What a morning! I left well and early to catch the sunrise on Ånnfjället, but it wasn’t quite as straightforward as I had thought it would be. For starters, it was much colder than it was supposed to be, and for a brief moment I even considered cancelling. Skiing in -20°C is not entirely good for your lungs… but I trusted that it would be get less biting the higher up I got, so I just put on enough layers to manage. And then had to stop a couple of times for a wardrobe change when my internal heater was working at full power and I started sweating despite the cold. These unscheduled stops put me behind my schedule and I got a bit worried that I would miss the sunrise, just like I did two years ago. Especially when I had to spend over 20 minutes going through that last 500m to reach the tundra. I had no tracks to follow and you just have to trust me when I say that it’s difficult and very slow work ”skiing” uphill in 50cm deep powder snow!

But happily, I had enough of a margin to get topside just before the sun came up. And it wasn’t cold up there, around -10°C probably, and no wind. So it was actually really nice, and unbelievably beautiful – I almost didn’t want to turn back!

When I got home, I had a look at the mountain with binoculars. I saw my tracks! So now I just hope that in the coming weeks, we get some more snow and the wind picks up a little to cover my tracks, so I have a pretty snow cover to shoot later this winter. 🙂

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It was -23°C in the afternoon when I needed to drive to ICA to buy food. It took me at least 10 minutes to scrape a big enough hole in the ice that covered the windscreen, because we had some freezing rain earlier this week. The car heater had been on for 2 hours… I mean it’s not the first time I’ve fought with an icy windscreen, but when you need to use the sharp corner of the ice scrape to make a tear in that ice, it’s just crazy. When I finally got to the village, I found it packed with cars. And ICA packed with people. A trip that normally takes me less than 30 minutes, took an hour… But on the upside, I found Pepperidge Farm cookies. I’ve loved those since my very first trip to USA in ’94, the only problem is that I never found them in any store in Europe. Well apart from Verkkokauppa in Helsinki a couple of years ago. And now ICA in Funäsdalen. 😀