The light of the polar day

The light of the polar day is an unbelievable experience. It is like the source of life itself; especially looking at in places with 300 km and more above the north polar circle. In the summer time, the sun practically does not set for a few weeks. It almost sound like out of a fairytale… You can spend the whole day in the wind and the sun. But in the cold half of the remaining year, the story gets reversed, and there is very little sunlight, and the nights are very dark, cold and especially long. Sometimes, the darkness gets lightened up by the aurora, which dances on the night’s sky and helps you see vivid fantasies brought to life. But when the sun is standing high above the sky, you don’t even think about the dark nights.

The experience of the polar day we wanted to live out on the north side of Sweden. We did walk for quite some time, a whole month in the mountains, forests and lakes of the Swedish wild, but to experience this special day, we chose a location high above a lake named Torneträsk in the National park of Abisko.

Abisko is known for its winter sports activities, for its nightly exploring of the starry sky and the aurora borealis, and for its wild river Abiskojokk, which, during its existence, created a beautiful canyon along its path.

Early in the noon we did start to climb in the mountain Nuolja and walked across the well-known Kunksleden path. We didn’t walk all of the 425 km of which this Swedish mountain pass consists, but we walked enough to feel the true power of the polar sun.

During the day, countless hikers joined us for the walk, which came in search of the beauty of the Scandinavian nature. So we sat, sometimes chatted with the countless tourists from all over the world, feasted our sight on amazing flowers and the typical scenery there. But at 10 pm there was the last gondola tourist trip to the valley below for the enthusiastic walkers around us. And we were left alone with the waves of the Lake Torneträsk, on the breaking point of the true wild of Sweden and all its might, and in which only a few partridges provided us company or a fleeting, bypassing elk. And those golden colors of the sunset were long, very long.

We wanted to know how the sun sets there, where it does not set at all. A really stupid idea, you may think.  Well, maybe, because we only observed how the sun moved diagonally across the sky. But those golden colors in which it shone, which lasted up to 4 hours and more, were a special kind of experience. Luckily it also rained a few times, so we could take some time to sleep. But, as you know, we live only once.