The Quiet Picture

I’ve never done a hike in the mountains in October before, so it was exiting to see what the day had in store. It turned out that it was all good – the first snow had fallen in the tundra and apart from the occasional snowfall that flew past in the heavy wind, it was a sunny day which allowed us to see the landscape in all its glory. The colours were muted under the thin layer of snow and all the features of the landscape were highlighted, giving it a very graphical quality that you normally don’t see.

We hiked up to the Lill-Skarven fell because there’s a road that takes almost up to the tree line, thus sparing us from wasting time and effort on climbing up the boring part through the forest. Once you’re up there, it’s easy going until you’re at the foot of the mountain but it’s not such a bad climb anyway. It was cold though, so much so that the water in the tube leading out from the water bladder in my backpack was frozen! The October weather is nothing to toy with, the wind was biting through my supposedly wind proof clothing but by the afternoon the sun was sufficiently warm to melt the snow on the ground and the ice in the water tube. But the slight discomfort aside, it was an amazing hike. There’s nothing like the first snow in the mountains!

I had an “off” day today. I thought I would get a delivery today but I didn’t, so that was morning wasted. In the afternoon I took some of the garbage left by the builders to the recycling station in Ljusnedal, which then left me the rest of the afternoon free with no plans for it. I decided to explore the area around the viewpoint on the road between Funäsdalen and Mittådalen and try to spend enough time doing it so I could catch the sunset there. This turned out to be a great decision, because I found a lot of nice spots. A part of this area is spoiled by the powerlines and snowmobile trail markings but I found a few spots where those could be hidden from the composition, and then when I continued further north (not venturing very far from the road) I got away from those distractions and compositions were even easier. Not that I took very many pictures for obvious reasons, but I did make a note to come back here under some other circumstances.

So sometimes it helps not to have a plan and just aimlessly walk around. This is one of my favourite roads in Sweden and I’ve driven it countless of times and I’ve stopped at the viewpoint almost half the time and taken a lot of pictures from it. But never before have I actually explored the area… shame on me!

And the sunset? Didn’t happen. Sun disappeared behind the clouds long before and didn’t show up again. More time for me to have my evening tea then.

One mountain that I’ve meant to explore for a few years now is Ormruet. It’s a sub-1K peak but it’s located in a nice place, for one thing it’s close to the road so it’s only a 2km hike to the top (even shorter, if you’re prepared to climb a vertical cliff wall) and secondly, I’ve speculated that it will provide a nice view towards Ånnfjället, since it’s practically just across the road. Ormruet has a very similar profile to Funäsdalsfjället, which means that it’s ugly to look at but interesting to be at. Instead of one distinctive peak, the top is flat with several ridges with a tarn nested in between two of the ridges. I had a thoroughly enjoyable morning walking around the tarn and checking out the ridges and now I’m determined to come back next summer with a tent and camp out for a night. In the evening you can shoot Ånnfjället and then catch the sunrise and shoot the mountains in the west bathed in the morning light (unlikely that I will catch the sunrise in the summer any other way than camping out…). With such a short hike and relatively easy ascend to the top, it doesn’t matter if you’re lugging heavy gear so it’s a perfect location.

This is probably the sunniest day of the vacation. It can’t get any sunnier in any case! Perfect day for a hike, so I drove to Bruksvallarna and left my car at Rockvallen. I hiked up to the Skenörsfjället peak and it was a real treat. It’s right smack in the middle of the massif between Fjällnäs/Tänndalen in the south, and Bruksvallarna/Ramundberget in the north. It is also higher than the surrounding fells (except for Skarvarna) so the view is spectacular. Yes I know, I say that about every peak… but Skenören really stands out. You can see all the plus-1500m peaks of the region; Stor-Vigeln, Skarddöra, Skarsfjället, Sylarna and Helags. And even Härjångsfjället in the distance. It’s a real primer for Funäsfjällen and fairly easy to get to, if you’re prepared to do the legwork. And today I was treated to special offer with some snow on the high peaks, Skarddöra and Sylarna were particularly nicely decorated.

On the way up there, I found quite a few reindeer antlers. I picked up the best one and strapped it on the backpack to shamelessly use it at first best opportunity. It wasn’t easy… I was in between the sun and the snowcapped peaks, which means that my shadow was falling in the foreground. I had to find an elevated spot for the antler and then lie down on the ground in the lemming droppings to avoid getting my shadow in the shot. Is it cheating to move the antler like that? I don’t know… but at least I didn’t steal it from somebody else’s picture and paste into mine! I leave that to the pros*, LOL!

When I sat down for a cupe of coffee, I saw a lot of lemmings go about their business in the slope below me. One of them appeared just a couple of meters from me, it settled down to eat some grass and totally ignored me. I was thinking that this must be a veritable smorgasbord for hawks and other predators… and would you believe, as I was sitting there, one of those birds starting circling above the spot! I couldn’t resist turning my head to see where it was flying, and maybe it saw the movement because it flew off. It would’ve been too cool if it had swooped down to catch a lemming…

I also saw a sea eagle above the mountain. I think it’s a sea eagle anyway, I don’t have a history of getting my birds of prey right… it was a big bird in any case, like the one I saw in the summer, harassed by three smaller birds of prey (that I won’t even try to ID).

In the evening I made an effort to shoot the sunset. Unfortunately, it’s pointless – you can paint the birches any colour you want and they will still be naked. The only way sunset will be interesting if there’s any cloud and then shoot into it. Considering that this was the last sunny day according to the forecast, I might still have a chance.

*go to your favourite search engine and search for “terje hellesö” and “fusk”

I decided to go to exploration mode today, so I left the cabin with the compact camera in one pocket and a chocolate bar in another. Equipped with a map and a compass, my mission for the day was to find a way to the Kovvograven ravine south from Messlingen. There was a slight problem though – I didn’t know exactly where it was. It’s not big enough to be shown on the maps the same way as e.g. Evagraven does (the !!höjdkurva!! make distinctive curves) so all I had was a vague idea and a plan.

It’s easy enough to get to the region where the ravine is, just walk south from the bridge over Mittån until your reach the plateau with the Middagstjärnen tarn. So I set my compass and followed where the arrow pointed, and gave myself a pat on the back when I came up to the plateau exactly where I wanted to – to the right of the tarn. Now I just had to continue going south, over the plateau and then go a little bit down on the other side and this is where it would get tricky, I didn’t know how much to the east or west I would need to be and I didn’t know at which altitude either. So the plan was to walk down a bit and then change to an east-west direction and walk back and forth until I came across the ravine. I almost laughed when I saw that the ground dropped steeply in front of me when I’d gone a mere 10 metres or so from turning east. Considering how steep the drop was, it was obvious that I had found some kind of a ravine, but there were no cliff walls like in the other ravines I’ve visited. The bottom of the depression was covered with spruce forest and I was wondering if the whole place even qualifies as a ravine at all. I followed it down until it levelled off, and then followed it back up in case it would get a little bit more exciting on top. I had almost given up on the whole place when I saw some cliffs between the spruces to my right and sure enough, I had found it!

Earlier in the summer I wrote about the Öjegraven ravine and what a disappointment it was. Kovvograven was even smaller, but I wasn’t disappointed at all, because it had a completely different character. It wasn’t just Evagraven in miniature scale like Öjegraven was, but it was a much gentler profile with a broad mire bottom and only one spot with cliffs on both sides in the southern end of the ravine. I followed the ravine up and now there were low cliffs only on the western side while in the east the ravine was bordered by a ridge covered with a birch forest.

Getting back from the ravine was obviously even easier than going there. All I needed was a generous southern direction, knowing that if I veered too much to the left, I would end up by the lake, and too much to the right would take me to the river. In other words, it was virtually impossible to get lost but when I found an old path, I decided to follow it anyway, curious to see where it would take me. The answer is that it took me down to a small beach by the lake and I realised that the people who use the trail normally take a boat across the lake. I didn’t have a boat but there’s also a trail that circles the lake (not sure if it circles it completely, so I guess I will have to explore it some other day) so I took it back to the bridge. But if you’re planning to visit Kovvograven, forget about the paths and just go south from the bridge to the ravine and then follow the same way back north. No GPS needed!

My cabin is shaping up nicely. There are only two major jobs remaining and I have a reliable guy to do them and then it’s pretty much done, actually. There are a few minor things that I have to take care of myself, but then again, a cabin owner’s job is never done. Most of the furniture is also in place, I only have one cupboard that’s waiting to be compiled and then I have to get a bunk bed in the guest room. The cupboard can wait, and the bunk bed arrives next week, just in time for my parents’ visit!

I have a two weeks vacation in September. Unfortunately this is a wrong year for a long autumn vacation because the birches are suffering from some kind of fungal infection which turns all the leaves brown and then kills them before the leaves would naturally turn colour. In some places the alpine birch forest was already stripped of the leaves and it looked more like October than August. In some other places the leaves were still hanging on, but they were infected so I expect the leaves to be gone by the time I have vacation. I’m not going to cancel my vacation though, because September is a wonderful time in the mountains. There won’t be any colour explosion but I can still enjoy hiking in the fresh mountain air. And if the weather is not so good, I can just sit on my couch in the cabin and read a book and take it easy… isn’t that what vacations are for anyway?

Spent the weekend at the cabin, and managed to waste most of it on putting together Ikea furniture. 8 hours on a wardrobe, and we were two people working on it! It would’ve been impossible alone. But… there was this one photo session that was worth the trip alone. Full moon rising just before sunset!

We did some scouting in the afternoon, but the first place wasn’t anything special. The second place was something I had figured out should work; I had been there before and felt that it has potential although of course I’ve never used the spot for a moonrise before.

We got to the spot a little bit too early. Moonrise was still about an hour away and to our disappointment, sunset was looking like a dud after a warm and sunny day. So that was a long wait ahead of us while the temperature was dropping, making the waiting all the more difficult. We welcomed any respite from the boredom and even I was happily shooting a distant reindeer with my short zoom, all the while knowing how hopeless it was. Then when I started feeling the cold bite through my clothes, I did some running up and down the plateau we were standing on. When I reached the lower end, I saw an opportunity towards the sunset so I gave up on waiting for the moon to appear from behind the mountain and set up shop at the new spot instead. I made sure that I still had a free view towards east (moonrise) so I would be able to switch shooting direction quickly. Just as I was trying to figure out what shutter speed to use to prevent blowing out the bright blob of the sun that was visible through the clouds, a glance behind my back told me that the moon was actually visible! I abandoned the sunset without hesitation and then realised that my lens was too short to properly compose the moon as it was rising above Blåstöten. But then, sometimes you’re lucky. To my absolute amazement, the sun came out and I found the dwarf birch glowing bright orange right in front of me! I should say that this is how I had planned it, but it really was just pure luck. With this foreground, it was easy to compose when I switched to vertical and zoomed to the max and I was glowing just as happy as the dwarf birch was glowing (unseasonally) orange. So imagine my disappointment when I discovered at home that I didn’t have enough DOF to keep both the foreground and background sharp… the mountain and the moon were soft. It almost broke my heart when I deleted these images.

But then I thought… are those images really beyond rescue? With some resizing and clever sharpening, I might be able to rescue something. With this in mind, when I was reviewing the failed images, I realised that they weren’t even as good as I had thought at first that they were. The sunlight hadn’t reached the mountain yet, I had been so concentrated on the foreground that I missed the light on the mountain. By the time the light did reach the mountain, I had switched camera orientation and zoomed out, which gave me a smaller moon and inferior composition but all-around sharpness as well.

So I’m thinking, what’s wrong with me when I miss something as elementary as checking DOF? If I don’t have the discipline by now to use my knowledge even when the situation is changing fast, then I will never have that discipline… I just have a lot of theories and more regrets. With that said, it was an awesome evening watching that moonrise. It was another awesome evening on Friday on Flatruet when we saw seven (7!) short-eared owls fly around us. And when it comes down to it, it’s these experiences that makes life interesting!

Finally taking a closer look at my vacation pictures. Found one HDR which needed processing, did it manually because I didn’t like the result that any HDR software produced. It still needs some work but I’m undecided if it’s worth the trouble. I was waiting on Flatruet for the sunset to happen with glorious colours, it didn’t do it but a herd of reindeer came running by. In the low light, I got some serious motion blur but it was a concious choice, I wanted to see how it works out.

It was nice to see the pictures from the unforgettable evening at Måns-Erstjärnen. I’m well pleased with some of them, but they all remind me of what a wonderful experience it was. I can still feel the warmth and hear the eerie cry of a loon echo from the distance… just amazing.

In fact, I think I’m still basking in the glow of the vacation. My shutter finger isn’t itching yet, although it did feel good to shoot the white waterlily today. One thing I wonder though, where are all the mosquitoes? There weren’t any at the lake. But… I’m guessing I will find them in the forest. I have some orchids to shoot there and I also need to find some blueberries and raspberries to pick… and I need to get my exhibition ready, it opens on Saturday. Nervous!

It’s the last day of my vacation, then it’s the weekend and back to work on Monday. I decided to do one last hike, then do some cabin maintenance on Saturday and head home early on Sunday.

It was not intentional but it seems like I finish the outdoors part of my vacation in the same place where I started it – at Rockvallen. I wanted to get to the peak of Stor-Skarven, it is 1260 m but it’s one these flat-topped mountains so from whichever direction you look at it, it is always seen as a big round mountain. It has a steep wall towards east, but the rest of it is very gentle and thus hiker-frienly. Except in the beginning, there was a zone of willow bush that was driving me crazy because your feet get tangled up in it. But once I was over this zone, it was one of the most pleasant hikes up the mountain. Either I’m in better condition than I was for two weeks ago or then it was my light backpack, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten up a mountain this easy!

As I mentioned yesterday, I wasn’t too bothered about getting any pictures today so I only carried the little Powershot with me. I wasn’t missing the SLR at all, the light was boring with this high cloud covering the whole sky and veiling the sun. I got one nice opportunity though when I came a across a reindeer and calf and they kindly ran past me with the valley in the background.

On the way down I was able to get a better overview of the willow zone so I found a way through the maze without getting tangled up again. It was a very nice hike to finish the vacation with, a kind of boring hike because nothing much happened but I guess I’ll rather have one these than do something stupid… even if it’s the stupid things I’ll remember best afterwards!

In the evening when I was processing the pictures, I saw a strange light in the window. It had been raining all evening but it turned out that there was a gap in the clouds where the sun was setting, so I had a huge rainbow in one direction and bright orange clouds in the other. The problem is that I’m not familiar enough with my surroundings to know which way to find the best foreground and I was out a little bit too late anyway, the sun was dipping below the horizon and the rainbow disappeared with it. The glow in the clouds stuck around a bit longer but even so I missed the best of it, because I ran in the wrong direction at first and wasted precious time. When I found a better spot (not perfect, but better), it was too late already and all I had was the last rays. Last night it was the kind of sunset where you wanted to keep the light at your back and shoot the scenery lit by the sun. Tonight it was the kind of sunset where you wanted to shoot right into the light!

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I think I’ll spend Saturday on my new couch and maybe watch some of the Frasier episodes I brought on DVD. I’ve only had time to watch one episode so far… I sure don’t need a TV here! The days have been filled with hiking and photography and I’ve barely had time to go through my pictures and write the blog posts. On the other hand, I’ve also been lucky with the weather. It has been a few rainy days, but only one day when it has rained from morning to evening. I’ve also had a few days with warm sunshine to get that summer feeling, but otherwise it’s been perfect for hiking. Perhaps a little less ideal for photography but those few moments when the light worked to my advantage far outweigh the times when it didn’t. There’s only one day when I didn’t get any pictures and that’s the day I drove to Östersund for shopping. Maybe some days I didn’t get any nice keepers, but I also have a “documentation mode” – just grab some shots of the places I’ve been to so I can remind myself of them later on. And this is what I’ve been doing with the blog as well, write the stories and use the pictures as illustration. I know the stories have been a bit on the long side, but thank you anyone who has taken the time to read through!

The other day I lamented how I lacked patience and missed out on nice evening light. I speculated that it was no big loss though, there will be new opportunities. And guess what, I already had that opportunity and it was better than the one I missed! The evening was so calm that even the big lake provided reflections so I didn’t have to settle with the small tarn next to it. It didn’t start too good though, just when I got to my first spot a small cloud drifted in front of the sun and with so little wind, it took a while before it disappeared. In the meanwhile, I was looking at the sky quite frustrated because there was a really nice cloud formation above Ånnfjället. By the time I got the light, the formation had changed already. I almost wished that I had a real wideangle though, so I could contain the foreground and enough of the sky to show the remains of the nice cloud formation. So I used stitching instead, three verticals and it still wasn’t quite enough…

But after that initial wait, it was all good. It was quite an incredible evening, it was warm and the light was great and the water was calm and my mosquito proofing worked, didn’t get bitten once despite the clouds of insects surrounding me every time I stopped. It was already close to sunset when the next cloud drifted in front of the sun, so I had to wait again. But by then I already had a lot of pictures so I decided that I will wait just this one more and then call it quits, it was a perfect evening as it was.

I really can’t describe what a feeling it was to experience an evening like this. My head was full of the impressions and I was wondering if my pictures would do any justice to the scenery. But it turned out that it wasn’t over yet – I had barely driven 50 m from the parking when I looked towards the sunset and saw the mountains silhouette against the warm sky. I quickly pulled over and grabbed the camera one more time. Imagine, I even got the peak of Sylarna that I missed yesterday!

I’m almost thinking that this should be the last picture from my vacation. Wouldn’t it be a perfect ending?

* * *

My furniture arrived before noon, so I spent the day putting it all together. It worked out nicely, because it left me plenty of energy to do this evening excursion. Not like some days when I’m so tired that I’m just hoping that it would be a windy and overcast evening!

* * *

I came back so late that I didn’t have time to do any proper post processing and now that I’m posting this, I’m sitting in daylight which definitely is no good for evaluating pictures (the post is back dated, obviously). I will have to go through all of my pictures next week at home, so there’s a risk that I will be posting more holiday pictures later…