In Sarek there are no trails, no signposts, and you can count the bridges on the fingers of one hand. This means your eyes have to do the work that somewhere else is done for you by somebody with paint and a brush. Reading the terrain is not some kind of esoteric art, just a few concrete habits that get into your blood after two or three days in the valley. In this article I wanted to show how to recognise the main types of ground you will run into in Sarek National Park, and what to do with each of them once you are standing in front of it with your backpack.
Moraines — chaos that has its own logic
Moraines are ridges of rubble and boulders left behind by a glacier, or being left behind right now. Under glaciers like Mikkajekna, Suottasjekna or Pårtejekna you can see them from far away: irregular, bright, with no vegetation or only a few clumps of moss, as if somebody had thrown a handful of stones from the sky. In the field there is one distinction that matters above all.
A fresh terminal moraine is a field of bright, sharp-edged boulders with a lot of fine material between them. It looks walkable, but the boulders can turn under your foot without warning. I walk on it slowly, I always put my foot on the largest, most settled stone, and I test its stability before I shift my body weight onto it. An old moraine, on the other hand, is boulders overgrown with moss, lichens, sometimes dwarf birch — a sign that nothing has moved here for decades. It is stable, although after rain it gets as slippery as ice, so it is not a place for a hurried step either.
A classic trap that many beginners fall into: a lateral moraine often drops down a steep gully into the glacial stream. You can get down, but you will not get back up, because the rock slides under your feet with every attempt to return. Before I even start going down, I always check whether I can see the opposite bank and whether I have a clear plan of exit.
Mires — read the colour and the vegetation
You can see a mire from a kilometre away if you know what you are looking for. It is a bright, even green without protruding boulders, sometimes with a metallic reflection of water between the tussocks. The more „lawn-like” the valley below you looks, the more carefully I approach it.
The vegetation here tells you basically everything. Cottongrass, with its white fluffy tufts, means water up to your ankles, and often higher. Peat mosses of the genus Sphagnum, spongy and in places reddish, announce very wet ground, the kind where your foot sinks well below the calf. Dwarf birch, when it grows in dense, low swathes, often marks the edge of a bog; the famous „willow thicket” in Rapadalen is a good example — from a distance it looks like a strip of green to walk through, up close it turns out to be a half-day trap.
In Sarek you also come across a lot of so-called aapa-mires — patterned mires, where narrow ridges and small pools of water run alternately. The ridges are walkable, but the pools are waist-deep. From a distance it looks like a striped carpet, almost decorative. If I see such a pattern, I go around higher up, even if it means two hours of extra walking. Trying to cross an aapa „as a shortcut” is always a mistake that a person remembers far longer than an extra hour on the legs.
Tundra and scree — read the lichens
Low tundra — mosses, lichens, polar willow creeping along the ground — is the most pleasant ground you will find here. Dry, it walks like a carpet; wet after rain it starts to slip, especially on slopes, so even on it you have to watch where you step.
Scree fields — patches of loose rubble at the foot of rock walls and in the post-glacial „bowls” under the summits — require a completely different habit, which is reading the surface of the boulders. I have one rule that basically always works. Bright, clean boulders without lichens are fresh material that has moved in recent years; you have to assume it will move again under your foot. Boulders that are dark, with patches of lichen, especially that yellow-green map lichen, Rhizocarpon geographicum, have not moved for decades. They are stable and you can trust them.
In practice this is a simple visual test: if I see a field of bright, as if „washed”, stones, I step off it to the side, even by a longer route.
Water from under the glacier — when not to enter
You will recognise a glacial stream by its colour: milky, grey-white, sometimes almost completely white — that is the rock flour the water carries from under the ice. Streams like Rapaätno or Mihkájåhkå look this way through the whole season, so there is no point in hoping that around the next bend they will turn clear. Clear, dark water usually means a rain stream or a mire stream — that kind reacts faster to rainfall, but is rarely dangerous.
The most important rule of Sarek, which beginners usually have inverted in their heads, is this: a glacial stream is lowest in the morning and highest in the afternoon. On a sunny day, between afternoon and evening, it can double in size, and after a heavy rain the peak comes with a delay of several hours, when a person has already managed to forget about the storm.
I do not enter the water when it is milky and reaches above the knees with a fast current. I also do not enter if I hear the rumble of stones rolling along the bottom, because that means the current is carrying boulders, and the boulders will carry me too. And finally I do not try to cross when it is the afternoon of a sunny day and the bank I am standing on looks freshly flooded — because this means very plainly that the water is still rising.
In such situations I simply make camp and wait until morning.
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