Björkliden - Abisko

As soon as my friends and me had bought snowshoes and a free weekend was approaching in the end on March, we were of course eager to give some easy winter hiking a try. Happily there is some reasonable bus service from Kiruna to Abisko and the surrounding area, so we would start at the bus station at 7am and have a full day of hiking until the bus back home at around 6pm.

 

The weather being nice back home in Kiruna, it turned out to be really snowy as soon as we reached Torneträsk, so we quickly dropped our plan of ascending to Nuolja from the Björkliden side and going down to Abisko, instead we followed the E1 long distance hiking trail between the road and the railway. Took some time to find it, but we were successful.

 

Snow conditions were really really bad for snowshoes on this day. Unexpectedly high temperatures had brought some rain the day before, so the top layer of the snow was frozen, while the underlying 1-2 meters were perfect powder.

With snowshoes this meant stepping on the top layer and standing up on it, only to break in directly afterwards. Followed by a half-meter drop until the powder was compressed enough to not sink any further.  Just powder snow is good to walk even if you sink in quite a bit, because it's so light; good frozen snow of course doesn't even let you sink in. But this combination was just really awful to walk.

 

So we ended up having to literally break our way and made only little progress - especially considering that the overall distance from Björkliden to Abisko is around 10 km, without any remarkable elevation in between.

 

At some point, we had enough and crossed the street to continue walking on the frozen Torneträsk. The steady strong snowfall provided an interesting scenery, and walking was easy nevertheless due to heavy winds blowing the snow all over the ice.

 

 - photos partly by Laura -