Today’s hike is one of the ”guldtur” hikes in Funäsfjällen. The description says it’s 19 km and I’m not sure how long it will take me – it all depends on how many photo opportunities there are on the way! Just to make sure I could take it as slow as needed, I drove to Walles in the morning. It was overcast weather with that uniform dull cloud cover that can’t do anything with so concentrated on intimate landscape shots while waiting for the sun come out.

When I was about halfway through the valley, the sun did finally come out. The good thing about walking in the valley is that there’s almost all the time something you can compose with so I didn’t bother to wait anywhere for the light, I just kept moving and stopped when the light happened.

I had lunch at the Ösjöstugorna cabins, the sunlight was warm but the wind was cold so I didn’t feel like sitting there any longer than it took me to finish eating. As I started hiking towards Ramundberget, the clouds reappeared and it started getting a bit boring. It was the kind of cloud cover that makes the colours really dull so it didn’t matter what photogenic spots I passed, it was just not possible to make anything out of them.

At Ramundberget, Sportstracker told me that I had hiked for 12 km. My feet were starting to feel it, I wasn’t tired as such but in combination with the dull light it felt like the hike back to Walles was just a necessary evil. But then I reached the sign towards Sörgruvorna, which is one of the many old mining efforts in the region. So I decided to check it out and regretted the decision as soon as the trail started heading down the slope. But I had come this far, so I didn’t want to turn back now… and then the trail got steeper. Again, I considered giving up, but I had come this far… for every metre I went down that hill, I regretted my decision more. It was the way back up that I didn’t like!

Well eventually I reached the mines and drank the last my coffee in the wind shelter provided by some stone walls and braced myself for the hike back up. I decided to take a shortcut and took a diagonal route back to the main trail. As much as I hated going up, I discovered that it was no longer boring because now I was outside the marked trails. It’s good for the brain to keep thinking about the best way around the mires and bushes while keeping the right direction. At one point when I stopped to check Sportstracker for the route I was taking, it crashed, again! It would’ve been nice to know exactly how long the hike had been so this is the last time I’m going to rely on Sportstracker. My trusty old GPS device has never crashed on me, not even when I dropped it and the screen split.

When I got back to the car, I was surprised to see that the hike had only taken me 7 hours. Of course, it helps when I do half the hike without stopping to take any pictures. But it meant that it was still only afternoon, so when I was driving back home and the clouds revealed the sun again, I didn’t hesitate to stop at one of my favourite spots. The best pictures from this spot are taken with some water in the foreground, but the wind was breaking up the reflections so I had to find something else. I walked around a little bit and then found this wonderful mountain birch and got the pictures I wanted just before the light disappeared again. Don’t be surprised if you see this same birch in some pictures in the future!