The first multi-day trip into Sarek is for most of my participants a collision with a fairly simple truth: the map lies. Or rather — the map tells the truth about the distance, but it stays silent about the time in which that distance can actually be covered. The biggest enemy of a beginner is neither the weather nor the bear, but his own plan put together at a desk on the basis of a ruler and a map at 1:100,000. In this article I want to show how to plan daily stages so that the expedition ends where it should, that is in a hut with a cup of tea, and not with a helicopter on the horizon.
Real distance in Sarek – forget about four kilometres per hour
In the Tatras, on a marked trail, a healthy person with a backpack does twenty-something kilometres a day and is back in the hut for dinner. In Sarek such numbers simply do not exist, because outside the edges of the park there are no marked trails at all. If you walk along a section of Kungsleden by the south-eastern border, you can count on something around eighteen, twenty kilometres a day. If you go into the heart of the park — into the valleys of Rapadalen, Sarvesvágge or Guhkesvágge — your real pace is two, three kilometres per hour, and in difficult terrain it drops below that. In practice this means a day of walking maybe a dozen or so kilometres long, and on stretches of stone fields or bogs often less.
A terrain conversion that cuts ambitions down to size
Before you write into your plan „today we’ll do fifteen kilometres”, check what you are actually walking on. From my experience the rough conversion looks more or less like this.
- A kilometre of flat tundra is more or less a kilometre of marked trail in the Beskidy — you walk more or less normally.
- A kilometre of a stone field, in Swedish blockfield, is already close to two, two and a half kilometres of normal trail — every step under control, every ankle under control.
- A kilometre of wet bog, that is myr, is two to three kilometres of trail — boots wet after the first kilometre, and energy runs out much faster than a person expects.
- A kilometre of bushy willow thicket, vide, is more or less three kilometres of trail — the branches reach up to your waist, the backpack catches on something at the side every other moment.
- A river crossing is an hour, and sometimes more, added on to the day, regardless of how many kilometres you planned.
Now look at the map of your expedition and count honestly. Often it will turn out that a day which looked like „an easy dozen kilometres”, once converted to trail, is twice as much.
Buffers and the art of saying „today I’m not going any further”
For a seven-day trip I pack food for seven days plus two days of reserve — nine rations in total. In Sarek, statistically, it rains every second day in summer, and once per expedition there is a day on which one simply cannot move from the spot — because the river has risen, the fog limits visibility to a few dozen metres, or the group needs a rest. The working rule which I apply myself is simple: one buffer day for every four, five days of route.
Equally important as a buffer of days is the ability to stop in the middle. I end the day earlier when:
- fog limits visibility in stony terrain — the risk of a sprained ankle rises very quickly in that case;
- a river I am to cross reaches above the knees and has a strong current — I wait until morning, when the level usually drops;
- I am more than two hours behind the plan — this is a signal that the plan was too ambitious, and not that one has to chase it;
- I feel serious tiredness still well before the planned camp — because injuries arise precisely from those last kilometres pushed through by force.
Rhythm of the day — start, march, camp
A well-planned day in Sarek begins in the morning, but without exaggeration — usually somewhere between seven and eight. About fifty minutes of walking, ten minutes of break, a longer pause for lunch, an hour or something around that, somewhere between twelve and half past one. The last hour of the march belongs to looking for a campsite with a time margin — I never walk „until I find a spot”, because then it always turns out that there is still a bit further to go. The camp should stand by at the latest some two hours before dusk, so that there is light left for pitching the tent, cooking dinner and drying the socks.
The most common mistake I see in people planning their first expedition is very simple: they draw a straight line on the map, divide by four and enter the result into the calendar. Sarek does not forgive this. It is better to come back from an expedition a day earlier with food to spare than a day later with frostbite.
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