Midnattssolens Land

by R. G. Humphreys

The end of July, a month clear between jobs, and a rare opportunity to take rucksack and a little coinage and to step off the world for a while.

I have always wanted to cross the Arctic Circle, preferably in Alaska; but Lapland is much more convenient, and ancient tales of Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club expeditions to the Lofotens, and George Spenceley’s more recent films had aroused my curiosity; and I wanted to see some of the rest of Scandinavia in passing.

So rucksack stuffed and boots polished, I flew from London to Oslo and spent a couple of days seeing the tourist sights in brilliant sunshine.

The express train for Trondheim leaves Oslo at noon, travelling gently northwards past cornfields towards the mountains; through Lillehammer, into the Gudbrandsdal, climbing steadily to over 3,000 feet at the Dovrefjell (which looks just like Rannoch Moor) and down to Trondheim by nine o’clock in the evening. Then a change to the night train, which crosses the Arctic Circle in the small hours.

Nine o’clock the next morning, before turning sharp left for the last few miles to the end of the line at Bodo, the train unloads passengers who are continuing northwards at Fauske, where there is a wooden station, a cafe, and a park full of rugged Volvo buses, belonging to Nord Norge Bussen. This is the well worn tourist trail to the North Cape, but the trees are by now small and thin, and underfoot there is more and more bare rock, so that civilisation seems many miles away.

The journey from Fauske to Narvik, crossing four ferries, must be one of the most spectacular bus rides in the world. On the left there are frequent views across the sea to Lofoten and Vesteralen; on the right are the mountains. The mountains are not high (about 4,000 feet) and are rounded; but since they are naked rock, dropping vertically into the fjords, the topography is unique.

Because of the scouring action of the Ice Age glaciers, some of the fjords are a mile deep, which means that there is more fjord below water level than above it, which is quite a thought when peering over the bow of a ferry into the inky depths.

Narvik is an industrial town—the unloading point for iron ore from Sweden—but it is spotlessly clean, and the northern part of the town, over the hill from the harbour, looks down onto a bay with bathing beach and fishing boat quay. The water was warm enough to lie in.

The first thing to do in Narvik is to strike straight up the hillside at the back of the town to the Fagernesfj, in order to get the lie of the land. There are three deep fjords to the south, and to the north there is a gentler area around two bays in which the naval battle took place during the last war. Twenty miles to the east is the watershed which forms the boundary between Norway and Sweden; and to the west lies a jumble of sea and islands containing peaks beyond number.

Local buses serve the villages in the nearby fjords, and the railway into Sweden serves the Rombaks Fjord; so that it is a simple matter to travel to the end of one bus route, and to walk over the tops to the head of the adjacent valley and then ride back to the town. The country round Narvik is relatively sheltered and so the lower slopes are covered in stunted forest. This is extremely hard going—you nearly need a machete—and since the ground is soft underfoot and full of mosquitoes, the best that can be said of the scrub belt is that it is nice when you have got through it.

The thing that most surprised me (it was by now the first week of August) was that having been seen out of the village by the local school children trying out their English (you need to ask them the way to avoid dead ends in gardens and farmyards), there is not a solitary soul to be seen; there are no trees and no sheep, so that the locals have no cause to climb high; I once saw through the binoculars a fisherman, but otherwise nothing. There are not even many birds.

I moved northwards a little way (by bus again) to a spot called Gratangen where there is a Turiststation—that is to say, a modern hotel on the main road. High season is in the spring, for ski-ing; in August it was very quiet. There was a view straight down the fjord to the midnight sun, or strictly speaking to where it would have been if it had not by then dropped a few degrees below the horizon; but at midnight it was not dark, and there was a glorious sunset effect every night.

All the mountains around have a bit of snow on top; they slope upwards at a walkable angle from the South West, but the North East face tends to be vertical for the top 1,000 feet. This always tends to take me by surprise, and reduce me to my hands and knees as I peer over the brink into the next valley.

I had to forgo the summits, because (and as far as I can see, looking round, the problem is a general one) they require either a climb or step cutting up a snow slope; and being alone and not partial to bashing myself on granite, I made great play with my camera instead.

Then into Sweden, to the Abisko Turiststation, a massive place which forms an important link in the tourist route and whose barrack-like exterior conceals great comfort within. The country here is frankly ‘dull Scottish’; the mountains reach 6,000 feet but do not somehow look much higher than Ingleborough. I was perhaps put off by the weather, which was now damp and cloudy as it often is away from the Norwegian coast. Abisko is on the shores of a lake, in a nature reserve; for 250 miles southwards there runs the Kungsleden, a walking route which is equipped with huts and which leads past the Kebnekaise, which, at 6,946 feet is Sweden’s highest mountain. Near to the hotel there is a genuine Lapp settlement, which reminded me exactly of Indian reservations on the tourist routes in America.

I made a sortie along the Kungsleden and was surprised to find planks laid for mile after mile over the boggy bits. This sounds cissy, but the distances that the Swedes trudge, often with large packs containing children, are considerable and would not be possible if they had to plough through the soft going.

There is much more wild life here—genuine reindeer (which look like birch trees in motion), lemmings scuttling off the path at every pace, and all sorts of bird. Not knowing a budgerigar from a black-backed gull, much of this was lost on me; but even I could see there was a good deal of variety. There were people there spending their entire holiday wandering round with massive binoculars and little books by Peter Scott and James Fisher.

I caused rather a stir by mentioning a large bird with an exceedingly long tail that had been wheeling round me as I took a short cut back to the hotel via a desolate little side valley. “It was probably a long-tailed skua”, they said laughing in a rather hysterical way. They produced a book of birds, and lo, there was the very creature, standing on the same rock, as far as I could tell. There was much consternation; they had spent two weeks looking for it, since it was very rare and had last been seen by Peter Scott (or was it James Fisher), when the photograph was taken in 1953. The book said the nest had been in the lonely Karsagge Valley and the map revealed that this is where I had been. One chap left there and then in search (it was after dinner) and the rest got up early next morning. I had to leave for Stockholm; I trust it was not a large magpie.

And so overnight by electric train back to the short days of southern latitudes, to the considerable delights of Stockholm in summer, followed by the flight back to work for a well earned rest.