Walking the Kungsleden under midnight sun

The Kungsleden — the King's Trail — runs for 440 kilometres from Abisko in the north to Hemavan in the south through some of Scandinavia's most remote mountain terrain. I walked the northern hundred kilometres from Abisko to Kebnekaise in early August, when the sun stays above the horizon for twenty-two hours a day and the willow ptarmigans are still raising chicks in the heather beside the trail. The light is the variable that no photograph reproduces: a perpetual amber quality, like standing inside a lantern, that makes the most ordinary stretch of birch forest look like a passage from a book about somewhere else. The Swedish Tourist Association mountain cabins along the route are a civilising influence: self-catering kitchens with gas stoves, simple bunks, and a sauna at every fourth station. At Alesjaure, the cabin manager had been running the hut for eighteen consecutive summers and could identify exactly where each group had come from by the state of their boots.