Scandinavia End-to-End

Many years ago I spent a rather wet summer hiking south to north through Norway and Sweden. I never wrote much about this walk - just one magazine article as far as I remember - as there was little interest in it despite it passing through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in Western Europe. Nowhere else in our crowded continent can you walk 2200 kilometres in roughly a straight line and be in wild country most of the time. Publishers however did not find Scandinavia interesting and where the Yukon was seen as romantic and the Munros as popular, and so my long walks in both worth books, Norway and Sweden were seen as unknown and dull. I had thought the walk long forgotten until a Swedish backpacking acquaintance, Jörgen Johansson, contacted me to say he'd mentioned it to members of the Nordic Lightpacking group on a recent meet and they were interested to know more about my trip. An interview followed and can be found on Jörgen's site here. The Nordic Lightpackers know now that this was not a lightweight trip!

Photo info: the walk took place long before digital cameras and I've never scanned any of the slides I took so I have no digital images. Instead here's a winter picture of the Hardangerjøkulen, an ice cap in southern Norway that I walked below and which I have skied up on several occasions. Canon 300D, 18-55mm lens @45mm, 1/125@f8, ISO 100, raw file processed in Lightroom 3.