This was an exhausting week at work. We had several workshops/meetings lasting over half a day, where the tone got more confrontational and less collaborative than I am used to. In order to recover I used up some of my flex hours to take a day off and go walking instead. There’s nothing like 7 hours outdoors on my own to restore my mental energy levels.

It was a beautiful, warm day, with blue skies and balmy winds. The lakes I passed were still covered in ice and so were parts of the path, but the brooks were full of snow melt and the hazelnut bushes were in bloom – the first plants to do so.

I needed a dose of nature so I went for a long walk.

(It’s a stressful time at work right now. Senior developers have been increasingly dissatisfied with our work situation, and just as we had started work on analysing and improving the situation, we found out the company would get a new CEO. That new CEO arrived a few weeks ago, and he of course has his own ideas about what needs changing. So everything is in a state of flux, but nothing is actually improving yet. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.)

It’s a snowless, cloudy day in February, and it feels like the whole world is the colour of muddy asphalt. And it is actually muddy as well, due to unseasonably warm weather – all of February is normally below freezing, and today’s forecast was +7°C. I stopped for a snack break next to lake Muskan (which you can see in the photo above) and while the ice was still thick, it was dripping and purling like a whole brook.

But it’s not all mud and greyness. With a bit of attention, I found specks of colour here and there. (Although counting my own rucksack as a speck of colour does feel like cheating a bit…) I also found out that lingonberries, which are quite tart in summer, get milder and sweeter after having been frozen – the taste brought lingonberry jam to mind.

After more than a week of not doing much (other than cooking, eating, and hanging around) I am in need of physical activity. My body is getting sofa-shaped and my back is getting sore from all the sitting. Today I went walking on Sörmlandsleden.

Christmas wasn’t white, but last night we got a bit of snow, as luck would have it. Everything was covered in a powdery layer of fresh, fluffy snow – very picturesque! The forest looks much prettier in white than in brown and black. Much of it was untouched by human feet, which made it extra beautiful.

Untouched by human feet, but not by any feet. The forest was full of animal tracks. I’ve never hiked after such fresh snowfall before, so I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, I know in theory that there are animals in the woods. But as a loud and clumsy human walking through the woods, I normally never see them. Maybe a deer in the distance, that’s it. Now I got to see – well, still not the animals, but signs of just how omnipresent they are.

Fox tracks in particular were everywhere along the paths and footbridges. It seemed funny to me at first that a fox would choose to walk on footbridges on Sörmlandsleden. But then again, Sörmlandsleden follows old, established paths, which in turn probably started their lives as animal paths, centuries ago. So it’s not that the fox follows Sörmlandsleden – it’s Sörmlandsleden that follows old fox paths.

Stages 5 and 6 together are about 24-25 km, which is eight hours of walking at my normal hiking pace. Midwinter days are short, so eight hours is just at the limit. I started in the pre-dawn twilight and finished shortly after dark.

The family is gone for the weekend. What does mum do? Turn up the volume on Adele in the entire house and start planning and packing for another solo hike.


I do pack light but some creature comforts are important. I want good, proper food, rather than cheese sandwiches or trail bars. So I packed both a luxury lunch (flatbread wraps with prawns and avocado) and two thermos flasks with hot drink. It weighs a bit, but dull sandwiches or cold drink would just take all the fun out of it.

I picked up Sörmlandsleden where I left off two weeks ago. So finding the beginning of stage 3 was easy. But then after a hundred metres or so, before I actually started walking for real, the trail markings just seemed to disappear. I spent a good quarter of an hour circling around before I managed to pick up the trail again. (Instead of turning right into the woods, the trail first detoured across a parking lot and behind some ugly gravel hills.) From then on it was smooth going.

The first part of the trail was quite similar to the previous stages. But after a couple of hours, as the trail crossed from the nature reserve into the Tyresta national park, the landscape got more and more beautiful. Much of it was still rocky pine and blueberry forest, or mossy spruce forest, and the odd little lake here and there, but somehow it was just… better. Like it had been more artfully arranged, with more pleasing proportions and less distractions. Just beautiful.

The weather was not so beautiful, unfortunately. It was only about 5°C outside, and around midday it started to rain. First just a light misting, and then a drizzle, and from then on it rained until 5 o’clock, sometimes more and sometimes less, with just a few brief breaks. At first I thought I’d cut my hike short if the weather didn’t improve. But I had waterproof shoes and clothes, and a hat and warm gloves, and there wasn’t much wind, and it was not actually pouring… so I just kept going. I was both warm and dry, even if the weather was not.

I was like the fabled frog in hot water, except the water in my case was cold. It would never have occurred to me to go out hiking in the rain, but since I was already out hiking and the rain only came gradually, I never saw a reason to jump out.

The only two downsides of hiking in the rain were (a) the way the hood of my waterproof jacket rustles and blocks ambient sound, and (b) it was harder to take photos. I have no rain cover for my camera, so I had to put it in my backpack to protect it, and stop to dig it out when I wanted to take photos. Which was a right hassle, so I took far fewer photos than I’d have done otherwise.

The shelter at Årsjön protected me from the elements during my lunch break, and I had brought an insulated jacket to keep me warm. I postponed my other meal break until it was nearly dark, and luckily it stopped raining just as I was thinking that I’d have to eat in the rain (because section 4 has no shelter). It was just me and a few small birds in a twilit mossy forest.


Section 4 of Sörmlandsleden was ordinary forest. The contrast to the beauty of section 3 was stark. On the plus side, while the best parts of section 3 were quite busy, this section was completely empty of people. I met a group of boys with their leader at the very beginning, and not a soul after that.

There is a qualitative difference between hiking with few people around, and hiking with no people around.

By the end of this section it was dark outside. I had brought a headtorch so the darkness was not a problem, but I didn’t really see much of my surroundings. I was also getting tired at this point. The two sections are listed as 12 km and 9 km respectively. But somehow my hike totalled not 21 but 24,5 km, and therefore took over an hour longer than I had planned. It’s a good thing the final part of the trail went through unexciting nature, basically just little forested patches of land between residential areas and some light industry – I don’t think I missed out on anything unforgettable there.

Sörmlandsleden 1+2. Another rainy hike. A previous hike in Tyresta.

Having done two weekend walks in the company of others and come home semi-satisfied from both, I decided to go out on my own this time.

I’ve been thinking for a while of starting to walk Sörmlandsleden, or at least its more accessible sections: the entire path stretches 1000 km throughout the county of Sörmland and is perhaps not entirely doable without overnight stays and dedicated transport. So today I got started with stages 1 and 2.

My start happened to coincide with the start of Sörmland Ultra Marathon, a 50 km run mostly along the Sörmlandsleden. But those 200 runners quickly disappeared from view and most of the time I was walking on my own, which was just the way I liked it.

The views were nice and varied but nothing spectacular. A bunch of little lakes overlooked by rocky bluffs, pine forests with blueberry bushes, some fir and birch and oak, a few meadows.

After 14 km of walking I briefly considered doing section 3 as well, but I would have reached the end after dark and after the last bus back to civilization, so I had to give up that idea. Instead I walked a few extra kilometres to Tyresö castle, hoping to get a hot meal at the café there. The extra walk there was nice, castle was pretty standard, but the salmon quiche served at the café was the stingiest one I’ve ever had.