The fastest wind speed ever recorded at Tarfala was over 180 kilometers per hour. As I leaned into it, unable to move forwards, and barely able to stand, I thought it must not be too far short of that record. Strangely, there was no howl; there was nothing for the wind to hit except me, our daughter in my pack, and Yon about twenty paces behind. No howl, just a sudden horrendous flapping as the red sheet protecting my child flew loose at one corner.
“Are you scared, baby?”, I yelled. “No”, she said. “Well just a little bit”.
We were 26 kilometers into this hike; even for Arctic Sweden it was getting dark by now, nearly ten hours since we set off at noon. I was wet through, and, as Hicks and Hudson classically exchanged, either my motion detector GPS was reading wrong, or I was reading it wrong.
Where was the damn hut?
Through Rain and Fog
After a gruelling but in hindsight very satisfying 40 kilometer five day hike with our daughter and full camping gear along the Kungsleden, we had rested up in the Arctic town of Kiruna and reconsidered our approach. The original plan had been to continue along the Kungsleden and detour north of Kebnekaise to Nikkaluokta via the very remote Gaskavaggi valley into almost-as-remote Tarfala. The first day or two of the Kungsleden demonstrated there was zero chance of pulling that off. But if we ditched most of our load, we could still reach Tarfala by the easier route and stay at the mountain hut there. The fact I’d already paid for it was extra incentive.
So it was that we caught the bus out of Kiruna (after, inevitably, sprinting down the road after I left my phone in the hotel room…) and rode it to Nikkaluokta. This little place is the trailhead for the very popular walk into Kebnekaise, Sweden’s highest mountain.
From Nikkaluokta it’s a long, long way to Kebnekaise, but it’s mostly flat. There’s even a boat you can take along part of the river-lake system, which saves about six kilometers. Of course, we missed that and decided to walk. By the time we could see the view pictured above, it was getting close to six in the evening and there was still no sign of the turn-off that would take us uphill into the valley that led to Tarfala. The weather was still nice when we finally got there at six, after six hours of more-or-less non-stop hiking.
From out of that valley came a deep rushing river, and as we finally gained some real elevation I felt like we were in a scene from a Tolkien story. The small trees were white-barked, the lush grass was green and wildflowers still lent colour to the late summer. But up ahead, the grey sky was past threatening rain. It promised it. The path led up a narrow valley beneath dark cliffs: we climbed out of those Elvish lands into the Trollshaws.
At that moment, I got busy calculating time and distance, and hoping we’d reach the hut before it rained. Suddenly the path left the valley and got quite steep and I imagined – as it is so easy to do when you are tired – that the hut would be standing just over the next ridge, warm and welcoming. Foolishly, I even foreshadowed this imminent discovery to Yon, only to be proven quite wrong.
All I could see instead was a wide open area, strewn with grey rocks, some enormous, and all of it about to disappear in the bank of dark cloud that was rolling in toward us.
 Skarð |
 Mt Jagungal |
 Kungsleden |
Just now, things got a little bit difficult. Far out to the left we could still see the black-and-white relief of the snow-and-white covered mountains. Uphill to the right we could make out the faint little matchstick forms of a line of telephone poles. But ahead was just grey; swirling mist morphing with the jagged shapes of nothing but rocks. As the rain began, I pulled out my GPS and called up the waypoint for the hut. I had carefully punched in its latitude and longitude from the official website of the STF – the Swedish Tourism Foundation which runs this hut and hundreds of others across the country.
It was getting really late. True, this was the world of the Midnatssol, but it was already mid August and the sun did indeed disappear briefly at midnight so by nine at night it was dusky, especially under a low cloud base. Yon was expressing some concern about the general course of events and the prospects for the immediate future (she put it somewhat less diplomatically at the time). My instinct told me to keep a bit to the left, but past experience taught me the risks of following your instinct in white-out style conditions. Like a pilot in a plane, you’re meant to follow your instruments, not your head, heart or gut. So we followed the little arrow on the GPS uphill to the right. The path was so faint we lost it in a few minutes and as we topped out on the next little crest, there we were.
Not at the hut, which was nowhere to be seen. No, there we were in the middle of a pretty decent gale, with considerably more than a sprinkling of rain “falling” more or less parallel to the ground, with 24 kilometers and more than nine hours behind us, about 100 meters of visibility and No. End. In. Sight.
In other words, a “Richy Special”.
Thankfully, the kid really did seem to be fine. She was dry under her jury-rigged protective screen, and professed to be warm. She certainly sounded cheerful. Yon and I were soaked (me from the inside, too, as I had after all carried nearly 20 kg the whole way). The wind was really strong, and buffeted us around so unpredictably that Yon was quite literally knocked off her feet while crossing a small river. In she went, hurting her hand on the way down but avoiding total immersion (well might I say “good save” because nothing will save me from what’s coming if when we get to the hut).
The GPS was working fine but it was giving out confusing data. I had studied the valley carefully on Google Earth and I also had a paper map with me, carefully wrapped in clear plastic. The hut should most definitely be to the left, and slightly downhill. Why is the GPS sending us uphill to the right? I didn’t understand, though I was starting to think the map might be wrong. Funny how tiredness affects your judgement. Fortunately I was not too tired to remember the adage: work the problem. As Gene Kranz – head of mission control during Apollo 13 – said (in the movie at least): “let’s look at this from the standpoint of status. What have we got on the spacecraft that’s good”?
What have we got that’s good? Not the GPS. Either it was wrong, or I was reading it wrong. I couldn’t see the hut and I couldn’t find the path. The only thing I did know for sure was that the line of telephone poles was marked on my map. According to the map, the hut would be northwest of the point where the poles ended. So, work the problem. Let’s get to the one feature you can see on the map and on the ground, and follow it home.
There was further pointed commentary from behind me about the latest developments, not least because they involved tiptoeing over slippery jagged rocks while heading generally uphill, and still into that heinous wind. But acting on the principle that if you stay calm, others might too, we kept it cool and followed the telephone lines, keeping them about 100 meters off our right hand. I was almost certain by now that the GPS was not sending me towards the hut, and a little compartment in my brain was trying to decide whether the coordinates on the website were wrong, or I’d entered them incorrectly.
And then, finally, I saw not only the little huddled huts of the Tarfala Research Station, but also, mercifully, the more distant tiny black dots of the STF hut. It was a good mile away from where the GPS was pointing, but seemed to be more or less exactly where the map said it should be. “I can see it!” I yelled into the wind. Now all we had to do was get there. The STF hut is very exposed, and the wind here was harder to move against even than before. Several times I was hit, hard, and had to brace myself and lean into it to avoid falling over. I tried hard to put my front into it, to keep the kid in her backpack out of the full assault.
When I got to the hut I was probably more than a hundred meters ahead of Yon. We’d agreed I would race ahead to get the kid inside. It was ten pm when I got there, and quite dark for the Arctic. The hut has no electricity so it was pitch black in the entrance and for one horrifying moment I wondered if it was unoccupied. Then a nice woman who spoke English appeared and I blurted out something about this is my daughter I have to go get my wife I will be back in a second she is really shy but don’t worry. And then, ten hours after we set out, and 27 kilometers, we had made it.
There was a cool Russian kid there who thought ten hours was a pretty good time, and handed us some hot blackcurrant juice. I sat down, relieved of the burden of all that physical and mental weight, took a quiet moment to congratulate myself on the navigation (we took a slightly longer route, but we made it safely), and hyperventilated for about twenty minutes.
We hadn’t eaten since lunch so Yon heated up some pasta and we guzzled that down. It was time to sleep – oh how I wanted to sleep – but finding a bed was tricky. While I had reservations, they aren’t like at a hotel. You choose a date but the reservation is valid for a fortnight either side. Sleeping space is first-come-first-serve at these huts. The first door I opened was a four bed two bunk room with a “dogs allowed” sign. On the right side was an empty double bunk; on the floor was an inconceivably large St Bernards dog, snoring and slobbering onto the ground. And to his left on the other bunk was a pretty decently proportioned human male, at least 60, stark naked and snoring in harmony.
I was similarly unlucky in the next few rooms so we went to the large dormitory at the end and after tiptoeing in and out a bit I managed to find two empty beds. Yon and the kid shared one and I took the other, passing out in about fifteen seconds and sleeping deeply until 11 the next morning.
Deeply, that is, except for when I needed the bathroom. I padded out of the room in my socks, too quietly to hunt around for my jacket. It was very dark inside, as it should be at three in the morning, but it was a shock opening the door. What had seemed dark at the end of that long hike just hours before now seemed bright. It was cold though, and I raced as fast as I dared in my socks and underwear along the wooden path to the outhouse. A quick pee, and race back, shivering, in less than five minutes.
Tarfala
And finally, here we were. Not on some windswept rain-battered fog and cloud-covered boulder field like last night but here, at Tarfala. It’s a flat rocky plain at the shore of a fantastic glacial lake cornered between several high mountains and a few glaciers, all of which lies behind Sweden’s highest mountain, Kebnekaise.
It is, quite simply, stunning, spectacular, just so beautiful you can sit at the table in the hut and just stare right out at it. The weather changes so rapidly that it’s like watching, well, the timelapse at the top of this story. For the first few days, we did little more than that. Sit in the hut and look out the window; play games with the kid; and recover from the hike in and from the longer trek on the Kungsleden.
The wind was always there, those first days, an unending presence evidenced in that treeless, leafless, dust-free otherworld more by its effect on the apparent horizon than anything directly obvious. Clouds moved above the glacier, swirling slowly but never crossing the lake toward us; fog obscured the hunched black figures of mountainous trolls; ancient, petrified giants that quietly broke through the 21st century western rationality that told you trolls don’t exist. If they did – which they might, you now think – up there in those steep scree fields is where they play at ninepins while picking their teeth with your femur.
We explored slowly and quietly. One afternoon I took our daughter to a snowdrift to build a snowfriend. It ended up, somehow, being a scarecrow, wrought from a hunk of ice and decorated with stones and a sunbleached bone of some forgotten creature. She loved it, and played there by the lake shore until a squall built and we hustled back to the hut, treading carefully from rock to rock across both streams and lush patches of green bog sprinkled with the bobbing white heads of Arctic cotton (Eriophorum callitrix). The next day, the wind had done its work, and that scarecrow lay broken on the drift. “My scarecrow!”, she wailed, before the inevitable parental lesson on life, death and “let’s go find Mum”. Nothing lasts forever, not even ice scarecrows in the Arctic Circle.
Story continues after pictures
People came and went. Though a long way from Nikkaluokta, Tarfala is a manageable day hike from the much larger mountain lodge at Kebnekaise. Many visitors there tried the 16km round trip to Tarfala and could be seen marching their way across the plateau. Even in broad daylight as the visibility improved through the time we were there, those hikers said they’d found it difficult to stick to the path. Very few stayed the night; most arrived, looked around the hut, had their lunch and left. Four Chinese students based in Paris stayed a few nights, the lone woman barely looking up from beneath her cap the whole time and her three male companions quiet and housebound. Yon struck up conversation and learned they had reached the limit of their comfort zones. “They’re scared of the mountains”, she told me after they’d come back early from a hike. “They went up past the lake; they told me they’re scared, they don’t know what to do here”.
And no wonder. Because this place, though truly beautiful, is no place to muck around. The hut is miles from anywhere and the hikes from it are miles from there. We barely ventured a kilometer from the hut ourselves until nearly the end of our stay, when we climbed up beside the glacier to the Black Lake – a story for another time. Wild weather and slippery rocks mean even a short walk needs care and preparation.
A few days into our stay we met Lars, the steward or manager of Tarfala hut. Our daughter described him as Santa Claus; in turn, she reminded him of his adopted daughter, a child from Korea (now an adult). Each had an immediate soft spot for the other and it was heartwarming to see. By the end, Lars seemed to come by the hut a little more often, just to say hello, and we paid him a few visits too in his neighbouring manager’s hut. A hardy soul, Lars was a veteran manager and had spent many winters here supporting skiers and climbers during the snowy season, then digging it all out again to prepare for the spring and summer seasons. Lars told us of the deep connection he felt with Tarfala, a strong pull that brought him here year after year for months on end.
There were others, too. One afternoon, the day before we hiked out, a helicopter flew in lower than usual. Most days a chopper would fly overhead a few times with construction material slung beneath, I assumed for some kind of hut or structure up on Kebnekaise. But this time it slipped in low, spun around over the lake and set down on a small pad between Lars’ hut and the outhouse. Old Lars ambled up to it as a younger man jumped out with an enormous pack full of climbing gear.
As he lugged the unwieldy load across the stony 50 meters back to the hut, W and I watched as the pilot spooled up his machine and took off, nose down as it whirred overhead to our kid’s delight. “Heliklopter!” It’s too cute to correct; she’ll work it out soon enough.
The daily routine was refreshingly simple. Yon would boil water on the hut’s gas cooker and I would go out to the bank where the glacial lake drained into the river that flowed down the valley. The water here is pristine and you can drink it without any treatment at all. Two big buckets were heavy work, but it wasn’t far and they lasted a while. By the time I got back, porridge was about ready and I’d make coffee, too. I had just enough of the fresh stuff for most of the visit, and then a few instant sachets for the rest.
Then we might sit for a while by the window, play a few games with the kid and look outside when it’s her turn. Stare at the mountain. Perhaps visit the bathroom. Come back, stare some more, play another game or paint another picture with the kid. Pretty simple. What’s for lunch?
Farewell
It was time to leave. No-one wanted to. This was just about our idea of Heaven. But another part of life was calling – I won’t say real life because this was real, too, though rare – and we still had a 27 kilometer walk back to Nikkaluokta. On a clock, too, because we needed to make back for a bus and then a flight.
I woke that morning of our last day at 4am and went outside for a pee. It was still a strange feeling to come out of the dark room into broad daylight at that hour. But on this last morning, I raced back in and woke Yon. Because the sky was still, dead still, and the entire lake was too. Some things you can scarcely believe when you are staring at them.
Together we just looked at it, silently, but together. We’d come a long, long way to get here and not just the epic walk in. Our child slept in the hut behind us and we soaked in that moment of stillness. A few days ago as we approached the hut in a buffeting gale I never would have believed I’d be standing here unable to see a single ripple on the whole lake.
We retired for another hour or so of sleep and once we were up again and ready to leave – our daughter snoozing in the baby carrier again – the reflection was already blurring. Lars, or Santa, came to wish us farewell and the climber who came by helicopter was leaving too, with a nice German woman he would show over the pass to Gaskavaggi. I still wanted to go that way, into that mysterious valley. Perhaps another day.
We turned our back and crossed the stony plain in a light breeze with 27 long kilometers ahead of us. On the way out we managed to follow the path, more or less, down into the little valley and onward to the main route from Kebnekaise to Nikkaluokta. Even with blueberry stops, we managed it in eight hours. And before we knew it, we were boarding the plane to Stockholm.
Postscript: the STF website had the wrong GPS coordinates for the Tarfala hut.
