The Quiet Picture

I had this great plan, a short hike in the morning and then wait for the weather to improve and do a longer hike in the afternoon. A slight problem though, the weather got worse in the afternoon. Since I don’t have any Internet connection or even a mobile phone signal at the cabin, I can’t check the weather forecast in the morning to help me plan for the day. Yesterday when I checked, it told me that afternoon would be better…

In early evening when the raining finally stopped I put on my rain gear and took off towards Fiskhålsgraven. I wasn’t interested in the ravine this time, but I was very keen on checking out the little brook that runs parallel with the trail. When I got to the brook, I was feeling less and less enthusiastic about the whole thing though. With the rain jacket and pants on, it was hot. I had covered my hands and face with mosquito repellant, but as the water trickled down on me from the trees as I walked through the thick forest to get a better view of the brook, I knew the repellant would be washing off. And when I stopped, the hordes of mosquitoes were all over me. Not very pleasant. So I found myself hoping that I wouldn’t find any photo opportunities, and when I did, I tried to find all kinds of reasons why the picture wouldn’t work anyway. It took a lot of will power to set up the gear and take a picture anyway!

I also found some “new” ferns. Since I didn’t have the Powershot with me, I had to use the SLR for the ID shots. It meant that after I had used the polariser for the waterfalls, I had to remove it so I could take some snapshots of the ferns. And then I found some waterfalls, so it was back on with the filter. When I came across another fern that I needed to ID, I almost screamed out loud! I was anything but enjoying the conditions.

The best waterfalls are upstream and when I got to this one particularly fine spot, I forgot about my misery and happily composed my pictures. After all that walking through a wet and dense forest, it was slightly ironic that this spot was so close to the trail that I needed to clone out a trail marker in one of the pictures. The brook got less interesting again further up and the misery of the hot rain clothing and itching mosquito bites surfaced again so I didn’t think twice about turning back.

The Messlingen area is rather oligotrophic so there’s hardly anything of any botanical interest growing here (not including the lake, that’s another matter). However, this brook is maintaining its own little botanical world – perhaps not very many different species, but some of them are very numerous, I have probably never seen so much alpine blue-sow-thistle (Cicerbita alpina) before. Orchid-wise I found a few heath spotted orchids and one hot spot for the lesser twayblade, a very small area with dozens of this small flower. But the most interesting discovery however was the hard fern (Blechnum spicant), I know there is one spot a few km north from Loos where this fern still grows, geologically isolated. My guide showed it to me a few years ago and back then when I was a beginner with orchids, a fern didn’t really set my world alight. But I took a picture of it anyway and it helped me to keep the fern in my mind, so when I saw it now I knew immediately what it was. The interesting part of this discovery is that it’s not supposed to grow here, no more than in Loos. The 1992 flora inventory (Bengt Danielsson, Härjedalens kärlväxtflora) only gives 11 confirmed spots for this fern in Härjedalen and the closest one to Messlingen is east from the Grundsjön lake. So I’m pretty chuffed about my discovery!

I’m on vacation. Two weeks! Amazing luxury, I don’t even want to hear when was the last time I had such a long a vacation. The cabin is ready enough to be my home for the whole period, I have hot water and the toilet ventilation works. The biggest problem I have with the cabin is the lack of furniture, the lack of storage space is driving me crazy. I have my things spread all over the floor (well, nothing new there, I have things all over the floor at home as well…) but it’s the kitchen area in particular where the lack of storage space is a problem. I’m waiting for Ikea to deliver my order, I was silly enough to think that the 5-7 working days delivery time mentioned on their home page would cover the whole country but I’m not so lucky, it takes them 10 days which means that I will only get the furniture on the 11th. Unless it’s delayed, of course.

I spent the Saturday mounting the furniture I already had. The weather is nothing stellar so it’s not like I’m missing out on anything major if I skip a hike and I also just realised that two weeks is a long time – there’s a lot of hiking to be done yet!

So the hiking started today. I drove to Rockvallen, it’s great for orchids and other flowers and then up on Kariknallarna you have the waffle cabin (even if their waffles are nothing special, what I really miss is Djupdalsvallen) and from there, it’s an easy hike to Hästkläppen so I can claim a new peak.

There’s really nice alpine forest on the way up. I was delighted to see all the ferns, the season is still early and the ferns are bright green. The early season was evident up on the alpine tundra as well, there is some snow left and in one place the trail was blocked by a big snowfield. I reckon some spots are only a month away from becoming glaciers – the snow is probably gone in August and in September it could already be snowing again. But of course it varies from year to year and somehow I get a feeling that the season is late this year.

When I started climbing up to Hästkläppen, I found a lot of dwarf cornel. It’s not a rare flower but maybe I don’t visit the places where they grow because I don’t often see them. So I made the most of the opportunity and picked a younger individual which still had a pale green colour, normally those bracts are white. And note, the actual flower is only the black cluster in the middle!

And something very cool happened when I was approaching Knallen. There was a huge bird in the sky, so I grabbed my binoculars (which I’m finally carrying with me, after years of cursing that my binos are in the car) to take a closer look. It was still only a dark dot against a white sky, but the size was obvious – must be a golden eagle! After following it for a while with the binoculars, I finally decided to try and take a picture. I only had the 150mm macro lens which is no bird lens for sure, but it was able to focus on the small dot without hunting at all. The crop is ridiculous but the silhouette is clear. Further in the distance I saw another big bird but it had a white tail, so I wasn’t sure if it was the same species. But when I checked the bird guide later, it turned out that juvenile golden eagles have white tails. This was the first time I saw a wild golden eagle, and I got two of them at once! And you know what, during all that time that I was observing the eagle, it didn’t flap its wings at all. Not once. What a cool experience!

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Towards the end of the hike I was developing a bad headache that started from aching shoulder muscles – either I hadn’t been drinking enough, or the backpack is too heavy. I now have a hydration system in the pack which is very nice, I can sip water without stopping but it’s difficult to say exactly how much water you’re drinking. Although I thought I was sipping often enough, it turned out that it wasn’t a lot anyway, I had one liter in the system but I had only drunk 1/3 of it. Not good. The backpack weighs about 9 kg with the stuff I had in it in today (9 kg!! I didn’t even have a spare lens in it, where does the weight come from?) and although it feels good and balanced on my back, it does wear me out after a trip up and down a mountain. But I’ll survive. What are painkillers for anyway?

Time to explore the local forest again. I remember there should be a spot with a lot of ferns not very far from home, previously when I’ve walked past I was looking for other plants but I was almost sure I would find some ferns there. I hadn’t gone more than 20-30 m from the house when I came across a lesser butterfly orchid! I’ve walked this way countless of times but never saw a butterfly orchid. Now that I know it’s there, I can even see it from my living room window! It was in a good position at that, so of course I had to take some pictures. Then I checked out my regular lesser butterfly orchid spot and again had to stop and take more pictures. Not far from that, I came across a freakishly big heath spotted orchid. Maybe it’s not big in height, but the flower cluster was as tight as I’ve ever seen.

Still on my way to the fern spot, I finally decided to take some pictures of the bird’s foot trefoil. Every year I think about taking pictures of this wonderfully yellow flower, but every year I don’t – I mean, it’s growing everywhere, I’ll take the next opportunity, right?

Finally I reached the humid fern spot and found all the mosquitoes as well. Been wondering where they were when I was able to do all the shooting so far without the pesky devils. Anyway, my bug spray was working so I just tried to ignore them and concentrate on the ferns. It turns out that the compact camera is my best ID aid. I can take quick shots from above and below and then overall for later study, so I don’t have to rip off any plants and carry home. The macro lens is less convenient for that, and using a 150mm lens for an overall shot of a meter high plant would be too much of a challenge anyway!

I have to say, the ferns are fascinating. There’s a whole lot of geometry in them with regular and repeating patterns. Maybe it gets a bit boring after a while to take similar compositions with minute differences between species, but they are an absolute treasure for studying the plants afterwards. There’s so much to them that I didn’t see on the spot, but that’s one of those things you learn to look at when you keep at it for a while. An exciting new world!

On the way home, I passed by the skiing track. I had heard that the storm a few weeks ago had felled a lot of trees here and indeed it was a sad sight. Some trees had fallen on the power line, so I’m wondering if they have enough money to fix it. Not that it’s really a problem for me, I didn’t need the illumination last winter at all. Instead, I was a bit irritated when someone had turned the lights on, because they stopped me from shooting the aurora!

We made an excursion to one of the best – or the best – botanical places in Loos. We were there a couple of years ago but it was rainy and cold and my fingers were frozen, so it didn’t make quite such an impact on me as it should have, because the variety of life is just astonishing. All kinds of rare or rare-ish plants have a home here, and even the common plants were special – they were growing in freakishly large sizes. At first when I saw a common butterworth (Pinguicula vulgaris), I thought it was a different species of butterworth because it was twice the size they normally are (and let’s face it, we only have three species of butterworth in Sweden and the other two are smaller and don’t grow here anyway). Lily of the valley leaves were so big that I had to double check them because they started to look like lady’s slipper leaves (which we also found). And the twayblade grows with three leaves. I felt like Alice in Wonderland!

We had two specific plants we were looking for, besides of just generally admiring the plant life (which the bears seem to appreciate as well, judging by the frequent tracks). First one was the rare mountain bladder-fern (Cystopteris montana). It took us a while but we finally found it, unfortunately there were fewer of them than the last time and they were much smaller as well. The second plant we wanted to find was the wonder violet (Viola mirabilis), and when we found it I understood why it would be called like that – it was enormous! Well that’s not really the reason why it’s called a wonder violet, the name really refers to the self-pollinating flowers that don’t open up in the summer. The flower kind of has two lives, first it blooms in the spring with the typical violet flowers and size, but then instead of disappearing like the rest of the violets, it just keeps growing until it reaches this gigantic size. I had read in the book that it would be big… but when I first saw the leaves, I thought “funny looking marsh marigold leaves” until I realised that it was the plant we had been looking for!

Despite all this abundance, I didn’t really take any pictures to speak of. I could easily spend a day there just shooting and come back the next day for more, but now I just settled with the visual input. Besides all the natural wonders, I also found that I am increasingly attracted to ferns. I’ve always liked them but I’ve never made any particular effort to either shoot them or learn their species. But this time when we were looking for a fern, I paid extra attention and… I think I have to start learning them. They can be difficult to tell apart and sometimes you need a loupe and observe the spores on the underside of the leaves to id them, but the benefit of doing that is that the spores develop late in the summer when you no longer have so many flowers to look at.

So… ferns. Only 20 pages in Den Nya Nordiska Floran, piece of cake! Not.

If I ever again decide to have the midsummer week as a holiday, please do me a favour and remind me that I’m an idiot. How many years has this happened now? June is statistically one of the rainiest months of the year… so I shouldn’t be surprised to find that days just get washed away. Like today. It was raining in the morning, pouring by afternoon and the whole thing finished off with a big thunder. In the evening it was finally dry enough to venture out. I am well prepared to photograph in rain, but there’s a limit. Add some wind and it’s a recipe for sitting in front of the computer instead!I was determined not to let a day pass without taking some pictures, and noticed that the ferns looked rather photogenic. I wanted to shoot the ferns last year, but somehow it never happened (after all, they are right behind my empty nextdoor garage so it’s such a stretch to get there with the camera). Maybe next year I can not shoot something else.