A GPS will sooner or later fail you — and it does not have to be a spectacular breakdown. The battery can die at the least expected moment, the device loses signal at the bottom of a deep valley, the screen cracks after an unfortunate fall, and sometimes you simply forget to charge the phone before leaving. In Sarek National Park there is no GSM coverage and no trails, so the only reliable tool of navigation remains the map and the compass.
Contour lines — they are the ones telling you what lies ahead
Contour lines, meaning the lines that join on a topographic map points of the same elevation, are the foundation of reading the terrain. The more densely they lie next to each other, the steeper the slope that awaits you, and the more sparsely they are set apart, the gentler and more friendly the ground. A cluster of lines merging into one thick stain usually marks a rock wall or a slope that will be difficult to overcome, while a wide spacing of contour lines is flat terrain, the floor of a valley, sometimes wetlands.
Reading the map is best learned before you enter the terrain — at home, over a cup of coffee, with a calm head. That is the moment for analysis, not a slope in the rain, when from the map under the hood there remains only a crumpled piece of paper.
Which map for Sarek National Park
The standard for these regions are the Fjällkartan maps in the scale 1:100,000 — sheet BD10 covers the western part of the park with Stora Sjöfallet, BD11 the eastern part with the main massif of Sarek. You will buy them in Swedish outdoor shops such as Naturkompaniet or Outnorth, or you will order them online before the trip. A paper map is obligatory, even if you carry two GPS units and a solar charger in your pack — on a screen you will never take in the whole terrain in a single glance, and it is precisely this wide context that most often decides a good choice.
Scale — calculate before you go
A scale of 1:100,000 means that one centimetre on the map corresponds to a kilometre in the terrain, and on more detailed maps, 1:50,000, the same centimetre is only five hundred metres. It is worth developing the habit of measuring distances with the fingers — the width of the thumb on an average hand is roughly one and a half to two centimetres, so before you set off, you will measure with your fingers the way to the next landmark.
In steep terrain you also have to honestly add the toil of the climb — two kilometres on the map can grow in the legs to three or four. To estimate the time of march, add another minute for each ten metres of elevation gain.
Magnetic declination — a small thing that changes the direction
The compass shows magnetic north, not geographic, and this difference is easy to forget at home, much harder in the terrain. In the region of Sarek National Park the magnetic declination is currently around seven, eight degrees to the east, which means that the compass is wrong by exactly that much. Over a distance of ten kilometres this gives a few hundred metres of error, and in fog, on flat ground without clear points of reference, that is the difference between arriving at camp and spending the night out in the open.
You will find the value of the declination in the legend of the map or on its margin — check it earlier, even before you pack the rucksack.
Triangulation — how to determine your position
Triangulation is a way of establishing position without a GPS, based solely on the map and the compass. You choose two distinctive points visible from your location — a summit, a clear bend of a river, a sharp ridge — and you take a bearing on each of them with the compass, reading the azimuth. Then from each of these points on the map you draw a line in the opposite direction, meaning you add or subtract one hundred and eighty degrees from the measured azimuth. The place where the two lines intersect is your position. The greater the angle between the bearings, the more accurate the result — ideally it would approach a right angle.
This technique is worth learning at home, with the map spread out on the table. In the field, under the pressure of time and the curiosity of what is hidden beyond the next ridge, that is not the moment for first attempts.
Procedure when lost
The first thing to do, when you realise that you do not know where you are, is to stop. Really stop, and not walk a little further „because maybe beyond the ridge something will look familiar”. Establish in memory the last point at which you were sure of your position, and the time that has passed since that moment. Multiply it by your average pace — on flat ground that is three, four kilometres per hour, on climbs considerably less — and imagine a circle of places where you may be. Then look around for something distinctive in the terrain: a river, a clear ridge, a rock wall, and match it to the map.
In Sarek National Park the best landmarks are usually the rivers. Each has on the map its own unrepeatable course, and each leads somewhere — to a valley, a lake, a larger river. Water never lies.
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