Sara på tur: reindeer

Monday, 7 December 2015

A windy day in the forest.

I'm still amazed places like this exist on earth.

This morning I woke up to the sound of the trees swaying around and small branches flying against the window. It was definitely too windy to try to go higher up on the mountains, above the treeline. In the mountain station there is a cool weather station and some information about wind chill factor. For some reason I'm a real nerd when it comes to weather oberservation and I love the automatic calculation of the felt temperature.

(The minimum temperature doesn't show on this picture. It changes between the measured temperature and how long ago this was measured)

Here's some more about the effective/felt temperature

I tried some x-country skiing, but the tracks were ruined by the wind and melting of the last days.

great.

Later on I went backcountry skiing in the forest and tried to take a little video of it. It's not exactly action sports, so consider it a relaxation video ;). My skiing, which is otherwise of course perfect, got a little bit worse by holding my phone in one hand all the time. I had both skiing poles and both gloves in the other hand and basically nothing to push or balance myself. So all mistakes or any whacky style you see is of course only due to that.

So here it is, my first (shaky) video:

And some more pics of the amazing midwinter light!

STF mountain station

Everything on the other side of the lake is Norway.

Another untimely sunset at 14.30 pm.

Sunday, 6 December 2015

A lot of reindeer and a bit of skiing

This morning I woke up to a beautiful sunrise and no cloud in the sky. I got ready quickly, to not miss any of the daylight and got my equipment from the car. Such a nice feeling to stand on the skis again!

As soon as I got away from the cross country track though the snow showed it's true face and it was a crust of ice with some melted slush underneath. Needlees to say it was very very hard to go uphill in these conditions. I have no skins on my skis (because I don't own any) and it felt a lot like going on an escalator that goes the wrong way. After about 45 minutes I looked back and I realized that I wasn't going anywhere. So I decided to drop my plans of getting to the top of Jakobshöjden for today. The way down took me about three minutes.

As I was already rushing downhill, I continued to the nearby lake and then up again to the mountain station.

I drove to Idre, which is 40km away, to look for some skins, fuel the car and do some shopping. On the way I encountered at least a hundred reindeer that were licking the salt of the street. They are completely crazy about the salt that is used by the snowplow in order to make the road less slippery! Some moved away as the car approached, others couldn't resist and continued to lick the asphalt, even as I was half a meter away. I got out of the car several times just to look at them. One even came to me and sniffed on my hand. Unfortunately for the reindeer my hands were not salty.