Last thoughts before the walk…

Checking the weather forecast four times a day, nervously packing and hesitating about these last few small items to take in my pack… how many spare pegs for the tarp? Will my alcohol stove work well enough on cold evenings in the mountains and clear nights in Finnmark? Will all my contacts for my food drops be reliable? Will it be possible to cross the Hardangervidda with all this snow still lingering around? Honestly, they are only an excuse not to think about the real questions… How will I cope with long solo stretches in deserted Northern Scandinavia, or during long bad weather episodes, or even worse: both combined? Won’t I crack when autumn sets in and dark and depressive days succeed each other? Why can’t I just spend summer in Belgium and enjoy one of our beers on a cozy terrace like normal people? Shit, do I really want this?

1st of june is now really coming close…

It’s been the same questions before my long trips in the Pyrenees in 2007 and 2010, although they are now more pressing. On these previous walks these thoughts rapidly faded away as the days passed, progress was made and my confidence grew, and after a few weeks, the walk became all and I felt like I could go on forever. Most questions above become trivial when reaching this point. You don’t hope a food drop will work out, you rely on it. If the first two weeks pass smoothly, I hope I will experience the same evolution. No, I rely on it.

I’m a bit of a Lone Ranger, but not the kind which can wander for 4 full months through wilderness alone. Some friends will join me on the way: after 3 weeks of solo walking Joris will join me for a week from Finse to Tyin. My girlfriend Elien will replace him as my companion and accompany me for a full month up to Teveltunet. I’ll continue my drag north solo up to Saltfjellet where I’ll meet Fre, with whom I hike and packraft all the way to Abisko. Then there is a 4-week solo stretch left towards Nordkinn. It will be good to look forward to company when I have a difficult moment and pushing on feels like a hard thing to do. Both for them and for me, this is vacation and vacation equals enjoying things. If things don’t work out as planned, so be it.

Don’t expect a daily update of this blog. Maybe I’ll write a text every now and then when I find a computer and feel for it, but I don’t want any obligations. I’ll share most pictures, videos and stories afterwards. I will share a feeling or thought on a more regular basis through my Twitter channel to which you can now suscribe. A map will also appear on this homepage where my last SPOT-position (which will mostly be my bivouac spots) will be pinpointed. It will be updated every day at midnight.

I can only wish one thing: no physical injuries. Oh yeah, and a nice summer would also be cool.

Enough talking! Let’s hit the trail!

Gearing up

Carrying a monster pack when starting an 8-day traverse of the Ariège, Pyrenees 2007

When I crossed the Pyrenees 5 years ago, my backpack had a base weight of nearly 15kg. I carried a 3kg 2-person tent all the way across the chain, used a 500g cooking pot and gas stove and took stuff like a washing basin. After resupplying and adding even more kilo’s, and sometimes carrying 2 to 3 litres of water in the dry Spanish sierra’s, the long climbs on scree and the relentless boulderfield tended to become a heavy burden. I’ve slowly tried to decrease the weight of my backpack ever since, but the purchase of my packraft last year was the real turning point. Adding 4kg of gear to my pack, I had to economize elsewhere. The result is a gear list totalizing only 11,5kg for the first (non-packrafting) part of the trip, of which just 8,1kg will be in my backpack. This will become about 12,5kg for the second part – still less than my Pyrenees pack and in a harsher climate!
The full packlist for the first part of my trip can be found here: Gear list Transscandinavia 2012. Not all items will be mentioned in the text below!

My backpack will be the ULA Epic, which goes with a 65L Big River Dry Bag to keep all my gear dry. As the mid-layers of my clothing are mainly poorly compressible polyester fleeces, 65L could become a bit small when having to carry food for over a week, but it should work out.

It will be my first long trip without a real tent. Instead, I’ll use the MLD Cricket Tent, which combines a Silnylon flysheet with a mesh inner net. I chose for this inner net because I like some comfort for reading during the evening hours and the mosquito pressure will be pretty high on some parts a the trip. I have not used my cricket tent a lot and although I feel pretty confident after having experimented a bit with the pitching possibilities, the question will be how I will behave during high-wind bivouacs. I will have to chose my bivouac spots with care and get to know my shelter better during the first few weeks of the trip. My sleeping bag will be the Alpkit Pipedream 600 again, which keeps me warm down to about -3°C; and this should be about the coldest temperatures I experience along the way. The Therm-a-rest XTherm, which yields an incredible 5.7 R-values for 420g, will be my mattress. I could have gone lighter on this item, but I have long needed a winter mat and this one will later also serve for that purpose. I’ll also take the Terra Rosa Quilt cover which I won online last year to keep my sleeping bag dry during prolonged wet periods and when sleeping under the stars.

Bivouac with the Cricket Tent (right) during an overnight packrafting trip on the Amblève (picture: Joery Truyen)

I’ve never spent a lot of money on clothing and it won’t be different for this trip. The biggest innovation compared to trips in the past is my switch to trailrunner shoes. I’ll wear the Inov8 Flyroc 310 on this trip, which I succesfully tested in the Alps last autumn. I’ll have my currect pair replaced after 3 weeks when Joris comes to join me for a while, and have a third pair send together with my packraft two months into the trip. I reinforced all seams with Seamgrip to increase the lifetime. I’ll combine the Flyroc’s with waterproof Sealskinz socks and cheap 172g gaiters. My walking socks will be the Thin Mid-lenght socks. As I will have to cross many extensive snowfields in june, I’ll take Yaktrax Pro to minimize continuous slithering, which could provoke injuries. My base layer will be either (depending on the weather) a cheap polyester shirt or an Icebreaker merino shirt. I take two polyester fleeces as mid-layers and a 4-year old Berghaus 4 Season trek as a waterproof hardshell. The latter is not in top shape and may need replacement along the way. The Fjallraven Ruaha zip-off pants should allow comfortable walking in all weather conditions I will encounter. I’ll take North Face HyVent rain pant from the start – as rain and wind protection during the first part and also for packrafting during the second part. A merino wool base layer and neoprene socks will be added to my kit for cold-weather packrafting from mid-august.

I brought down the base weight of my cooking set to less than 300g. I’ll cook on a home-made alcohol stove with 0.1mm Aluminum windscreen using the Alpkit MytiPot. Having a soup and a hot meal (either pasta or freeze-dried), I estimate I’ll need about 40-50mL of alcohol every day, which I will buy in local drug stores.

Full cooking kit (without alcohol bottle)

The only part of my gear list which weight increased is the ‘electronics’-part. I’ll take a GoPro Hero 960 sports camera for movies during walking and packrafting and for timelapses. As I want better pictures than from my previous trips, I invested in a Olympus PEN EP-L 1 camera with a 14-150mm lens, a combi weighing about 600g. I’ll carry both on my breast in a LowePro camera bag, which I can attach to the shoulder straps of my backpack with 2 minibiners. For both GoPro and camera I’ll carry one spare battery. And, as just sending Li-batteries to points along my route is way to expensive in every aspect, we come to a shitty stumbling block in my gear list… should I either take all chargers (together some 200g), and stop for hours at every electricity socket I stumble upon to charge all my batteries, or should I take a solar charger and have full flexibility and autonomy… but depend on the weather conditions? I will try the second option and take the A-solar AM-108 Solar chargerand necessary connectors which I can borrow from a friend. Together they weigh a bit less than 200g. The thing needs about 15 hours of sunlight to charge – and can charge one of my batteries during the night with this power. I expect I will need one full charge every 3 days. If the solar charger is not sufficient, I can still switch to the regular chargers when I’m joined by Joris. When days get shorter and duller from mid-august I’ll need another solution anyway.
I’ll store all my media on two 32GB memory sticks. The SPOT 2 Satellite Messenger will assure I can make contact with the emergency services should something really bad happen. Finally, I’ll have my mobile phone as a communication device, an MP3-player and a voice recorder for my diary.

Wondering what my gear list for the packrafting part will look like? You’ll have to be patient!

The conditions, one week before leaving

After a snow-rich winter and a rather cool april and first half of may, a lot of snow still persists in the mountains of Southern Norway. Conditions are particularly snowy on the mountain plateaus of Setesdelsheiane and Hardangervidda, which I will already cross during the first three weeks of my journey. The higher parts still see more than 4 meters of snow, some parts of Setesdalsheiane experience their most extreme conditions since 1971! The maps below, on which I quickly sketched my route for the month of june, give a good idea of the current situation.

Although very warm weather is now forecast for the coming week (some main rivers in Southern Norway currently have their highest discharge in a decade because of the resulting massive meltwater pulse), there is no doubt I will walk on snow a lot in june. Orientation could prove to be hard during bad weather spells, crossings of meltwater-swollen rivers, especially in the southern Hardangervidda, will be a pain as the summerbridges are not up yet (although firm snow bridges may hold until late june), and overall progress will be slowed down. I won’t take crampons, but purchased the 143g Yaktrax Pro for more traction and comfort on snow and ice. I will use my more reliable regular compass for the first few weeks and only swap it with a clip-on micro-compass in early july.

Today’s webcam picture from Finse, showing a south-facing slope at 1200m asl, shows what it is still all about… and Finse is one of the few places with below-average snow cover

Hiking the Mullerthal trail

May – the month of the long weekends in Europe! We have four days off during the Ascension weekend and I hit the trail together with Elien for a last hike before the big deal. Our destination is the ‘Little Switzerland’ area in the Grand Douchy de Luxembourg, a 5 hours train journey from home. The term ‘Little Switzerland’ was invented in the early 20th century to promote tourism in the region – the landscape has very little to do with the mighty Alps. In this area, lush beech forest and towering Jurassic sandstone formations attract walkers from Belgium, Holland and Germany. Funny enough, Joery also published a blogpost blogpost about a walk in the area just a week ago.

We start on thursday afternoon in the town of Mersch and quickly climb out of the village. On our first day, we walk a connection trail to the ‘Mullerthal trail’, a 110km waymarked tour along the highlights of the region. After a warming up of two hours, we zigzag through the Noumerleen sandstone formations and rock corridors, a nice preview of what to expect during the coming days. We find a nice bivouac spot in a field near the Meysembourg castle.

Slight rain ticks on the flysheet of the tent most of the night, but the morning brings glorious sunshine again. Our second day is presumably the least interesting of the trip. The trail mostly follows forest lanes and field roads, but also contains some nice sections through narrow valleys like the Gluedbaach and Ernz Noire valleys. In the late afternoon we reach the Schiessentumpel waterfall, presumably the most photographed piece of nature in Luxembourg. And yep, after not encountering any hikers the entire day this spot is pretty crowded. I cannot even take a picture of the nice waterfall and the old bridge without any people on it.

The trail nows steeply climbs through the beech forest up to the valley flanks and we enter a fairytale world of towering sandstone formations and rock labyrinths. Wood mice contantly rustle through the litter at the forest floor as we pass by. We continue for half an hour, then leave the path and steeply climb through the forest out of the valley to find another nice bivouac spot in a field NE of the hamlet of Breidweiler.

The next morning, blackbird morning songs guide us through the wonderful Goldkaul and down to the Constrefer watermill. A bit further, the path suddenly enters a very narrow rock corridor. This is the famous Rittergang, the most spectacular section of the Mullerthal trail. We have to push our backpacks in front of us because it gets too narrow, and even need our headlights for a pitch dark section! Another splendid corridor, the Déwepëtz, follows shortly after. Then the paths climbs up to the plateaus, winds it way towards Scheidgen, and descends all the way to Echternach through the pretty Deisterbaach valley. It’s already late afternoon and still a long way towards the next bivouac locations far enough from civilization, so we stay at a local camping for the night and a shower.

On the last day a long staircase leads us back to the trail. We immediately enter the Wolfsschlucht, perhaps the most famous of the rock corridors in Little Switzerland (although this is mainly due to its proximity to the touristic village of Echternach). A pretty section upstream along the Aesbach leads us to the Houllay caves, where smoke below the vault of the cave indicates someone has camped here last night.

The path steeply climbs towards the village of Berdorf, where we fill our water bottles again at the camping. The trail quickly plunges back down into the beech forest and the last fine rock corridors and ravines rapidly succeed each other. When we round the trail near the Schiessentumpel waterfall, we climb towards the village of Consdorf the catch a bus back home. A nice region to visit!

Many, many maps

“How on earth are you gonna carry all these maps???” is usualy one of the first questions I get when talking about the trip. And you are right, covering the entire route with classic 1/50000 maps would imply buying about 60 maps, that is about 7kg of paper and a spicy 1000€!

I’ll try to do it with less. Most of the maps I will carry are at 1/100000 scale and not 1/50000. I’ve used such maps before in Scandinavia and think they are sufficiently adequate in the (mostly) not too complex landscape. Publishers of such maps are Cappellen Damm Fjellkarten and Nordeca Turkarten in Norway and the Lantmäteriet Fjällkarten in Sweden. For Norway, such maps only exist for the popular trekking areas, mainly in the southern part of the country. The large gaps in between I will fill by just making prints from the Ut.no (Norway) and Retkikartta (Finland) websites. I find prints are also much easier to use while packrafting.

I will carry only 3 maps and a few prints when I start my walk in Lindesness. The remainder will either be taken be friends joining me for a while or sent to post offices along my path. Maps which are of no more use will be sent home the same way.

Thanks to my sponsor Altiplano Books I can purchase my maps at a nice price

This is the complete list:
Cappelen Fjellkart CK48 Setesdalsheiene (1/100000)
Turkart Nr 2557 Hardangervidda (1/100000)
Cappelen Fjellkart CK44 Skarvheimen (1/100000)
Turkart Nr 421 Breheimen (1/100000)
Turkart Nr 73 Dovrefjell Sunndalsfjella (1/100000)
Turkart Nr 710 Dovrefjell-Knutsho (1/100000)
Turkart Nr 731 Forollhogna (1/100000)
Turkart Nr 101 (595) Sylan (1/100000)
Turkart Nr 619 Borgefjell Sor (1/50000)
Turkart Nr 621 Borgefjell Nord (1/50000)
Statens Kartverk Saltfjellkartet (1/100000)
Landmäteriets Fjällkarta BD9 Padjelanta-Sulitjelma (1/100000)
Landmäteriets Fjällkarta BD10 Sareks Nationalpark (1/100000)
Landmäteriets Fjällkarta BD7 Sitisjaure-Ritsem (1/100000)
Landmäteriets Fjällkarta BD6 Abisko-Kebnekaise-Narvik (1/100000)
Turkart Nr 599 Bardu (1/100000)

Why?

I can no longer call backpacking my hobby. It is my passion, absorbing most of my spare time and money. Being out in the mountains for weeks or even months is a mind-blowing experience which seems to make all other things in life trivial.

So why long distance? Chris Townsend once summarized it like this: “Actually the distance doesn’t matter. What is key is time. Time to feel part of nature, time to feel the subtleties and details of a landscape, time to move slowly yet make progress and time, crucially, for backpacking to become a way of life not an escape from life. Long distance is almost a by product. Walk every day for week after week and you will cover many miles. I’ve never felt the actual distance was important. I’ve never set out to do daily big mileages; hundreds and thousands of miles accumulate with time not constantly pushing myself. Because being in the wilds, absorbing the intricacies of nature, listening to the wind, hearing echoes of the past in the rocks, observing flowers and insects and birds are all important I want to have the time to pause and look and listen whenever something beckons or seems interesting. Backpacking is not a race. I don’t want a schedule that says I have to walk ten or more hours a day with few if any halts and no time to enjoy the camping side of backpacking. I think backpacking is about living in nature not streaking through it.” Only after weeks, and only with many weeks of backpacking still ahead, the last notions of daily worries disappear, and all is put into perspective. Eventually there is nothing but the walk. You wake up with it, you go to sleep with it, you breath it.

Besides, I need the feeling of walking something, from point A to point B, to geographically accomplish something. In the past, I’ve made a few walks where I thoroughly explored a certain area by making lots of loops, but after some time the drive to keep going started to fade. Thru-hiking the length of a mountain chain is an overwhelming feeling, fueling body and soul with infinite energy.

My first major backpacking trip was the crossing of the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean. I had just become 20 years old and had never traveled solo before. I had no more than 25 days of serious backpacking experience, yet I planned a route which out-numbered all existing described trans-pyrenean walks in terms of length, denivellation (nearly 60km of climbing) and technical difficulty. I carried a 3kg 2-person tent all the way, and the base weight of my backpack was over 14kg. To most of my friends and not in the least my parents, the plan appeared to be an extremely masochistic suicide attempt. But I was convinced I could do it and gave it a try. I became by far the most moving and eye-opening experience so far in my life. As the weeks passed, a seemingly unconquerable mountain chain changed it face to a vast playing ground, and I felt my body and mind grow stronger by the kilometer. By the time I finished, I felt at home in the mountains, and I felt I had to repeat it. Now five years later, my Pyrenees trek is still the major landmark in my life at which I look back with pride and joy.

I returned to the mountains every year for many weeks, but never had the same mind-blowing feeling of a real thru-hike again. Plans of crossing Scandinavia have crossed my mind for years. This huge peninsula comprises the last real wilderness one can find in Europe. As a student I could not just take 4 months off. As a PhD student I can, thanks to generosity of my supervisor. I’ve spend days pouring over maps, tracing possible routes, choosing between them, and letting the affection with the area grow in my mind. I’ve spend days in front of my computer screen, sending dozens of emails searching for contacts to arrange food drops and logistics. Like always, I’ve enjoyed the planning a lot, but I’m also glad the real thing is now rapidly coming closer.

A walk like this one cannot make every year. Besides practical and social limitations and the planning of it which takes a year of sustained work on its own, the mental rollercoaster of a long thru-hike is too intense to ride too often. But this feels like the right moment.

And finally, from a more philosophical point of view… it has taken billions of years of evolution, and here we are. One of the first generations of the very first species ever to be able to travel the globe and consciously feel and experience it’s raw beauty, which might well be mostly destroyed within a few more generations by over-evolution. I would be ashamed not to make use of such a dazzling privilege.

Somewhere halfway a Pyrenees traverse in 2007

Complete route plan online

2660.9km (1653 miles), 616km of which packrafting and 476km of off-trail hiking. After months of sustained evening work I finally completed the planning on my route. Those of you loving (a lot of) numbers can have a look at this Excel-file with a complete breakdown of the trajectory into nearly a thousand points: PLANNING TRANSSCANDINAVIA 2012

Below, I added some overview maps covering the entire distance from Lindesness all the way up to Nordkinn. These are very large files (10-25MB), so downloading them will take some time. More details can be found in the “route” section of this website!