It feels like summer already, sunny and warm. I decided to make the most of weather and took a couple of hours off to drive to my old hunting grounds north of Ljusdal. I especially wanted to see Gröntjärn again and I was hoping to get lucky with the pale pasque flowers (Pulsatilla vernalis), normally they are in bloom at this time but it could also be too early… but nothing I could do about that, I can’t drive up when I have on call duty because there’s no mobile phone coverage, and next week I’m on call.

When I turned to the Gröntjärn road from Svartsjöar, I was surprised find a good bit of snow by the roadsides. At a few places the road was soft and muddy as it tends to be at melt, but I got through fine. Eager to see the lake, I parked my car and walked to the bowl without the camera gear to take a first look. I was expecting the water level to be low and that it was – very low. I got back to the car to get the camera and set down to business.

I was interrupted abrubtly by a woman with a young boy in tow – they had driven in the ditch about half a km from Gröntjärn towards Västerstråsjö and couldn’t get out and wondered if I could help. I followed them to their car (which turned out to be a van) and realised that there wasn’t much I could do. The van had well and truly sank in the waterlogged ditch and only one of the wheels was doing any work and even that was just slipping on the ice. I was glad I had come via the southern route, as this northern bit of road was in a worse shape with a lot of snow left. She had winter tyres on the van but a quick look revealed that she probably had less grip in them than I had in my summer tyres. We made a futile attempt to put branches behind the wheel but since the van wouldn’t budge, it was not able to make use of the traction provided. Anyway, not much else to do in this situation than to call for help. But… no mobile coverage, as I mentioned earlier! I had to drive back to Svartsjöar before I was able to make a call and order a tow truck to release the stranded van.

Having done my good deed of the day (of the year? Decade? Life?), I concentrated on the flowers. The incident had taken about an hour and a half but there was plenty of light left so no worries. Time just flew by and I had some trouble with the flowers because the wind was swaying them hard, those big blooms function as sails and the flowers were hardly still at all. When I finally checked the time, I realised that I had to stop right there – I needed to buy some food for the weekend and the stores would close soon, so I packed up all the gear and splashed my way through the mud once again. I’m so glad I washed my car yesterday.

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Snowmobiles. Gröntjärn is a nature reserve, where snowmobiles are forbidden by law. I have however seen snowmobile tracks there before, and now even in the melting snow I was able to see traces of them (look at the Gröntjärn picture above, on the right). Please excuse my French but… fucking morons.