I haven’t done any skiing in many weeks, since I came to the conclusion that there’s no good skiing to be done in Föne. But that’s just the photographer in me speaking, because I’m not tired of skiing in itself. So in order to get back to skis, I drove to Kajevall yesterday. They have a few trails, the longest is 10 km and that’s what I did. The tracks were newly prepared but it was was snowing a little bit, a cold powder snow which makes for poor glide so it didn’t go very fast, I had to push with the poles to get any speed going in some of the smaller slopes. But that’s ok, I’ve never been a friend of fast skiing and it turned out that this ”milspåret” trail was pure eye candy as well so I was in no hurry in any case. But even if the landscape was very pretty to look at, it didn’t provide any real highlights that would stick out as obvious photo opportunities, so I didn’t have to get the camera out very much. On the mires which provided the most potential, my experience with the ice was spooking me so I didn’t dare to go outside the prepared trail in the soft snow. The thing with mires is that it’s not always ice underneath the snow, it can actually be water as well. Same difference – risk of sinking! But regardless, as a skiing trip it was one of the better ones.

Although it has been snowing for three days in a row now, the forest isn’t quite as decorated as I would like it to be here in Föne. Kajevall is at a much higher altitude (just under 400m I think) than Föne and it does make a big difference in the snow cover. I almost missed Loos… I bet it looks just as fine there as it did in Kajevall.

Today I took the snowshoes up to Vallåsen again, but this time I followed the Ljusnanleden trail back to Föne. The peak is about 180m higher than Föne and even that makes a difference. When I was on the top, it felt almost arctic – the effects of the wind were very evident in the snow cover (a lot of snow drifts) and even the trees had frozen to look like something I would normally expect to see in the alpine environment.

I was lucky to find that a snowmobile had taken the trail at some point during the winter so I had tracks to follow. There was about 10-15cm soft snow on the tracks but as soon as I stepped by the side of the track, I sank so deep that it would’ve zapped out my energy in no time flat. I love my snowshoes but they are sometimes powerless in the dry Nordic powder so this is one of the few times I actually appreciate the snowmobiles for paving the trail for me!