This stage, by far the most desolate of the stages, had no STF huts and it was far between emergency shelters. To drive the point home, look at the Kungsleden map from wikipedia. This section and the next is no man’s land as far as the average hiker is concerned.
With far fewer hikers in the area, it paradoxically was the most social of the stages for us. Because you could easily go several hours without seeing someone, every encounter was a social event. Another key difference was that everyone we saw was passing us, rarely meeting us. This meant that we would pass them when they took a break, we would take the same boats and, for the most part, they would walk the same distance as us during the day. It was clear from the first person we met that we were doing something different now, the quality of the hikers had increased substantially. Everyone we met were at least doing the entire Kungsleden, many were doing the Gröna Bandet (the entire Swedish mountain range from Grövelsjön-Treriksröset. 1300km). Almost everyone had done through-hikes before. We were the amateurs amongst the pros.
This suited us well, we felt happy to just be in the league. We might be the slowest, least experienced and most tired out of everyone in the emergency shelter, but we were there, we had a great time and everyone we met accepted and encouraged us forward, sharing their stories of past adventures. On this stage, we felt we were truly living up to our motto: Ambitious but rubbish.
From a scenic perspective, STF aren’t stupid. There is a reason why they haven’t put up cabins in this section. For our part, the cabins weren’t missed by any means as the emergency shelters were within a reasonable day’s hike and they all had an outhouse. The social aspect of the emergency shelters and camping sites more than made up for the lack of shops. Many stretches felt more like transportation than hiking, but we knew that going in. It was also our first encounter with boats and more importantly, boat schedules.
Day 5: Ammarnäs – Rävfallsstugan
Waking up in Ammarnäs felt surreal. After two straight nights of poor sleep, the last being at least for Martin almost 0 hours, we were now clean, well-rested and felt on cloud nine. For about 30 minutes before a potential disaster became apparent, our food package had yet to arrive at the local food store. Our daily target-distance during these 21 days was above 20k. Therefore, if we were forced to take a 0k day (zero day) waiting for the package, we’d have to increase our daily average by 1.5k for the remainder of our trip. After a few calls, it seemed like the package would likely be on the very same bus that Louise would be taking home at 13:30. But we couldn’t know for sure. We compensated for the distress with Coca Cola, Red Bull, Oreos and the like.
Now, time for a short story! It principally occurred during the first stage, but it ended as we were sitting outside the store. During day 3, when we were at STF Serve taking a short break, we started talking to two younger men, early 20s. They had the image of being experienced hikers and they confirmed our suspicions. They asked if we were inexperienced hikers, and we confirmed their suspicions. We discussed hiking spots for the night and our experience so far on the trail. When the hut warden asked us if we were staying the night, we simply replied that all we wanted was to buy “Chips and cola”. They had none, they stopped having a shop at STF Serve this year and our guidebook wasn’t updated with that info. The guys heard and found our needs and our outdated info funny. Whenever we’d meet on trail over the last 2 days, they’d always ask us if we had found chips and cola yet, smiling superiorly, like Malfoys. We started earlier than them but walked slower, so we passed them several times a day, each time with the same routine.
Well, triumph came as we sat outside the shop. For they had decided to cancel their trip early, the storm night taking a heavy toll on one of them and the other uninterested in continuing alone. It felt like a victory, sitting there, having in fact gotten chips and cola, knowing that the turtles had come out on top over the hares. That victory lingered for 30 minutes, until we met Valter and Emelie.
Long story short, Valter and Emelie were two doctors who had started their hike at the southern tip of Sweden many months ago. They initially planned to walk the Continental Divide Trail between the US border to Canada and Mexico but Covid-19 put a stop to that. Despite walking more than 1000k, they looked even fresher than us and we felt immediately like amateurs again. They were very encouraging, ultralight and had decided to go off Kungsleden for this hike and walk directly alongside the Vindelälven because, as they saw it, “the stage is basically going up a ski hill, walk on top of it and then walk down, why not go next to the beautiful river instead and avoid the 540 height meters?”. They weren’t wrong, but our goal was to experience the entire Kungsleden, so we couldn’t miss the ski slope…
Because we had lost almost 4 hours waiting on the package, we were in a rush during the entire day to get to Rävfallsstugan before dark. Once up the hill, we thought we had done the hard part. We were wrong. It was perhaps 100-200m more height meters to go and the 20k walk was to be done almost entirely without clean water.
We reached Rävfallstugan by 20:00 and we were starving. The hut was really nice and can be rented for cheap, don’t miss out! It even has a sauna. Inside the hut, we met a German girl our age named Julika. We didn’t know at the time, but we’d be seeing a lot more of her. She was a very experienced hiker, having done the Pacific Coast Trail and several other long distance hikes across the world. She was solo-hiking the Kungsleden as a spontaneous 3 week getaway vacation. She was staying inside the hut tonight with a nice Australian couple who had rented it for the night and was cool with us eating inside and using the sauna after them. They recommended a tent spot close to the sauna and we settled in for the night.
Day 6: Rävfallsstugan – Sjnulttjie
We knew when we started the day that this day would, from a hiking perspective, suck. It would be 3 hours straight uphill, followed by an uninspiring hike on the fjäll, then downhill to an area of still water lakes infested with so many mosquitos no amount of protection could keep you from being bitten.
We cleared the first challenge by taking our sweet time in the morning, putting on podcasts (Critical Role season 2 for Martin, some lecture for Jonathan) and just pushing through it. With only 1 minute breaks every 20 minutes to avoid the mosquitos finding us climbing through the birch forest, we reached the tree line after approximately 2 hours. Up on the fjäll, Martin devoured half a bag of chips (carried from Ammarnäs), 100g Marabou and rinsed it all down with Oboy. Classic move.
We survived the second challenge by eating every snack we could find. The podcasts kept us from being too bored with the monotonous terrain.
The final challenge wasn’t what we thought it would be. On our way down from the fjäll, we met an older man, mid 50s, walking uphill with his rain jacket put on the wrong way. It hadn’t rained for the entire day, he was surrounded by mosquitos and he looked beat. We assumed the worst was yet to come and put on our head nets and braced ourselves for hours off hell.
We took our head nets off after maybe one hour, finding the area not more mosquito infested than we had been on previous stretches below the tree line. The warnings of the Sjnulttjie mosquitoes proved exaggerated, at least from our experience.
With maybe 5k to go, Martin started to experience some pain in his right Achilles’ heel. In hindsight, we should have stopped for the day, recognizing that our most probable failure point for the trip is Martin’s propensity to write checks his body can’t cash. Our defense; rain was on the horizon, we were tired and we were really not in the mood for ending the day soaked like at Tärnasjön so we pushed on, betting that we’d reach the hut before Martin couldn’t walk.
The heel forced us to slow down considerably, from our normal 3-4km/h to below 2. What should have taken us one hour was becoming more than two.
To make matters worse, our map suggested that we had a difficult choice for the final stretch:
- Stay on the road (purple dotted line), taking a detour north for 3k (eta 21:30) to reach the emergency hut, ensuring rain and risking injury (blue line).
- Go off-trail through knee-high swamp lands to cut the distance to 400 meters (red line). This would ensure we’d reach camp before the rain but almost guaranteeing Martin’s injury would become worse (heel gets stuck in the swamp which adds considerable strain to the tendon).
Kungsleden really isn’t made to walk northbound, we moaned. Both options had risks, and we disagreed on how to proceed. In the end, we decided to pursue option 1, at least we knew we’d get to the hut eventually. As we walked on, bodies increasingly strained and morale on a rare low, Martin saw a sign in the distance, could it be?
We knew our maps were somewhat outdated, from 2017, but how many positive changes could it be in the sparsely maintained wasteland between Ammarnäs and Jäckvick. Well, Länsstyrelsen had made a short-cut to the Sjnulttjie hut through the marches, with wooden beams and everything, a massive boost to morale and we reached the hut by 20:15, before the rain with 30 minutes to spare.
Upon reaching Sjnulttjie, we went inside the hut to find our newish friend Julika and another set of swedes, a mother and a son. The mother-son duo was probably the most experienced hikers we met on the entire trail but were very Swedish about it.
“Are you experienced hikers?” – Martin asked
“No not really, but we enjoy it” – The mother replied.
After some probing, their plan was to do Kungsleden in 14 days, followed by Padjalanta and Höga Kusten, doing all trails combined in 28 days. They were doing 35k days, starting at 6 am. They had already done all trails in Sweden, several more than once. They, not unlike Valter and Emelie, had initially planned to go to South Korea and Japan for some off-trail hiking, but Corona made them do Kungsleden.
The mother son duo had decided to sleep inside the hut, not finding any satisfactory tenting spots nearby and tired from a long day of hiking. Later in the evening a forward Swedish man, mid 50s with a fishing rod, joined us. He solo-hiked and had probably spent the entire day in silence, or at least we think so. Because when he entered the cabin he went on an uninterrupted monologue of his day, reasons for hiking and the family drama that made him fish in the area just this day. Wow, the guy had a voice that could fill cathedrals, way too loud for an emergency cabin at ~22:00. He also wanted to sleep inside the emergency hut, so to rest our ears and get a chance of an early morning, we retreated to our tent.
Day 7: Sjnulttjie – Luvtávrre
Because Martin had a painful Achilles, we made two adjustments to our standard schedule, which we would later come refer to the “Slow is Pro”-system. Firstly, we set the alarm early to get more hours of daylight while walking and we ate breakfast on trail instead of at the campsite to gain a longer break while hiking (breakfast break). Secondly, we set a hard rule to stop 1 minute every kilometer to mitigate the injury in addition to a longer 5 minute break every 3 kilometers. This worked out great and we kept that routine going for the rest of the trail.
We woke up with a swarm of mosquitos clinging to the outside of the inner tent. This was a chill day where not much happened, so enjoy the pictures and the attached text.
Day 8: Luvtávrre – Jäckvik
If the day before was a full albeit uneventful day, this was a half day with nothing to see and apart from Jäckvik, which was awesome, nothing happened on trail. We were slowly realizing that Martin’s Achilles (this will be a recurring thing, sorry) wasn’t getting better and that we’d have some very difficult choices to make in Jäckvik before deciding to continue. At the end of the post we’ll discuss why Jäckvik was one of our absolute highlights of Kungsleden (it sounds crazy, we know).
By this point, we had committed to our strategy of maintaining our daily distances, but at a much slower pace – which obviously makes the days longer. We reasoned like this:
[Speed] x [Time] = [Distance]
[Speed] x [Weight] = [Strain]
If we wanted to maintain the needed distance but reduce the strain on Martin, we had to reduce speed, increase time and decrease weight.
Why we loved Jäckvik so much:
In the “middle” of Jäckvik, there is a lovely place called Kyrkans Fjällgård (roughly translated to the church’s mountain homestead). It’s run by a non-profit along ecclesiastical values. What this materialises as is super-chill 80-bed housing, with the most welcoming and relaxed hosts we met all trail. It was very affordable and as soon as we had any requests, the answer was “help yourself”. Even more then that, it was on the level of “Yeah, go for it, pay when/if you feel like it”. There was just no hassle about anything. And since there was much fewer people on trail, we could get our own 8-bed room.
Besides the actual Fjällgård, we also liked Jäckvik because this is where we met many of the interesting people we’d hike alongside for the rest of Kungsleden. The Fjällgård is quite big and has large seating areas for events, meaning they also have an enormous kitchen – on an industrial level. Having everyone cook their own meals at the same time and then sitting down together was a really nice experience.
Our last reason for loving Jäckvik was the ICA store. For 2020, the local store owners had decided to upgrade, becoming a part of the Swedish ICA franchise (the biggest grocery store chain in Sweden). This meant huge amounts of supplies available! So, besides picking up our food package at the store, we also went shoping. We got a bunch of our favourite things. Jonathan was so hungry he even spontaneously tried a “rescue” ice cream, made from rescued fruits. It tasted horribly. Like, absolutly disgusting. Everything else was great tho! Luckily, Jonathan also got a regular cone ice cream.
Overall, Jäckvik was the perfect reset experience.
