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.

Sörmlandsleden stage 17, back and forth, 6 + 6 km.

Today’s walk was mostly just to get out of the house. With nothing going on in life, I’ve gotten used to nothing going on and lost the habit of doing things, of planning and making things happen. Planning something feels like so much effort. So it’s a good thing that my slow-burn Sörmlandsleden project makes it so easy to get out. Just take the next stage on the list.

12 km is far from a full day of walking, but with the driving there and back and a leisurely lunch + book break in the middle, the whole outing took over 8 hours anyway. Sörmlandsleden stretches many miles away from Stockholm and the point that I have reached is currently about one and a half hour’s drive from home. And it’s only going to get further and further away. Stages 18, 19 and 21 are all just over 10 km, so they’re also doable back and forth in a single day, albeit a long one. Stage 20 I’ve walked already.

It was a very quiet walk. There was no wind and none of the rustling or whispering sounds of wind. No birdsong. No sun, with its brightness and shadows. I met a single other person on the trail. He was running and doing the same as me, back and forth, so he ran past me twice.

The ground was not as muddy as I had feared. In many places, what looked like soggy ground turned out to be still frozen. There were patches of grainy old snow here and there. The small lakes were all fully iced over, but the larger ones had open water.

I heard a black grouse sing. I didn’t know what it was; I don’t think I’ve ever heard one before. I walked closer, hoping to get a look, but it took flight. I got enough of a glimpse to see that it was like a large dark hen, which means it was some kind of grouse. Google and Fågelsång.se helped me figure out which one.

This is the inside of a hollow dead oak.

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.

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.

Today promised beautiful weather, warm and sunny, so I took the day off and went walking.

I have quite flexible working arrangements and this has always been possible, but I’ve almost never taken advantage of it. Somehow taking a day off feels like a smaller step when I’ve already been working from home anyway, with my afternoon walking and cycling breaks.

After a longish break from walking the Sörmlandsleden, I did another section today. I’ve done all the easy-to-reach low-numbered sections. The ones ahead of me now cannot easily be reached with public transport, and some cannot even be reached by car. The best way to walk them would probably be multi-day hikes. But I only have one day, so I just simply walked section 12 twice. There and back again.

Section 12 starts near Järna, in an old iron mining district. For the first kilometer or two, the woods are pockmarked with small water-filled mining pits, most just a few metres across. There were several informational plaques here and there as well. I skimmed a few; the oldest one I noticed was dated 1985. That was a really durable, well-made sign, with the text and images etched into metal. No flimsy plastic signs here.

The rest of the section is pretty standard Sörmland pine forest with blueberry undergrowth. There were several lakes here and there offering resting places with nice views.

Much of it was quiet, as pine forest tends to be, except for the soughing of the wind, although I heard blue tits and finches in a few places.

Section 12 is 8.5 km according to the official notes. Adding another kilometre to walk from the parking spot I found to the beginning of section 12, and then doubling it all, brought the total to 20 km. A good distance for one day, especially when the walking is as hilly and rocky as this was.

After several weekends of wanting to go for a walk but having to do other things, I actually got out today and walked section 5:3, from Hemfosa to Paradiset.

It was a beautiful day for walking – a few degrees below freezing, overcast but still relatively bright. The temperature has been below zero for a while so the ground was all firm rather than muddy. And the ground was covered with a fresh blanket of fluffy snow. I love walking on untouched snow, and that feeling of being alone in the forest.

There was a stretch in the middle where the trail went along roads, which I didn’t much enjoy, but most of it was pleasant walking through the usual fir-pine-bilberry-rock forests. This section of the trail is quite far from major roads and the commuter train lines, plus the snow muffled any remaining noises, so everything was wonderfully quiet.

The fresh snow and the lack footprints meant I could see a lot of paw prints instead. Fox, hare, squirrel, deer, and even moose I believe, plus tiny prints of unidentifiable tiny rodents.

All was great except lunch, which was very cold. My big mittens are warm and weatherproof but impossible to hold a spork with, so I had to switch to gloves, and even though I ate as fast as I possibly could, I felt like my fingers were going to turn into icicles and fall off. It took me a good while to get them warm again afterwards.

The last part of my walk went through the Paradiset nature reserve. I don’t know what it is about that place – it’s the usual pine forest over granite, but somehow it manages to look prettier than other similar forests. The moment I cross the boundary of the nature reserve, it’s like the pines become more elegant and the snow lies extra fluffy on their boughs. I noticed the same effect when section 3 crossed into the Tyresta national park.

The trail passes by Tornberget which is apparently the highest point in the greater Stockholm area. There’s a viewing tower with views of nearly endless flat pine forest in all directions. Uniform and not particularly interesting.

As usual the official distance is one thing and reality is different, what with having to actually get to and from the trail. The section starts where Sörmlandsleden crosses a public road, but it’s a kilometre from the train station to that spot. And the section ends in the middle of the forest, not even near a road of any kind, so there’s one kilometre to get to a road and then another to the nearest bus stop. In total the 15 km trail section became a 18 km walk. Starting at 9, finishing just before 15 – perfect use of daylight hours.

The Midsummer weekend contained too much eating and lounging around and not enough moving. I was itching to get out and walk, so here I am. Sörmlandsleden, stage 5:2. I like the stages that are easy to reach using public transport, and it doesn’t get much more convenient than this one: it effectively goes from Ösmo station to Hemfosa station.

Well, that’s what it does on paper. In reality the start is about a kilometre from the station, and the end likewise, so the 15 km becomes more like 17 and some. And then there’s the extra detour you can make to a hill with an ancient fort. That one is described as “might be worth making a detour for” and indeed I’m sure there are people for whom that is the case, but honestly I wouldn’t recommend it. I couldn’t see any signs of the fort itself, just a rocky hill with a view barely worth looking at, because whichever direction you look, it’s all the same forest. Or perhaps I was just getting too tired to appreciate it.

This part of Sörmlandsleden itself was more varied than most. There were lakeside views, the usual Sörmland pine and blueberry forests, rough spruce forest with plenty of rocks and roots, and even a golf course with its manicured lawns and well-tended shrubberies.