The Padjelanta Project

Why is all the food covered in petrol? I don’t think the stove is working..

A good start to a multi-day first descent mission, along with no tent pegs and a map that covered everything up to the 2 day hike out. Far up in the Arctic circle in Europe’s last true wilderness. What else could go wrong.

A while ago, Callum Strong spent a while nosing around Google Earth and found some interesting looking whitewater in the middle of Padjelanta National Park in northern Sweden. It was in the middle of nowhere, with no easy way in or out, with potentially massive unrunnable whitewater. Sounded good to me!

I spent a while figuring out how to actually do this, and ended with a plan involving a 14 day mission consisting of days and days of hiking and slogging across huge lakes.

I was going to be spending the summer in Norway with Rory Woods anyway, and we were both keen, but it was hard to persuade anyone to join in, turns out not that many people have several weeks to spare on a stupid mission.

As such, the 600km shuttle felt a little bit far to walk back, so we condensed the trip into a 8 day trip, circling back and missing out on a few rivers to reduce the shuttle to 100km down main roads, which should be a bit easier to hitch.

We went up and scouted out the hike in, a slight snow block meant that we would be walking a bit further, but it looked to be simple enough. Then some drizzle came in, so we went and sat in Statoil for a day drinking free coffee.

The following day was beautiful, so we packed up the boats, shouldered up (Rory had a portage pack, lucky man) and headed off.

We were treated to some spectacular views, and a few very confused hikers. The going wasn’t quite as hard as we were expecting, going over the top took maybe 4-5 hours before descending into a lake system with a little bit of snow boating.

Into the lakes we started on the long slog along, getting a taste of what we were getting ourselves into. After a long day, we set up camp and realised that our stove had managed to break itself and leak petrol all over everything. Not ideal, as there weren’t many trees or burnable wood up in the Arctic, so we were in for a long week of cold petroly porridge. Luckily we also had sealed dehydrated meals, which still worked (ish) with cold water.

Just to top things off, Rory had lost his tent pegs, so had to round up some rocks every night. Good thing it was warm and sunny, and the feared Northern Scandinavian mosquitoes didn’t make an appearance all trip.

The next day started with some more lake, but we were soon at the start of the Sårjåsjåhka river. It started with a sketchy drop, but things were looking up, there was actually going to be whitewater on this trip!

The first rapids were hard work, the boats were heavy and the water was powerful and there was a lot of scouting to try and not drop into any little portage gorges. There were some fun rapids, and some that would require a bit more bravery.

This carried on throughout the day, with a lake halfway down the river for fun, where the river name changes to the Stålojåhka. More rapids and big slides followed, most of which seemed to have rather large holes at the bottom, but also at the top, and sometimes in the middle.

There were some rapids that would be amazing to go back and do, so we’ll see how that pans out…

After a day of hard work, we reached the end of the river and found ourselves in lake Virihaure, which is meant to be the most beautiful lake in Sweden, some driftwood meant we could have a warm dinner, and a good nights sleep was welcomed.

Flowing into the lake is another river straight off a glacier, which is pretty steep, but has a potentially runnable 60-80 footer at the bottom. We didn’t bother to get too close to this, as we were not keen on it, and could see the boils at the bottom of it exploding from 2km away. Perhaps some other time.

We crossed the lake to where Virihaure drains into Vastenjaure along a short stretch of whitewater called the Vuojatsavon, which consisted of a set of pretty cool rapids.

The first rapid we scouted and it looked like a wide, shallow rapid with some holes, lots of different lines, but nothing too bad.

Rory went first so I could take photos, and he just kept getting smaller and smaller and disappeared into the rapid. A thumbs up meant I followed down, I went for the line straight down the middle, which went through a few small holes.

The small holes turned out to be really quite large, luckily a heavy boat gave me some good momentum to crash through things that wouldn’t be out of place in Uganda, perhaps this little lake to lake combo was a big bigger volume than we thought.

Straight after the first rapid was a completely lethal pour over, so we gave that a miss and put in just below for another long rapid where the river flowed round a big bend, with some huge looking holes in the way.

This was followed by the final whitewater of the trip with another big, but simple rapid dropping us into lake Vastenjaure where we could think about how we were going to actually get out of here.

Crossing the lake we could see east into Sarek national park, where the lake drains into the Lule river basin, which the original plan would have taken us down. At the time we were partially glad to be starting to get out as it had been a long hard trip so far, with the cold food and petroly porridge not really helping. Plus we didn’t quite know how bad the hike out was going to be.

We crossed most of the lake before camping on an island, preparing for a long escape back to civilization. The going had been a good speed so far, so we were able to have two hot dinners thanks to some more driftwood.

In the morning, the wind had picked up again, not usually ideal for long lake crossings. Luckily it was blowing in exactly the right direction to shoot us across the lake in super fast time. From here it was a simple matter of hiking up a tributary and over a mountain pass, then back down to the main road at sea level 2000ft below through a lake system.

Hiking up and over took a little while, but we eventually got to the start of the descent at lake Langvatnet. Crossing this lake was tough, 10km in a creek boat isn’t the easiest of tasks and the landscape is so spectacular that you never seem to get closer to anything and you get the feeling that you’re going nowhere as no landmarks are going past and you’re in the middle of a choppy lake so have no sense of covering any ground.

We charged the lake non-stop and reached the other side to find that the outflow was pretty much all going down a hydro. This wasn’t too upsetting as all the height down to the sea was lost pretty quickly in-between each little lake.

We hiked for the rest of the day, and found ourselves peering over the edge of a precipice wondering how we were going to get down.

After a good sleep a sunny morning greeted us, and the way down didn’t seem too impossible, just pretty horrible.

Carrying the boats at this point was getting very painful, with frequent stops to forage for blueberries for a little bit more energy.

Soon there were a few signs of civiliaztion, the odd hytte (with seemingly no way in aside from a pretty epic hike), and eventually some paths along the side.

We eventually got back down to the E6, and decided that we’d try and get the bus back in the morning, so found a nice little hunting hut to stay in before the heavens opened. We sat and ate the rest of our food, hoping that we’d be able to get back to the car tomorrow!

In the morning we headed down to the bus stop, tried a bit of hitch-hiking too and eventually a guy stopped and gave us a lift all the way to Fauske. We eventually made our way back up to the car, and had a good cup of tea before going back to collect our kit. The nice thing about Norway is that if you leave all of your stuff in the grass by the side of a little road, and not worry about it going anwhere.

It was an amazing trip to do, I would love to do the rivers again, but maybe not the hike out. So if anyone wants to give me a helicopter that’d be nice.

A full album of my photos of the trip is on facebook here.