Nordkalottleden

About planning, preparing and executing a walking project in Scandinavia.

I think I got the idea about walking the Nordkalottleden when I started more seriously looking into long distance walk and thought it would be nice to walk something more closer to home. Naturally northern Scandinavia with it’s quite unhabitated Lapland and the mountains along the border of Norway and Sweden come to mind. And as I can’t be bothered with smallish weekend walk then the only way wa to go big. Hence Nordkalottleden.

Recently I found out that I could go bigger still by joining the Swedish part of E1 and Finnish E10 to the Nordkalottleden and so form a circle through Scandinavia and Finland. But that would make it a multi year project.

The most information I have found so far about Nordkalottleden is from here. It basically makes up the stages and give map information. After dealing with some other organisatory issues I’ll go forth with aquiring the maps.

Until that I’ll just look at this try not to cross that level on sanity.

UPDATE 25OCT11:

Instead of buying all the paper maps I found a Google Earth overlay, which I used to mark the route. Problem is that there are only Swedish Fjällkartan maps there so I’m missing some parts of Norway. So i’ll still need soma paper maps that cover the area between Kautokeino and Halti and north from Abisko. As Jorgen from Fjäderlätt informed me it is possible to send re-supply boxes into town and mountain ledges so I wouldn’t have to pay insane amounts for pasta and so on. According to my plans there is probably only one really long stage, where I would have to carry a weeks worth of food as the logicalt supply points are over 200 km apart. But I don’t consider that much of a problem.

The other thing is that I’m trying to raise money for a charity and actually do something myselt to keep the nature from being a waste dump for dumbass hikers. Read about it in here

UPDATE 05APR12

It’s getting nearer. I’m leaving on 4th of June on a plane to Arlanda, spend the night in the airport which I already loathe or if I get lucky surf-a-couch, and fly onward to Hemavan. And then I’m off. Some smaller things left to do – insurance, two maps still on their way, buy new trailrunners. And one major one – prepare and send off packages with food. As the re-supply locations are sparse I’m carrying occasionally as much as 9days worth of food – that should be around7kg. Map sheets are cut from that Google Earth overlay and there should be about 15 sheets. I am kinda worried about the winter that still tries to carry on – it could result in much lower temperatures and therefore affect the gear, but there’s still two months for the snow to melt and ground to dry. Will check the conditions now.

UPDATE 29APR12

90% done with the food. Some about 20 days worth of breakfast needs to be found or assembled and then the packages are ready for post.

UPDATE 09JUL12

I’m back for a month already, but was just now able to finish this post about me not completing my goal and leaving Sweden to be conquered in another day.