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At the moment: Skiing in Sarek National Park
Posted by on 07/03/2012
At the moment I’m on a skiing trip to Sarek National Park in Northern Sweden.
I’m doing another voluntary internship period for the Wilderness Guide studies and this time I’m co-guiding and instructing a group of 11 future Arctic travelers on a one-week long ski expedition course in Sarek National Park. We head to the fells from the village of Ritsem on Wednesday afternoon and will be skiing for about six days returning back to Ritsem after some night skiing on the Tuesday next week.
In 2010 I was in Sarek attending to the same course as a paying participant and I’m really looking forward to getting back to Sarek. It’s a great place! Last time we had a great trip with sun shine and easy-going in the beginning, a proper storm preventing skiing for one day and because of that we had to ski some extra-long days in the end but it was a joy in the good weather we had. This time the weather forecast doesn’t promise as varying weather but you really never know. The weather up in the fells can be about anything.
The Norwegian yr.no has usually good idea about weather in the North...
You can check the daily weather forecast and observations from SMHIs Fell weather forecasts to Eastern Jokkmokk area or the long-term forecast of the yr.no.
I’m carrying a Yellowbrick satellite tracker with me so you can follow my progress on my Yblog page. I’m testing the tracker for the upcoming ski expedition across Vatnajökull glacier so the URL of the Yblog is: my.yb.tl/vatnajokull2012. The Yellowbrick can also pair with an Android smart phone via Bluetooth enabling sending and receiving e-mails . I might try also this and send an update or two to my blog.
In addition to my Yellowbrick the main guide Kari “Vaiska” Vainio is carrying a SPOT tracking device which you can follow from here.
There is a trip report with pictures coming at the end of next week or so…
Skiing in great weather back in 2010.
You can leave comments also during the trip and if they are especially good (relevant, funny and max 50 characters) my friend Matias might send to me to my Yellowbrick. 😉
Korpijaakko 
Nice Jaakko! We are preparing our 15-day traverse of Sarek, which will also start in Ritsem on 30 March. Looking forward to your report!
There are allready couple of short notes from the trip and longer trip report with pics will be available by the end of the week. Sounds liek a great trip! Hopefully you’ll have better weather and less knee-deep soft snow! The weather in April should generally be better.
Was the knee-deep snow issue an overall-issue? How was the crossing of the big lake from Ritsem?
We are tending to follow trough the main valleys, in the hope to not have the deep-snow issue…
Deep soft snow was an issue only on the forested areas in the end. The storms had probably blown the snow to the forested areas as there was less snow than usually on the open fjell areas. I don’t think it should be an issue to you – but you never know. That’s the beauty of it.
The water level (ice) was higher than normal and the lake was easy to cross. Because of the hydropower plant the water level and ice thickness may vary and to play it safe I’d recommend using the marked snow scooter track across the lake from Ritsem parkign area to the Akkastugan hut. We used that on our way back.
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