The King of all trails

A dream of freedom

“The path is made in the walking of it” – Zhuang Zi.

A hiking trail, what is it – really? For most people who set off on a hike, or even a ‘thru-hike’ of the entire King’s Trail, there is a dream of freedom. But as you find yourself on the high plateau at Stabburet above Ammarnäs, with large swathes of Vindelfjällen nature reserve – one of the largest in Europe – in front of you, you realise that the trail does not provide oceans of opportunities at all. Instead, the trail reduces your flow of opportunities to a trickle: if it had not been for the path you are walking, you could have chosen a billion different options where to put your feet. As Zhuang Zi wrote: “The path is made in the walking of it”. What you dream of as freedom is the choice of the collective, in a way. Simply because it is the right way to go. Ideally, a path works as a helper, someone who discreetly shows you the way as the world just opens up. Surely that is why the path or trail in literature, philosophy and religion has always been a metaphor for man’s inner guidance.

Zarathustra spoke of the threefold path: good thoughts, good words and good deeds. Siddhartha Gautama spoke of the eightfold path to nirvana. Tao basically means trail. The Hebrew word for Jewish law, Halakhah, means the walking, and the Islamic law, Sharia, can be translated as the path to water. The Bible is, of course, also full of stories about people taking the path up the mountain or through the valley of the shadow of death. The Psalms state that the word is “the lamp unto my feet and light unto my path”. But on your way between Kvikkjokk and Saltoluokta, it is not very likely that you will be struck blind by a light and converted like Paul, even if you are walking in the midnight sun. The most important thing is that you stay on the road and keep walking. Because on the King’s Trail, a spiritual path is not much more than the ground in front of you, worn clean down to rock, gravel and dirt. Something you put your feet on because you want to get from here to there – because possibly you will encounter your new interpretation of things, something that will make you see the world as a little bit more beautiful.

The Vindelfjällen mountains

The Vindelfjällen mountains is one of Europe’s largest nature reserves; allegedly, there is one somewhere in Russia that is larger. The King’s Trail runs like an artery straight through the reserve, from Hemavan towards Arjeplog and Norrbotten. When you have hiked the first 100 kilometres between Hemavan and the Norrbotten border, you have walked through two municipalities, and there are four municipalities to go through before you get to Abisko. Ludmilla Wieslander works at Naturum in Ammarnäs. She is from Lund, in the very south of Sweden, but came here for an Easter break and her heart stayed put. First at the bar at Ammarnäsgården with a handsome man, then in the beautiful location itself.
— Yes, to me, Ammarnäs is the very heart of Vindelfjällen. The day-trail loops and the two big trails, King’s Trail and Vindelvaggeleden, like two massive blood vessels through the reserve, they all start from the village in one way or another.
— The nature is amazing, this place is stunning, and in the middle of all this, the beating heart: Ammarnäs.

As stated, the Vindelfjällen nature reserve is large, and its preservation is based on many different things. This area is not just about hiking; it is also home to some of the finest bird watching in the mountain world. The University of Lund runs one of the world’s longest-running bird-observation projects here: the Luvre project. Every year the red-listed lesser white-fronted goose visits the village for a stop before the birds fly into the mountain world. The reason for the Luvre project and other nature projects in the area is that the nature in Vindelfjällen changes on nature’s own terms. Even if it is not a wilderness per se – people have lived here for 8,000 years – it is a cultural landscape that changes very slowly. It is difficult to talk of a wilderness when hiking on a trail equipped with footbridges and marked with cairns. But there is something enchantingly wild and beautiful about the seemingly endless landscape. As if it should always be like this because it has always been like this.

In 1949 Aldo Leopold wrote his classic book A Sand County Almanac. It begins: “There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot”. No one has really explained it better, why some walk, fish, go out into the woods – and why others do not. Without the dream that the wild is needed, there is no need to go looking for it. Perhaps it is as simple as that – two types of people: those who are looking for nature and those who are not. Somewhere above Ammarnäs, some fifty metres from the King’s Trail with the Björkfjället mountain behind you and Arjeplog municipality and mountain world before you, you set up your tent and ponder the fact that there are just over 300 kilometres left until you reach Abisko. The King’s Trail will guide you step by step along the way. The area in front of you has basically been the same since the end of the ice age, and in this kind of nature, the process of evolution is a matter of course. No plants grow here without reason, merely to decorate the landscape. If they are able to grow here, they grow where they can, to feed the animals who need the plants that grow. In many ways, this is a place defined more by body than soul. You have to be strong to get somewhere; just thinking about it is not enough. It is only really the wind itself that has explored this landscape, everything in front of you, in detail.

Roadless land

Roadless land. That is what it is called, beyond the car park. But in the middle of this roadless land, there are some really big surprises. A place to sleep, a shower, a sauna and a cold beer with your meatballs at Bäverholmen Inn. Or Janne picking you up by boat in Vuonatjviken, and then you decide to stay there for dinner. Everything is basically as locally produced as it gets here along the Arctic Circle by the family that has lived here – beyond the highway – for several generations. Elk, arctic char, reindeer and cloudberries. Nature’s pantry around the corner. It is impossible not to think about how tough it must be to live like this, in isolation.
– You don’t forget to buy sugar more than once in your life if it’s sugar you wanted. There’s such a long time in between shop visits, says Janne and continues:
– But, as I’m sure you understand, our needs are different, and it would have been a lot tougher for us to live in the city. We have no traffic jams here, and the problems are completely different. We mostly choose those problems ourselves – as long as they’re not caused by nature.
Since restaurants are few and far between in roadless land, you have a three-course meal this evening before the trail leads you further. Alone.

There are questions you will always ask yourself as a hiker. It is about the physical person as well as the inner person. About blisters and doubts. They say you only start feeling like a proper hiker on the tenth day. That is when your body starts to feel like it is made for it. It is not an obvious or easy thing to manage ten days in a row on the trail. Some have the feet for it. Others do not. “A woman is as young as her knees”, wrote Mary Quant, and Polish philosopher Stanislaw J. Lec wrote, “He who limps is still walking”. The main thing to overcome is the comfort of the sofa. Another question that always comes up is whether you should hike on your own or with someone else? From a safety perspective, it is better not to go on your own. But perhaps it is safety you want to get away from? An Irish proverb says that “two shorten the road”, while Henry David Thoreau crassly states that “the man who goes alone can start today”. When Jeremias and Hannah, from Northern Soul Journeys, trotted along the whole King’s Trail a few years ago, they did so as a new couple. They also decided that they would each carry a part of the essentials in their packs, so they had to do things together when the day was over. No one carried the whole tent or the entire kitchen; they had to make camp together for the night. There is something very beautiful in that thought.

Sápmi

Along the trail, you pass some of Sweden’s most famous nature areas, as is to be expected. We have already mentioned the Vindelfjällen nature reserve, but the national parks Pieljekaise, Sarek, Stuor Muorke/Stora Sjöfallet and Abisko are also part of the trail. These four national parks were involved when Sweden, as the first country in Europe, set aside land for nature conservation on May 24, 1909. Sarek and Stuor Muorke has since been joined with Padjelanta and Muddus national parks to create Laponia, which due to its unique nature and culture, was designated a World Heritage Site in 1996 by the UN agency Unesco. Along the entire length of the King’s Trail, you are hiking through Sápmi, the indigenous people’s land. On the trail between Hemavan and Abisko, you walk through the reindeer grazing land of fifteen different Sámi communities. In some parts of the year, calf branding takes place in the mountains. During other times of the year, reindeer are gathered for other purposes. Always be considerate and remember that you are in the middle of Sámi everyday life and at their workplace. In summer, newly born reindeer calves do not need to be stressed for a selfie; it is difficult enough for them already in a land that is only truly known by the wind.