Tjuonjatjåkko

The way down the canyon is much, much easier than what I remember. Most likely because I can just follow a recommended route now and don’t rely on my bad taste and wrong choices. The drama starts when I leave the marked trail towards east after the bridge. Well, not quite. It’s a lot of bushwhacking but I find the trail and it’s easy to follow. It gets more and more wet though. And soon I’m ankle deep in water and mud. My shoes turned into a pool. How I have missed that! And if that wasn’t enough it also started to rain. “Embrace the suck!”, they say. I’m not quite there to be honest. And I remember when five years ago this old German guy recommended this route to me. “So nice, you gotta love it!”. This after we talked about shoes, that he comes here since 20 years and the only right choice is rubber boots, implying mine are the totally wrong thing. I think he was just a malevolent, gloating, grumpy old man who wanted to teach me a lesson. As if it’s a good idea to send someone you don’t know anything about into a god forsaken area like this one. Quite reckless if you ask me. Risk the safety of some stranger for your own enjoyment. Can’t stop thinking about this guy while I scuff forward. I hope the trail gets better once it changes its marks on the map. It doesn’t. Maybe a bit less bushwhacking but to sum it up, it’s a shitshow. I remember there’s a river crossing coming, and I remember it was no big deal at all since I happened to hit the river just at the right spot by chance. Not so this time. It’s a deep, deep canyon with raging white water at its base. Is this the same place? I don’t recognize it at all. I have to backtrack a lot until a place that seems doable. Where it’s flat and wide. Once I climb out of that canyon and are high up enough I remember another thing, it’s all swamps around here. Swamps for the next several kilometers. It’s hell. Somehow I make it all the way to Lapporten. My feet wet, so wet, I drain my socks every now and then but it doesn’t make much of a difference. Tired and exhausted I give up. I won’t make it to Abisko today. It’s over ten kilometers left, it’s 8pm already and I’m just done. Weather is fine and I have no other choice anyway. I pitch my tent at the most exposed spot you can think of and enjoy a completely calm and quiet evening with a sky in the most phenomenal colors you can think of. Stake out my guylines? - “Nah!”Meer informatie