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Ingvar Loco Nordin Chapter 1  Judy Spangenthal-Nordin The 2009 Northern Lapland Sapmi hike became a pleasant mix of easygoing drifts through the landscape and more strenuous and risky high pass passages and snowfield heel descents, just the way I’d wished it to be, with the added and completely unforeseen pleasure of getting to know some wonderful and unlikely people. 2 August 2009. Sunday. The train arrived in Abisko in the middle of the day. While I made my way to the coffee car in the train earlier that morning, before reaching Kiruna, I heard my name called out. It was Thommy Svensson from a small rural village in the Umeå area, whom I met on a hike in 2007, and whom I’ve kept in touch with since. We’d had a vague idea of hiking together for the beginning of my hike this year, but for a number of reasons decided not to. Thommy was however commencing his hike the same day as I, though from Nikkaluokta instead of Abisko, so we had the chance to chat a while on the train in the morning, making up some loose plans for a simultaneous hike in Sarek next summer.
In Abisko I was slightly annoyed by the weight of my pack, and for the first time since my first real Lapland hike – with my then 10 year old son Ivan – I retorted to shipping some content back home in a bus package, before setting out from the Abisko Mountain Station. I was slightly surprised myself, at the amateurism this speaks of, since I’ve been hiking so much since that first time, but in view of the faulty backpack from Haglöfs I’m glad I did that final down-sizing in Abisko. The weather was fine; sunny with occasional puffy white clouds – and a little too warm for carrying weights across long distances. I had my new Lumix DMC-LX3 compact camera, with light-sensitive Leica optics, strapped across my breast, kept in a National Geographic camera bag, and kept inside that bag in a plastic redline bag, to safekeep it from rain and sweat. I had a strap going around my body to keep the camera bag tight to my body, keeping it from swinging and moving while I walked. This is a method I’ve used for bringing the camera on racing bike rides, and it worked fine for walking too. The first kilometers south from Abisko on the King’s Trail (Kungsleden) is pretty much routine for me, but since the Panasonic Lumix has a good wide angle which my former Canon Ixus didn’t sport, I didn’t exactly refrain from taking photographs. On coming home they amounted to more than three thousand shots. I passed a middle-aged father and his 11-year old son from Denmark. They were doing their premier mountain hike, and obviously had much too much weight to hoist through the wilderness. They were Kenn L. Schjødt and his son Lukas. They’d left the rest of the family at home; i.e. Lukas’ two sisters and his mother, so that the men in the family could have their own quality time. We kept meeting all along the two weeks of our respective hikes, even though we went completely different ways. I criss-crossed back and forth while they went straight south, before turning to Kebnekaise – but we encountered each other even more than Hildegard Vermeiren and I did in 2008, and Hildegard and I kept our contact alive all since, so I suppose Kenn, Lukas and I will too. I regard these as synchronicity occurrences; opportunities that the web of existence offers up, which I thankfully like to perceive and make the best of.
Four or five kilometers down the line I diverted up left, climbing gradually up through the mountain birch forest along a path. After sweating it up the incline for a while I rose above the timberline, with a free view back north, all the way out across Torneträsk Lake, just north of Abisko.
The place I arrived at is called The Tent Camp (Tältlägret) by tradition, but it is no tent camp. It used to be a decided place for STF tourist tenting way back in the 1940s or thereabouts, but now you just find an old Lapp cot there, which, however, is fully useable and somewhat furnished. Inside it you find a heating stove for wood and a picture on the wall of the Swedish king – Carl XVI Gustaf – from his visit to the cot in 2002. The Swedish king is a dedicated mountain hiker.
The path continues up the slope. It’s the way into Ballinvággi Valley, which is one of the various ways to get to, for example, the Mårma Pass towards Visttasvággi (Vistas Valley) and the Vistas Hut. I, however, decided to pitch my tent – a small Hilleberg Akto one-man tunnel tent that I bought from hiker friend Stefan Jerling years ago after I met him in the mountains – right in the proximity of the cot. The mosquitoes were getting severe, so I had to spray myself with poison several times.
I went down into a ravine, to the Ballinjohka stream, to get my water, and commenced making dinner inside the cot, under the picture of the hiking king of Sweden.
I also cooled my hot feet in the brisk water!
As I was going about my chores, another hiker rose up the slopes. It was young Miika Jokinen from Finland, who did his third hike for the year in Swedish Lapland. The other two he had made in Finland. He was heading from Abisko to Nikkaluokta, and I suppose he’d do that route by way of the Mårma Pass and then perhaps to Nikkaluokta by way of Tarfala. You don’t have to use the Jojo Trail if you don’t really want to, because there is a simpler way from Vistas to Tarfala, which my mountain friend Thommy Svensson would use this year, albeit in the opposite direction. He’d ascend up right just before reaching Tarfala from Kebnekaise, drift across the high plateau and then descend on Vistas. Miika Jokinen cordially requested if I’d mind him pitching his tent by the cot too, but of course I had no complaints! It just felt nice to have a neighbor. The sun set, the way it does that far north in summer, barely browsing precisely under the horizon, keeping the night light, especially with no clouds in the sky.
During these hours I got some kind of toothache, which kept hitting at an irregular pace, in a place where I only have artificial crowns. It was a shooting kind of pain, which made me quite depressed for a little while, until I remembered a visit I made to my dentist some years ago, about the same thing. An x-ray was made. Nothing was visually wrong, so it probably just were the nerves reacting for some unknown reason, transmitting this sensation of pain. After I recalled that, the pain came back more scarcely, and then ceased completely. I slipped into my cozy and warm sleeping bag, reaching for the book I’d brought along; Raga by Jean María Gustave Le Clézio. He’s the latest Nobel Prize laureate of literature, but he’s been one of my favorites since the early 1970s. This thin book Raga turned out to be a poetic and philosophical masterpiece. I enjoyed it so much along this hike. Reading something along a mountain hike puts the read in a certain, relentless perspective, but Le Clézio’s book received that bright light with brilliance, working together with the wilderness circumstances to increase the experience of both the words and the nature alike, in a joyous and adventurous luminosity. |
