Kit Parks is filled with excitement as she puts the spotlight on the northern section of Sweden’s Kungsleden trail. Episode guest Rosemary Burris, an avid adventure hiker who has traversed some of the world’s most impressive hikes, tells us that the serenity, quietness, beauty, and remarkable light puts this trail up at the top of her list! What made her trip more exciting was that she walked from south to north. Rosemary explains why she chose to go against the course that most people take which is northbound. She also talks about their accommodation and the Sami people.

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Sweden’s Kungsleden Trail (aka The King’s Trail)

I’m excited today to share with you a new find: The northern section of Sweden’s Kungsleden trail. Our guest today is Rosemary Burris, an avid adventure hiker, who has traversed some of the world’s most impressive hikes and tells us that the serenity, quiet, beauty and remarkable light puts this trail up at the top of her list!

Sweden, a quiet country with loads of contributions to the world…

Sweden had been off of my radar, but now that Rosemary has brought it to the forefront, I recall that without Sweden, we wouldn’t have IKEA or H&M, Ingrid OR Ingmar Bergman, Pippi Longstocking, Candy Crush or Skype – and let’s not forget ABBA!  Or Absolute vodka and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo!

Sweden is home to sleek contemporary Scandinavian design, saunas, and the Zika tradition of catching up over coffee and cake, where Swedes make it an art form.

At only around 10 million people, and where most live in urban areas, the vast wilderness is a wonderland for folks seeking beauty and peace.  Sweden prides itself on its commitment to preserving nature and conservation, and put their money where their mouth is.  These people, were on the forefront of bringing art to the masses:  their metro station corridors have been lined with impressive artwork for fifty years, long before it was common.

The Kungsleden Trail

North of the Arctic Circle, Sweden has a magnificent trail, the Kungsleden Trail, that is 440 kilometres (270 mi) long, but most hike the northern section to Abisko, often taking a detour to see the magnificent Skierfe in Sarek National Park, or Nikkaloukta.

There are huts placed along the trail so you can get a warm place to sleep at night and there is a kitchen so you can cook a hot meal.  This means that you don’t have to carry a sleeping bag or your kitchen.  Rosemary was smart and brought seasonings to jazz up her meals.

You can resupply food about every other hut so you don’t have to carry so much weight.  The water is so pristine, there is no need to carry a water filter.

You would think being in the Arctic Circle that it would be brutally cold, but the Jet Stream has a tempering effect on the weather, so it’s not so cold in the summer!  You do need to bring all your thermal and rain hiking gear, because like all mountain weather, particularly this far north, you need to be prepared for inclement weather at all times, and expect it to be cloudy and often rainy.

In this land of the midnight sun, where briefly near the summer solstice, the sun never sets (nor does it rise during the winter solstice)!

Rosemary takes us along the Kungsleden trail and we learn:

• It’s best to join the Swedish Tourist Association to get the best rates on the huts and how the system works
• Most people do just the northern section to/from Abisko.  The trail is not crowded, especially late summer after school starts up again, but to have even more peace, hike northbound plus you’ll meet new people each day.  For a more social hike, hike the traditional southbound direction, where you’ll see the same people off and on throughout your hike, which allows you to get to know folks better.
• You can see the Midnight Sun in the summer but will also encounter mosquitos.  As fall gets near, you may see the famous Northern Lights.
• That you don’t need to carry your sleeping bag or cooking items if you are using the hut system
• Some of the huts have SAUNAS – yay!
• Outside of reindeer herds, there is little wildlife which makes the trail unusually QUIET!
• The indigenous people, the Sami, are reindeer herders, and manage some of the huts and are the folks who take you across the lakes (for a fee).  They speak English.  Sometimes you can buy fish or dried reindeer from them.
• The LIGHT, perhaps due to the sun’s angle that far north, is ‘other worldly’.
• This hike is easily planned on your own with a guidebook and map, but there is a company that can make all the arrangements for you (details and links on the FREE Travel Planning Cheat Sheet – click the button below, or subscribe to the newsletter to get it automatically each month).
• Rosemary Burris is an extraordinary quilt collage artist – see a couple of examples above (you can click on them to be directed to her website.
• Read the COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT of this podcast episode below.

Hike Sweden’s Most Popular Long Distance Hike

We’re going to a place that’s been way off my radar. The more I’m thinking about it, I was like, “Where would we be if we didn’t have Skype, Candy Crush, Ikea, or H&M? Pippi Longstocking, the girl the Dragon Tattoo, Ingmar or Ingrid Bergman, and the tradition of Fika, which is catching up with friends over coffee and cake.†Can you imagine a world without ABBA or Absolut vodka? While we thank them for all their great contributions to the world, we can also thank them for taking such great care of their natural resources.

Our interview is with a woman who has hiked all over the world and ranks this adventure as one of the top that she has ever done, probably in place one or two, she says. Let’s find out why this hike needs to get on your radar. You probably figured out we’re going to Sweden and we’re going with a woman who has traveled all over the world. Indeed, she has hiked all over the world and some of the world’s most popular and famous trails. She ranks this adventure as in her top one or two of all time. I’m really excited to talk to her to learn more about this. I had not even heard about this trail.

When she’s not out hiking the trail, our guest is actually an artist. She makes these extraordinary quilts, a collage quilt by using a photograph of your beloved pet. She can transform that into this beautiful work of art using all these hundreds, if not thousands, of fabrics and quilting them all together to make this collage that is extraordinary. I’ve put a couple of pictures of her work on so you can take a look at it. Our guest is Rosemary Burris, artist and owner of quilt collage at RosemaryBurris.com. Rosemary is going to take us to Sweden to hike the northern section, the most popular section of the Kungsleden trail, the Kings Trail.

If you want to do the entire trail, it takes most people about four weeks. The cool thing about this trail is that the Swedish Tourist Association has a hut system that’s arranged where there’s a hut approximately one day’s hike away. You just go from hut to hut. This means you don’t need to carry any of your equipment and only about two days’ worth of food because every other hut has food you can resupply. That saves you a ton of weight and makes it a much more pleasant hike. The entire Kungsleden Trail runs about 270 miles or roughly 440 kilometers and is broken into four main sections. We’ll be doing the northernmost section, which is basically from Kebnekaise to Abisko. Let’s head up to the Arctic Circle with Rosemary Burris.

My friend Andrea and I have done four European hikes together. We did the Dolomites in 2011, the Pyrenees in 2013, and then last year we did the Haute route. This year we did the Kungsleden.

The Haute Route trail shares trails with the Montblanc trail, which is the famous trail that runs through Switzerland, France and Italy, that we’ll be covering an upcoming episode. Tell me, what do you think of most when you think of the Kungsleden Trail?

I think the three things that stand out the most for me are the light. The light is stunning. The openness and the quiet.

Sweden has a population of only about 10,000,000 people and most of those folks are concentrated in the urban areas. Once you get out to the countryside and the wilderness, it’s just complete nature. What’s so appealing about this trail, Rosemary?

I love the quiet. I love getting away from everything. I especially love the huts where you’ve been hiking a lot by yourself all day and then you come into a hut and there are people from all over the world to chat with. I just think the silence, the open landscape, and the light, all of that made it so incredibly special. The other hikes that I’ve done in Europe, you’re in larger huts. It’s a lot more people, we’re shuffling all around them in the huts. This was so incredibly relaxing and beautiful.

How did the crowds compare on this trail as opposed to other trails in Europe?

Not nearly as crowded. If you want to get away and totally relax, it’s really wonderful.

Another reason that Rosemary found it less crowded was that she and her friend chose to hike northbound.

Most people go from Abisko, down six days and get off the trail. I don’t know what in the name where they get off.

The starting point that Rosemary’s referring to is called Kebnekaise.

The first day was probably the least satisfying out of Kebnekaise. That was probably the most challenging. It was muddy. You’re along the lake. There are lots of routes, there are lots of rocks, it’s going really slow. It’s your first day out and it was drizzling for us. I thought, “Why did I come all this distance for this hike if it’s all like this?†but it only got better and better. If you can get past that first day, it’s wonderful.

Their starting point is a town I’m going to call Kvikkjokk. They also took a side trip up to Sweden’s most impressive landscape.

Andrea and I could never say the word Kvikjokk and went north. Skierfe was about three days up to the hut. We did the fourth day up to Skierfe and back down to that same hut. “They call it like the Grand Canyon of Sweden,†this one woman said. You climb about 3,000 feet and you’re on this sheer drop down to this incredible delta of water. To the west is snow-capped mountains. It’s very beautiful.

A cool thing about this trail is you could pick how much solitude you want. If you’d like the quiet and the more serene hike, then do as Rosemary did and hike northbound as most people are hiking southbound. If you prefer hiking during the day with other travelers, then you want to hike southbound. You can buy the map at the mountain stations.

If you want to get away and totally relax, the Kungsleden trail is the one to take. Share on X

As we were hiking north in the mornings for a couple of hours, most people who are camping, camp right at a hut. The huts are spaced out far enough so that in the morning as we were going north, we’d hardly see anybody. A few hours in, three hours in, all of a sudden it would be like this nomadic tribe of people coming from the north passing you. We even meet them mostly midday, which was delightful. I really liked that. I’m glad we did it that way and I would do it again. There are so many adventurous travelers out there. We met a man from San Francisco who was going to be out for five, six weeks. He was continuing on. You can continue in any direction you want because there are huts everywhere. He was going to continue on over to the west and then make his way on trails all the way to the coast of Norway. Two young women that we met from Sweden, they were out for months. They started up near Finland. There’s a trail that connects down into the Kungsleden and starts up in the border of Finland and goes through the northern part of Norway, and then wraps around and comes down into Abisko, and continues down. They bring their tents and there’s enough food you can buy here and there that they can do it. It’s amazing, so many strong young women out there.

Can you describe the ages of the people that you see on the trail?

All ages, older people. We spent two or three nights, toward the end of the trip, with a woman who was retired. I think she was 64, from southern Sweden. She was on the same route that we were so we’d meet up at the hut every night. Young people in their twenties and there were even young people with their families sometimes. Not so much on the Kungsleden because I think school had already started, but there was a school field trip there. It’s just all ages. It’s people from all over the world. Mostly on the Kungsleden, it’s Europeans, a few Australians and a handful of Americans.

I find that I bond quickly with people that I meet when I’m adventure traveling. What are your thoughts on that?

I think that’s true. It’s really nice. In Saltoluokta, we met two women who had been doing a hike every year for twenty years. They met in some original job and they still meet up each year to go on a week’s adventure. We had dinner with them and loved hearing all their stories about where they’ve been hiking. It’s just wonderful.

Why did you choose to go against the course that most people do and go northbound?

Most people walk it from north to south. We walked south to north because there is only one book written in English about the trail, and that was written from south to north. We wanted to stay with that. I liked doing that because almost every single night I had a hut, you’d be meeting new people. It was nice instead of the same group following you each day.

Rosemary discovered another added benefit of hiking northbound.

I don’t know if the prevailing winds are from the north or the south, but the sun wasn’t in our eyes when we were walking that direction. It seemed like fall had arrived by the time we got to the north. We were out twelve days, thirteen days. By the time we got to the north, it felt like everything had changed. I don’t know if the north was just that much further ahead. It’s closer to the sea, but it felt like a changing of the season while we were going.

Why did you choose to go the month that you did?

I think the biggest plan was to avoid the mosquito season and the huts in the high summer are very crowded up there.

If you go in July, you’ll see the wildflowers but you also see more people. If you go in late August as Rosemary did, you’ll also avoid the mosquitoes.

We started hiking on August 23rd. Thirteen days later, I want to say September 12th, 10th, somewhere in there that range.

If you choose to you can backpack and bring your own tent. Another option is to stay in one of the mountain huts. Every once in a while, there’s also a mountain station where you actually have electricity and be able to get your Wi-Fi and check your mail. Please tell us about the mountain stations.

The mountain stations are like an oasis to get to. You get to check your mail, you get to take a good shower, have a nice meal and they’re very comfortable. The mountain stations were fun to get to. That’s not to say that the other huts aren’t comfortable, they’re very comfortable. They’re not like our lean-to’s on the Appalachian Trail. They’re very comfortable. There’s a wood stove, a full kitchen with propane you can cook food. At least three of them that we were in had a wood-fired sauna. The rooms aren’t so crowded, too. I think the most crowded room we had was eight people in a bunk room then, but that was rare. Mostly we were in rooms of six.

I’m assuming these are mixed dorms. Do you just grab a bunk or are you assigned a bunk?

The warden assigns you. When you come into a hut area, there may be one hut or there maybe two. They’ll assign you a bunk and a room. Every other hut, at least on the Kungsleden, has a store. You don’t have to carry all your food and you can buy healthy provisions. They try to go with things that are very nutritious, not junk food, though you can get a beer and you can get chocolate.

You have a greater chance of seeing the Northern Lights in late summer. Share on X

Do you have to bring plates and utensils or is everything there?

Everything’s there.

You can actually cook, right?

Yeah, it’s easy to do. There’s pasta, pasta sauce, Indian dahl. I brought dahl spices so at least three nights we had dahl. It was delicious. The spices weren’t provided but the dahl was provided. You can buy oatmeal too and you can buy sugar to go in it. It’s provisioned very well. You could always get by with what they have. You get a little sick of pasta towards the end, but it’s great.

Since you’re out in the middle of nowhere, I assume the wardens are not just waiting on you. What are the different responsibilities of the hikers?

You’re responsible for chopping wood sometimes or carrying wood into the cabin. You’re responsible for bringing water in and dumping out the kitchen water. Everything’s done in a bucket. The water there does not have to be treated anywhere. You just dip your cup in any stream, any lake you want. It is so incredibly crystal clean and cold, beautiful.

I know you can make reservations but if you are winging it, what happens and will they make room?

They always make room. Sweden actually has a nice system of their Swedish Tourist Association. You join it before you go and you make reservations, but you’re not stuck to those dates. You can get a discount if you make the reservations ahead of time. It’s a significant discount, so we would buy five nights in this one area. There are dozens of hikes in this one area and you can stay at any of them. You’re not bound by any days, and you’ve got a two-week window to use those. The second section, the same thing. Eight nights in the second section, and you have two weeks to use it. It’s a really nice system, and they never turn anybody away. If there are too many people though, they have stored mattresses they’ll put out on the floor, in the kitchen, or some other place.

Do you need to bring a sleeping bag?

No, you don’t even need a sleeping bag or a pillow. The huts have a mattress, a pillow and blanket. All you do is bring a sleeping sheet, like a sack. Packs can be pretty light. I carried about twenty pounds.

Tell us a little bit about the hut layout themselves and social life.

Because you’re in a pretty small hut, there may be two or four rooms off of the kitchen, and maybe four to eight bunks in each room. You’re sharing a small kitchen space, sometimes a little bit larger, with other people, and maybe two tables so people interact quite a bit. It’s very relaxing and very nice.

You’re tired and you’re sore from hiking all day. Did I hear you say in some of the huts there’s actually a sauna?

The saunas are incredible. They are absolutely amazing out there on the trail. There are three rooms. One you get undressed in, the second room is like a washing room, and then the third room is the sauna. You bring in a bucket. There’s a big wood stove with a bucket above it that contains water that gets heated up by the wood. You can tap off that water to wash in the second room. A lot of people will sauna and jump in the water body that’s nearby, a lake or a river, and then go back into the sauna. It’s the most wonderful experience. It’s three different times. The first time is for women, it’s either 5:00 to 6:30 or 6:00 to 7:30. The men get it the next time. The late evening is a coed time. It’s refreshing.

I don’t suppose they rent towels for you, do they?

You have to bring your own towel. I just brought a little washcloth to dry off with.

In that part of Sweden, the indigenous people are the Sami. They heard the reindeer up there. I asked Rosemary about them.

Some of the wardens gave us a little bit more information that was helpful. They were talking about how they heard the reindeer which I found fascinating, how the communities hire reindeer herders. They showed us a picture of one of the six-wheeled vehicles that they used to get out to herd them and how they radio collar the leader of the pack of the reindeer so that they can GPS where the herds are. Reindeers, they’re rounded up every spring or early before winter hits. The younger ones are tagged. Every reindeer has a tag of the community and the individual owner in the community of that reindeer.

Every reindeer has a tag of the community and the individual owner in the community of that reindeer. Share on X

Did you see the reindeer?

Toward the north, we saw some very large pens that the reindeer are herded into. It was fascinating. It’s always so breathtaking to see you’re seeing reindeer come by. Initially, we were just seeing one or two here and there, and then we started seeing larger groups of maybe ten to twelve.

The Sami people not only herd and manage the reindeer stock up in Sweden but also they help with the river and lake crossings.

There are several lake crossings that you have to get a boat. One of them was with a Sami woman who took us across who was just delightful. What a wonderful person.

Do you pay for these crossings?

You have to pay somebody to cross every time. Some of them you have to wait for a specific time to cross, too.

Some of the huts are actually run by the Sami people.

The ones without the stores are operated by the local Sami people, the Lapland folks. Sometimes you can buy fish and bread from them and dried reindeer meat.

Did you have any difficulty communicating with the Sami?

They speak English and Swedish. You wouldn’t be able to tell that they weren’t a native Swede. They looked the same as Swedes to me. It’s not like our indigenous people wears more distinct facial features.

While Rosemary saw lots of reindeer, I was surprised by her answer when I asked her about the other wildlife.

Hardly even any birds, just a few raptors here and there, and a few ducks on water here and there. I think that’s one of the things. I love watching wildlife, but it was so quiet out there. I’ve never been in such a vast open landscape that’s quiet. The water sometimes you hear, but it is quiet other than that. It’s beautiful.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the landscape?

The amount of forested land is a lot less than the open areas, called the moors. There are many more moors than there is forested land. The forested land is stubby short. The birch trees are very pretty at this time of year because the leaves were all turning yellow. Mostly the higher country you’re up on very wide open plains with beautiful mountains around you. Colors were every single color of the rainbow, the reds, greens, yellows. They were really pretty colors. The water bodies, which are crystal clear water, and sometimes beautiful colors, sometimes this dark, blue-green color.

 In that vast openness with so little light pollution, you must have been able to see tons of stars.

Remarkably, there were not. I don’t know what it was about if it was clouds up there. I don’t know why there weren’t many stars. Sometimes, I would go out at night to pee and there were not that many stars out. There were a few but I couldn’t see that many. That’s the other thing I loved about the trail was the light. The clouds part in so many different ways and the light filters through and lights up the surrounding hillsides. There were rainbows almost about half of the days that we were there. The light is spectacular. It’s like no other light I’ve ever seen before, it’s beautiful. Sometimes in the morning, it will be a little bit foggy, and then as you would cross a higher plateau, the fog would lift and these mountains would emerge on the sides just lit up.

The cloud cover can also help keep the temperatures a lot more comfortable than you might expect in the Arctic Circle. When I say the Arctic Circle, we’re talking about that latitude line that you see on globes. It’s the horizontal line, and the Arctic Circle is that furthest north horizontal line. The cloud cover is one reason it’s more temperate than you would expect, but also the jet stream affects the weather in that part of Sweden. I did ask Rosemary about clothing. Do we need to bring all of our thermals?

Yes, you do. Sometimes we’re wearing three or four layers initially in the morning. The weather is often not good. We had a good streak, I was feeling very fortunate. Other people coming down from the north when we first started said that they saw the sun twice out of a full week. I think that the weather is probably about 50/50, good days/bad days. We had one day of strong winds but it was at our backs, so it was really nice. It was not a problem at all. I was going to say there’s no clothing to buy along the way other than at the field stations, Saltoluokta and Abisko.

In late summer, you have a greater chance of seeing the Northern Lights, of course, provided there’s no cloud cover. I did ask Rosemary, was she fortunate enough to see any.

The one thing I don’t like about the huts is if you have to get up to pee in the night, you have to go outside. I saw it twice in the middle of the night when I had to go outside. It was more toward the early side of the evening and not the late side of the evening, and it wasn’t those bright colors you see in the photographs. It was more of light dancing around.

When I went to Iceland to go see the Northern Lights, the ones that I saw were these dancing white and green halo-looking lights in the sky. I was told by somebody that it’s the cameras that pick up the funny colors like the reds, the blues, yellows, oranges and all that. To our naked eye, it is that dancing, hauntingly white greenish light. There’s a lot about outdoor adventure that most people don’t understand about why we would want to do this. When you’re out pushing yourself so hard during the day, you get into where you’re going to sleep or camp for the night. Your feet hurt, your body aches. Here we’ve got a sauna, which is lovely, but most times you don’t have that opportunity. Oftentimes, the weather is lousy, cold, and rainy yet we still love to do it. We go back and we do it again and again. Despite the hardships, we come back each year and we ask for more. What’s on your bucket list?

That’s a hard one because there are so many to choose from. I do want to get back to Sweden, but it probably would be two years from now. It’s the time of the season I’d go again. The same time next year, I won’t be able to do that. I would love to go back and do the northern part that I was telling you that’s up in Norway on the border of Finland. I would love to do the one that leaves from the area that we were just started in and head over west. It’s called Padjelanta. That’s high on my list. I’ve been thinking about going back to Nepal because that’s where Steve and I lived for two years. I’d love to go back to see my village. After Sweden, I was thinking, “Do I really want to go back to Nepal?†because it’s harder. You often get sick. Many more people pull at your heartstrings.

Sweden is so restorative. You’re away from people, in communications, and it’s a wonderful trail to be on. I don’t know what’s next. I know Nepal is probably in there sometime and Sweden is definitely back on there again. As I get older, there’s a trail in the Netherlands that I want to do. It’s flat. If I can’t climb hills, I’ll do a flat one. I think it’s called Pieterpad, however, they say that in Dutch. I have friends doing the Pacific Crest Trail next summer and I would love to join them. One of those two people, it’s a father and son. The father is going to be 80 this year and he’s still hiking 25 miles a day. He’s done all the national scenic trails in the United States. Last year, he finished them all up at 79. He’s an amazing hiker and he wants to do the PCT again.

He sounds like somebody we need to get on the show. Why do you like doing this so much?

I love that feeling of being someplace else.

I want to thank Rosemary for teaching us about the Kungsleden Trail and also invite you to visit her website RosemaryBurris.com and check out her beautiful quilts. If you’re enjoying the show, please tell your friends. I’ll be back with another great adventure. Until then adventure on.

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• RosemaryBurris.com
• Swedish Tourist Association

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