie there and look at them but I could only see a very small patch of the sky so it stopped being interesting quite quickly.

Both Adrian and I slept really, really well. Adrian didn’t wake until eight o’clock, which is about an hour later than he normally gets up at home. He said the hammock was great. I think we might need to get another one so that he and Ingrid won’t have to argue about who gets to sleep in it.

I always wake several times per night when I am not in my own bed. That’s normal and expected by now. I’m happy, though, when we’ve been camping and I don’t wake up all stiff and sore. The combination of inflatable mattress, extra wide sleeping bag, and nobody poking me with their elbows (which often tends to happen in tents) made for a good night’s sleep.

Breakfast was pancakes of sorts, fried in plenty of butter. They were more delicious than they look in the photo. Why did I photograph them before flipping them?

After breakfast we had a swim in the lake. Or rather, I swam while Adrian just sort of was in the water. He likes bathing but not swimming, and very much prefers to do it in shallow water, with predictable footing and in the company of friends.

Then we walked back to the car.

Walking home was apparently not much more fun than walking out. We took several breaks again. At the last one, Adrian borrowed my camera.

Ingrid gets a week of corona-adjusted scout camp, because her age group (“Upptäckarna”) can pretty much manage themselves, cook their own food, etc. But the youngest scouts, “Spårarna” like Adrian, don’t get any summer camp this year. Adrian likes camps and camping, and is a bit disappointed by this. So he and I went camping on our own, while Eric stayed at home and got some peace and quiet.

We aimed for the camping spot next to Årsjön in Tyresta. That’s about a 3 km hike from the parking lot. That’s nothing for Adrian, really, but today he really wasn’t in much of a walking mood and seemed to struggle with every single step. We took plenty of water and snack breaks on the way.

Part of the problem is his rucksack. At about 140 cm, he’s too short for most junior rucksacks. He uses the shortest large rucksack I could find, back when Ingrid was preparing for her first scout camp. It’s a decent pack, but it lacks a proper padded hip belt, so all the weight rests on his shoulders.

No, he doesn’t walk bent over as he is in the photos – he was demonstrating for me just how unbearably heavy his pack was, especially when the path went uphill over rocks and roots. All it contained was his sleeping bag and mattress, a few small items of clothing, our toiletries and his water bottle…

When we got to the camping site, we were surprised to find it incredibly crowded. This is not an organized camping ground with flat ground and amenities like water and electricity – it’s simply one of the few spots in the Tyresta national park where tenting is allowed. Today, there were at least thirty tents here. I’ve never seen anything like it.

This was not at all what we had been hoping for. But it is what it is, so we just wandered as far as possible from the other people and the lake and the loo (this place now has a loo!) while still staying within the allowed area – and put up our hammock. Last time we were out camping and Ingrid waxed lyrical about the pleasures of sleeping in a hammock, I promised Adrian that it would be his turn in the hammock next time. Which was today. He flopped down in the hammock as soon as it was up.

Once the packs were down and the hammock was up, we made dinner: a potato, chickpea and coconut curry. This is what Adrian called “shovel time”: when the food has cooled enough that he can shovel it into his mouth at a constant pace with barely any breaks for chewing.

Dessert was diced apples fried in butter, with almonds and melted dark chocolate.

We had some concerns about the noise level at the camp site: there were some larger groups there, and a band of young children who were still running around shouting quite late. But it did quiet down just when Adrian wanted to go to sleep.

I myself had hoped to sleep in the shelter here at Årsjön, and the shelter was also my plan B for Adrian in case he didn’t like the hammock. (He did like it.) But with the amount of people here, the shelter was out of the question. I fell back to plan C which was simply sleeping on the ground. The nights are warm and cloudless right now, so the only potential problem was mosquitoes.

This was my “bedside table” for the night: phone, insect repellent, head torch, and a little bag with earplugs and a sleeping mask. I am a light sleeper and those last two are my lifesavers (sleepsavers?) when I sleep away from home.

Last time we went out walking, it was Adrian who suggested that we should go out. Except his suggestion was not that we should go walking – he wanted to go out and grill sausages, and maybe do a bit of geocaching as well. I somehow lost the grilling part completely as I was planning the outing. While we had a nice walk, Adrian did not get what he had suggested, at all.

Today we rectified that. We went out again and this time we totally did grill sausages.

What we originally had planned for today (and tomorrow and Tuesday) was a trip to Tiveden for some walking and canoeing. The weather report promised rain for all three days, so we cancelled those plans. Plan B was to go canoeing somewhere near Stockholm. But all the canoe rental places we called were fully booked by covid-cationing Stockholmers, so we were forced to cancel this plan as well. Walking near Stockholm fortunately requires no bookings and no advance planning so that’s what we fell back on.

Gålö is a place I’ve read about but not walked before. I’ve been there twice for nature photo mornings (once, twice). At those events we generally move within a very small area, so I didn’t really feel that I’d seen Gålö. And because we always drive there in the dark, following someone else’s car, I don’t even know exactly where I’ve been.

Today we walked the Havtornsuddslingan, which is a 4.5 km circular walk along the coastline of a narrow peninsula at the easternmost end of Gålö.

The path sometimes hugged the waterline, sometimes went through pine and blueberry forest and sometimes hovered between the two. The northern coast, which we walked first, on the way out, was steeper and the path was generally high up on cliffs. We had lots of lovely views there of the sea and small islands and sailing boats, which I somehow missed to photograph.

On the southern side, on our way back, there were more pebbly-rocky beaches instead of cliffs, and the path was even closer to the sea. The wind was from the south, so the sea was rougher and noisier on this side. Adrian and I tried bathing on one of the beaches but the sea bottom was so rocky and uneven and slippery that we kept stumbling all the time, so we turned back before we made it into deep water.

The actual sausage grilling we did on a new grill I bought just last week. We’ve been buying disposable grills for these kinds of outings, but the wastefulness of this has come to grate more and more on me, until I just couldn’t any more. Now I bought this portable, collapsible pop-up grill which I read about on some website some years ago.

It was all sold out in Sweden because of manufacturing issues due to the coronavirus, but I found one in a Danish web shop. I promise to use it lots and lots to make up for the wastefulness of shipping it from abroad. Although it was probably made in China so the trip to Denmark was most likely only a very small detour for it.

The grill worked really well. It was super easy to assemble and use. And the sausages came out really good! The grid on the disposable things sits right on top of the coals, so the food always comes out somewhat burned. It’s sort of an expected part of the grilling experience by now.

The grid on the pop-up grill is much higher up, so today the sausages were not the least bit burned, which might be a first for us. In fact we had the opposite problem – it was hard to get the heat up. Eric ended up blowing on the coals a lot to get them to burn hotter.

Our favourite vegetarian sausages come from Anamma.

We went out geocaching/walking/picnicking. I tried to think of someplace new, and came up with Erstavik. I passed through there on my bike some years ago and walked there once on my own and really liked what I saw.


We started off with a geocache just a few hundred metres from the parking lot, and then headed towards the next nearest one, which sounded intriguing. (Floating islands!) Adrian took care of most of the navigation, with some expert help from Ingrid.

The cache description said lake Dammsjön has three floating islands. We only spotted one, and another clump of earth that could maybe have been one. It looked like a perfectly ordinary small island, with some shrubs and a few pines, and didn’t seem to be floating anywhere.

After getting the second cache, we had our picnic on a small rocky peninsula extending into the lake. (Cold falafel in flatbread, with a chutney and sour cream sauce.) It was a lovely spot and I’m glad nobody else had gotten there before us! There’s something about being surrounded by water that makes it feel like you’re really on your own.

There were flat shelves of rock leading from the peninsula into the water that really invited to bathing. The lake water felt quite warm, so we took a quick dip.

I decided to swim to that island to see whether it really floated. It did indeed! The edge of it had no support, just water below it, and it wobbled up and down when I pushed it. I didn’t try to get onto the island – it seemed like it would be tricky – but I’m curious what it would feel like to walk on it.

Afterwards I read that the islands float around so much that they sometimes reattach themselves to the shore and then depending on the weather maybe float free again. So perhaps that’s what the other islands have done this year as well. Or maybe they just floated into some corner of the lake where we couldn’t see them.


There were masses and masses of blueberries everywhere. The first ones we looked at weren’t quite ripe yet, but when we got to sunnier spots, it turned out that most of them were just ripe enough. They’ll probably be sweeter in a week or so, but we’re here now.

As we were heading back towards the car, we saw signs next to the path about a café at the beach of Erstavik. Ice cream sounded good, so we turned that way instead. After much walking, we found the café to be closed. But the beach wasn’t, so Ingrid and Adrian had another swim. Especially Adrian didn’t like the lake – it had steep, rocky sides, and he prefers smooth beaches where he can reach the bottom.