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< January February 2007
	Features
NordicTraverse Two canoeists cross the Scandinavian Hinterlands Frank Wolf

Three-thousand-foot-high granite walls dwarfed the shepherd as he counted sheep in a forest opening along the edge of Norway’s Tys Fjord. Todd and I landed our canoe, and after exchanging pleasantries and explaining why we were there, the shepherd flashed his bright blue, inquisitive eyes down at our heavily loaded craft.

“You’re going to carry all of that over the mountains?” he asked.

We nodded.

“It will be hard.”

The shepherd proved also to be a prophet. It was June 26, and we were nearing the end of our second day of who-knew-how-many in an attempt to canoe across Scandinavia from Norway to Finland. The 500-mile journey began the day before in the tiny village of Bognes, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian Sea. We planned to paddle up Tys Fjord, cross over the border mountains into Sweden, then canoe down the Lule River system to the Gulf of Bothnia. Once in the gulf, we would paddle around into Finland, ultimately finishing in Oulu, the largest town in Finland’s north.

The shepherd’s name was Egil. He was an indigenous Sami man, short and stocky with brown, wispy hair that fell in a line just above his eyes. His ancestors were the first people to populate Scandinavia 10,000 years ago. Our course followed one of the dozens of trade routes that the Sami, and later the Vikings, utilized to transport goods by foot and boat. When the Vikings came to the region in approximately 900 A.D., they subjugated the Sami in Tys Fjord and in Lule Valley, forcing them to pay a tax of fur, fish, and reindeer. As Egil eloquently described to us, the Vikings gave their people a simple choice: “Pay the tax, or die.”

The pass through the Skanderne Mountains loomed above us as we set off from the end of the fjord in search of Sweden and the Lule River system. Years ago, a traveling Swede I’d met in Vancouver told me of this pass and ignited my dream to canoe west to east across Scandinavia.

Joining Todd and I for the first week of the trip was Kevin Shepit, a cameraman and producer who would help us film the initial portion of the trip. Each of us carried almost 100 pounds of gear. Todd carried a 30-gallon pack on his back and a 10-gallon pack on his front. I shouldered our canoe, an 18-gallon pack, and a video camera. Kevin lugged his camera bag and a folding kayak.

We portaged for 12 hours that day, covering 10 miles and gaining 2,000 feet of elevation along a root-strewn, rocky trail. The track ascended through a pine forest surrounded by granite spires festooned with dozens of gushing waterfalls. Eventually we climbed into the treeless alpine and traveled over gray slab around the stunning Avzi Canyon, which cuts a jagged 1,000-foot-deep, three-mile-long scar into the otherwise unbroken massif. As midnight approached in a land where the summer sun never sets, we reached a small mountain lake. Across the water, in a low point between two mountains, lay our day’s goal: Sweden.

We paddled a half-mile across the tarn, then portaged 100 feet to another lake and the farthest source of the Lule River. We had crossed the divide. Everything behind us flowed into the Norwegian Sea, while everything in front of us flowed to the Baltic. A GPS reading told us that we had arrived at the border. Todd sat in the bow of the canoe, happy to be in Sweden while I languished in the stern a dozen feet behind him, still in Norway.

The Skettejakke and Lule

I was sloshing through soggy, knee-high sphagnum moss. The canoe over my head sheltered me from the lashing rainstorm and doubled as a party tent for thousands of mosquitoes in their blood frenzy. We were in the midst of our second three-mile bush portage in as many days.

The previous morning we’d started down the Skettejakke River, which drains from the lakes at the divide. The river was gentle at first before evolving into a bony Class II-III stream, forcing us to scout and plan precise lines. One wrong move and our folding canoe would be severely damaged or wrapped irretrievably around a boulder. Days from the nearest village, we didn’t relish the prospect.

The rapids became more difficult and dangerous as the river plunged toward the sea, and our worst fear became a reality when Kevin broached his kayak and capsized. Fortunately, his unwelcome swim in the frigid waters left him cold and wet, but otherwise fine. We eventually dropped into a Class IV-V canyon, forcing our first portage on the Skettejakke. Using a map and compass, we bashed two miles through dense, swampy birch forests in a driving rain, eventually camping on a lonely, granite outcropping that rose mercifully above the swamp.

The Skettejakke spit us into the Lule River system, which is in essence a series of dam-created lakes running for 250 miles from the Skanderne Mountains, through foothills and flatlands to the Gulf of Bothnia. The Swedes have built nine dams on the Lule since the 1920s, harnessing the once-raging river to meet their power needs. Before the dams, the Lule was similar to the free-flowing Pite River 60 miles to the south, which boasts 90 miles of Class IV-VI whitewater, at least 50 miles of which have never been run even in a whitewater kayak. Though counter to our environmental ideals, the Lule’s emasculation allowed us to complete a canoe trip that would have been impossible.

The first lake of the system, Akkajaure, kicked up steep waves and headwinds so strong that we literally couldn’t move. Akka means “mother” in the Sami language, and the lake was one angry mother indeed.

The area from the Norwegian border to the end of Akkajaure is part of Stora Sjofallets National Park, which forms part of Laponia, a 5,875-square-mile World Heritage Site. It is the heartland of the Swedish Sami who still herd reindeer there, though they now do the herding in ATVs and snowmobiles.

Swedish Sunshine and the Coffee Grandma

We crossed the next lake, Langas Jaure, in a dead calm but looked up to see a wall of solid white whipping across the water. Small squalls had been blowing through all day, but this one was big and coming right at us—fast. The squall straddled both shores of the lake, and we estimated it to be five miles wide. It made a loud hissing sound as it approached, like a million cats baring their fangs in unison. When the squall closed to 100 yards, I felt a puff of wind. Seconds later it struck us like a sledgehammer, the rain battering us with such force it felt as if we’d paddled into a giant waterfall. The lake became a frothing mess, and the force of the wind spun our canoe broadside and began pushing us backward. We paddled ferociously through the building whitecaps, hit shore, and ducked into the knotty pine forest, where we spotted a small cabin through the trees.

The hut was locked, but the smokehouse was open. The pyramid-like structure was a traditional Sami design called a kota and was the perfect spot to take shelter. The original kota was similar to a teepee, built of birch poles and reindeer hides; this one was made of wood and aluminum siding. As little as 50 years ago, the Sami were still a nomadic people, and the traditional kotas that served as dwellings and smokehouses could be quickly rolled up and loaded when it came time to move the community.

The storm passed while we ate our lunch, but others rolled in and out all day, giving us liberal doses of “Swedish sunshine” that left us looking like a pair of saturated muskrats. The bad weather continued through most of Sweden, as 14 of the first 17 days of the expedition were cold and rainy. Somehow we’d chosen to cross Scandinavia during the region’s coldest, wettest summer in 80 years.

We’d expected to camp in the large, overcrowded camping areas typical throughout Europe, forking out big bucks for a tiny patch of grass and playing volleyball with the Swedish bikini team to unwind after a long day’s paddle. Only after arriving in Sweden did we learn of “Everyman’s Law,” an ancient law that allows you to camp anywhere you like on public land as long as your tent is at least 50 meters from any structure or road. We never once had to pay for accommodations, though the bikini-clad women of legend were nowhere to be found.

We arrived on the outskirts of the village of Porjus and set up our tent on a soggy pebble beach between two cabins. I went to ask two women and a girl who were fishing in front of their home if I could plug my rechargeable camera battery into one of their outlets. At that moment, the girl caught a fish, and the women screamed and shouted in celebration. The older woman, a gregarious grandmother with fire in her pale blue eyes, unhooked the two-foot-long pike, exclaiming, “Her first fish! Her first fish!” after which she proceeded to smash its skull on a rock while carrying on a completely unrelated conversation with me. The grandmother’s name was Harriet, the other woman was her daughter, and the girl her granddaughter.

The following morning, Harriet invited us to breakfast. Over a meal of bread, cheese, and pike she told us about growing up in the rough northern woods above the Arctic Circle. As she spoke, it became apparent that she had a particularly strong affinity for coffee. The elixir kept her warm and happy during dark winter ski trips and long summer days of fishing. She looked up from her mug with wild eyes and exclaimed, “I couldn’t live without drinking at least 10 cups of coffee per day!”

Harriet’s grandson, Rasmus, only 18 months old but live as a firecracker, drank voraciously from a baby cup, which Harriet kept refilling. Within minutes, he was running madly around the room, eventually bumping his head, crying, and soiling his diapers all at once. I asked Harriet how long Rasmus had been drinking coffee. “Oh, he started when he was 8 months old. It’s good for him!” Sweden is known to have the highest per capita coffee consumption in the world, a statistic supported by our witnessing of the small, highly stimulated child. Somewhere, Starbucks execs are grinning fiendishly.

The Push to the Finnish

A couple of days out of Porjus, we set up camp on the riverbank, planning to walk to the nearby village of Messaure to replenish our dwindling food stores. It looked like a fair-sized village, and we’d seen signs for it on the road leading out of Porjus. We hiked toward town for half an hour, far longer than it should have taken. Doubling back, we found a small sign indicating the town had been moved decades earlier when the dam had been built. Amazingly, all the streets and street signs still remained. The Swedish government simply loaded the buildings onto trucks and hauled them to a new town site, but never bothered to alter the maps or road signs. We shook our heads and grumbled, then turned back toward our campsite and a dinner of soup and crackers.

We began the final leg of our trip in the town of Lulea, where the Lule River meets the Gulf of Bothnia, a northern branch of the Baltic Sea that separates Sweden and Finland. The 80-mile stretch on the Swedish side consists of an archipelago of pebble beach and pine-dotted islands. The wildlife is rich through the islands; aggressive terns continuously dive-bombed us when we came too close to their territory, and one evening a moose swam in front of our canoe as we paddled through a narrow channel.

Like any large body of water, the Gulf of Bothnia presents its own particular challenges, among them a persistent south wind driving heavy swells, and long crossings between islands and across the mouths of large bays. In a typical day we would make three or four crossings of up to five miles with a choppy four-foot swell rolling toward us from the right. The waves crashed over the gunwales and ran off our spraydeck, continuously pushing our bow southward as we struggled to paddle east toward Finland.

Some of the islands were sprinkled with summer cabins, and to our surprise many of the people we met already knew about us. Before we left Lulea, we’d befriended some newspaper reporters who wrote a front-page story about our journey, and during our three-day paddle to the Finnish border, people greeted us warmly, some even bringing copies of the paper for us to see. We basked in our 15 minutes of Swedish fame.

In Finland, the islands melted away, leaving us a five-day paddle along a swampy, featureless coast. We crossed the mouths of several large rivers that flow into the gulf through Finland from Russia. Vikings once used these waterways to transport Russian slaves to Scandinavia. Attached to our paddles through 10-hour days, we related to those poor souls shackled to the oars of a Viking ship, toiling toward lives of servitude.

We saw few people in these final days, and those we did stood silent and still on the distant shore, greeting our waves with blank stares. The southerly winds continued, buffeting us from the front and sides. One afternoon, a squall blew over our canoe, and a simultaneous burst of thunder and lightning struck so close that our hands tingled from the supercharged air around us.

Finally, after waiting out a morning windstorm, we paddled into the town of Oulu, Finland, on July 21 at 11:40 p.m, 26 days and three countries after our start.

The following evening, as we sat in a sauna with new Finnish friends and told our tale, a man named Mikka turned to me and smiled. Whirling his finger around his temple, he said, “Only crazy people carry canoes over mountains.”

We took it as a compliment.