Mountaineering Adventure

Katie Schwind
Uppsala University, Sweden

This past year, I had the opportunity to study at Uppsala University in Sweden. One of my favorite experiences has been to be drive up to the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden. Two Austrians from my corridor, a Belgian girl from my class, and I rented a car and drove 20 hours to the north. The second day the Austrians, Anna and Finki, and I decided to drive to some nearby mountains.

Eventually, we drove to a very small village in the mountains. As we parked, a very friendly dog started running towards us. He immediately wanted to play, but we came to the small village to figure out where to hike. The two Austrians that I was with were very experienced mountaineers and were already deciding on which mountain to climb. They have been mountaineering all their lives, having completed safety courses on avalanches and other related activities in the Alps.

At first, I thought that hiking the large mountain was crazy and we would never be able to make it up there by dark. We arrived at the village around 10 am and the sunset was around 2 or 3pm that time of the year. We started for the mountain, accompanied by our fury friend we met earlier. We walked for a while on the trail, but eventually we strayed off the beaten path and had to start making our own way. A short while after leaving the path, we ran into a pretty large river that wasn't frozen. We kept walking up stream hoping to find an area where the river was frozen all the way across. Eventually, we found an area of the river that looked partially solid because there was some water on top of the ice and holes in it, but there were still reindeer and snowmobile tracks going across. Finki figured if a reindeer and a snowmobile went across, we should be fine. After testing the ice, Finki found it was thick enough so we all crossed and continued on our quest to the mountaintop. With in a few minutes we ran into another river that was even bigger and faster flowing, so we weren’t able to make it across.

We decided to go for the mountains on the opposite side of the valley this time. So we started to head the opposite direction. We were now even further away from the mountain when we started, and we lost an hour and a half of daylight, so in my head I was thinking that there was no way we would make, but I was willing to keep trying. We made it all the way to the top, right before our deadline to head back, the dog was still tagging along. We then had to get all the way back to the village before it got dark in less than an hour. The dog waited for us to make sure that we could find the way back, and once we reached the town the dog went home. My hair was frozen and my toes a little numb, but it was absolutely worth it.