Lying inside the Arctic Circle, with no roads, signed trails, wardened huts, or motorised access, Sarek National Park was established in 1909 and covers 1.970 square kilometres. This most famous of Sweden's national parks is a roughly circular expanse of genuine wilderness, one of Europe’s last; a daunting, glaciated, inaccessible region of 2,000 metre high mountains, densely vegetated trough valleys, unforgiving high-alpine plateaux and turbulent ice-cold rivers fed by glacial meltwater. The landscape feels decidedly primordial, perhaps because the last remnants of the vast Fennoscandian Ice Sheet only receded from the mountains of eastern Sarek some 9,000 years ago, just after the end of the Pleistocene epoch.
Sarek lies at the very heart of the Laponia Area, part of the homeland of the indigenous Sámi people (also known as Laplanders). Laponia was recognised as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1996, as it is the largest area in the world (and one of the last) with an ancestral way of life based on the seasonal movement of livestock in the form of semi-domesticated reindeer.
The only trails found here are those created by the migration paths formed over thousands of years by foraging reindeer herds, which the Sámi in turn followed.
The routes in and out of Sarek are dictated by the enormous valleys that separate its icy massifs, providing corridors into the heart of the national park. The nearest access points are a day away from any trail head, and crossing the park is a serious undertaking, a truly exhilarating experience you are unlikely to forget in a hurry.
Royalty free music by licence from Bensound.com
1) 00:29 A New Hope
2) 03:17 In Our Hands
3) 05:37 Magical
4) 08:08 Adventure
5) 11:23 Awaken
6) 14:45 Thoughts Resolve
7) 17:10 All Around Us
Read the blog about our 100km seven-day trek from Ritsem to Saltoluokta here: purplepeakadve...