Today was my last chance (or have I overused ”last chance” by now?) to check off items from my to-do list for the snow-free season. Cycling to Backvallen was on the list and now I’ve done it. It’s a nice road, in surprisingly good condition considering that there’s very little traffic so there’s probably not much road maintenance here. On the other hand, lack of traffic means that the road doesn’t get ruined either.
Last weekend I needed the key to the boom because we were driving to the trail head, but there is no key needed when you are on a bicycle. There is actually also a path that goes from Backvallen to Ol-Larsvallen and from there you can follow a small creek up towards Fjälländan where we were last week. The path from Backvallen looks very interesting, it goes across an area with sparse forest (as seen from above last week) so I will definitely want to see it up close next year. Together with the small creek and its waterfalls. I was half tempted to go up to that sparse forest (Brännsmolet) today, but first you have to get across a small mire and my cycling shoes were no good for it. Not a big loss, I figured, because the light was a bit so-so again. The sun came out at times but the clouds dominated. It was very warm though, t-shirt weather, and I thoroughly enjoyed sitting there drinking my coffee, looking at the beautiful view towards Lillfjället. Which by the way goes to my to-do list next year!
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As you can see from the above picture, the colours are fading fast. A lot of the birches have already lost their leaves and I heard an interesting theory this week. We have a moth invasion going on (or had going on, the numbers are now going down), every time you walked in the forest you had a cloud of moths around you. I think it’s a winter moth (Operophtera brumata) or some close relative to it, it swarms in September. I had already figured that a moth invasion this year will mean a moth larvae invasion next year, and knowing that their favourite food is birch leaves, I’m mentally preparing for naked birches next summer. But what I hadn’t thought about was that these moths are also the reason for the lacklustre colours this year. I didn’t see anything during the summer that indicated that the birches were under attack, but those moths have had to be larvae at some point and maybe they’ve been chomping away on the birches, thus causing the early disappearance of colours.
But it all depends on the weather of course. The conditions were right this year for the moths to swarm, and the larvae problem will only happen if the conditions are right through the winter (meaning that it doesn’t get colder than -35°C, which it’s highly unlikely to do) and in the spring and summer. So we’ll see what happens next year!