With so many days off during the Christmas period, I needed to do something else than long walks around home. I was curious to see Njupeskär in the winter, that’s a nice day trip and I got a fellow photographer to go with me so we set off in the early hours in order to make use of all of the daylight on location. It was going to be a sunny day, but sunny means cold – the coldest temperature we saw on the way was Särna at a chilly -29°C but I had faith that it wouldn’t be that bad on the mountain, and I was right. -16°C and no wind, it was perfect!

I wasn’t sure if people normally visit Njupeskär in the winter so we had snowshoes in case we needed to make our own trail to the fall. But so such worries, the trail was tramped hard and we actually met a few other people on the way. The fall itself is actually not so photogenic in the winter but all the ice meant that we were able to walk all the way up to the foot of the fall. At one point I noticed that I was standing right below the big icicles to the left of the fall and took a few respectful steps back. The fall is not completely frozen yet, there was a gap where we could see the falling water and it was enough to create some water spray which then immediately froze on my lens when I was a bit careless in pointing my camera in the wrong direction.

From the fall, I had the bright idea to follow the trail on the other side of the canyon instead of taking the same trail back, but after a while I decided that it was less than bright. There wasn’t any hard tramped trail to follow, instead it was deep snow and only one or two people had gone before us. It was tough going in the deep snow but at least it made the trek more memorable than the boring lemming trail…

It was only noon by the time we got back, so we had plenty of daylight to do something else. We drove to a trail head nearby and were able to follow a snowmobile trail up to the tundra. We were a bit on the shaded side of the mountain and barely saw the sun, but it gave us a wonderful contrast of blue shadows and golden highlights.

We still had an hour until sunset after this short hike, but since we were on the north side of the mountain, it wasn’t any good for sunset. Städjan in the distance was bathing in sunlight though, so we drove to Idre, only to see sunset fizzle out behind some clouds. But it had been a great day, where seeing the main attraction (frozen waterfall) turned out to be one of the less interesting things we saw today!

5