A short tour round the peninsula Kallholmen, just to open the kayak season.
… at least the “no-ice” kayak season. It’s not my first tour this year, but the first one was a winter tour four months ago and completely different.
I hardly can remember the intense snow fall a week ago, when I look at a day as today.
Today in a nutshell: sun, shorts, temperatures between 15° and 22° C, sandals, blue sky, t-shirt only, ice cream.
It looked like early spring with only some of the birches starting to come into leaf but it felt more like high summer with today’s temperatures.
Annika and I have been in the “Arboretum Norr” today, just five days later as last year. Last year we could see many different species of flowers, this year only some, mostly Tussilago and Alpine Penny-cress, the two flowers that use to bloom first in the season. No wonder, April and May has been colder than last year. But today warmth attracted many butterflies, such as this European peacock.
And Tussilago is a beautiful flower anyway.
Yesterday it started to rain, just when I entered the car to drive to Umeå. It drizzled and the road started to get wet. On my way the rain increased and became more and more intense.
Between Lövånger und Sikeå it just poured down and my windscreen wipers had hard work to do.
You may wonder why I write a blog article about rain and show a really poor photo. When you come from counties such as Germany or the UK you’re probable used to rain.
Me too, but I can hardly remember when the last rain happened here. The whole April and the first half of May were so cold that almost all precipitation came as snow, not rain.
Sometimes we had got a warmer day with sun now and then – one day I saw even the first butterfly of the season – but the Swedish weather forecast predicted cold snowy weather again and quite often they were right.
And so we got snow in Skelleftehamn 6 days ago, or 9 days ago, or 12 days ago, or 27 days ago, or 34 days ago, or many other days in between, where I either had been away or just didn’t want to blog about off-season snow falls again.
That’s why I was so glad about yesterday’s and last night’s intense rain falls. They seems to end a period of an “eternal almost-winter” and hopefully will have started a period of warm spring. And one day – so it is told by the old legends – even the bleak trees may start to come into leaf and the world will become green again.
Today morning was the 103rd February. It has been so cold and snowy the night and morning that I refused to call it 14th May.
Some random photos, taken between 6 and 7 o’clock where temperatures had started being above zero again:
It took the sun some time to melt away the late snow, but this evening most of the snow was gone and I was content to call today’s date 14th May again.
Winter is finally gone. Winter is gone? Well, if you’ll look at the photos below you see that most of the lake Rudtjärnen is still covered with ice and that due to the cold temperatures this evening even the open parts starts to freeze over again.
But hey, that’s part of Spring, too. So I just say: winter is finally gone! Am I right? We’ll see …
Valborgsmässoafton, the day before the Walpurgis Night is a quite important feast in Sweden and uses to be celebrated with a big bonfire.
Personally I connect the 30 April and the 1 May to last seasons snowfalls. It snowed on 1 May 2014, it snowed on 30 April 2015, so it didn’t surprised my that quite a lot of snow fell in Skelleftehamn today – round 5 – 10 cm.
But something was different this year.
I’m not in Skelleftehamn. Nor am I in Sweden. I’m about 2000 km south-southwest in Freiburg near the Black Forest.
I love mountains because you can look far and I love snow. After hesitating a bit – I can be quite lazy! – I picked myself up, packed some clothes, equipment and food, walked to the main station and took the train to High Black Forest to “climb” the Feldberg, Germany’s highest mountain outside of the Alps. The Feldberg has been already free of snow this spring, but the cold weather with high precipitation brought a lot of new snow to the mountain tops this week.
But today it promised to be warm and sunny.
Already from the train you could see some of these snow-covered tops and patches of snow everywhere, but the trees were green and many flowers were blooming. The same in Feldberg-Bärental, where I left the train and started my hike. The path itself was bare of snow, but the slopes beside the path were covered with wet snow.
Soon I arrived at the Feldsee, a lake formed by the last Ice Age. Here I made a short stop, drank some water, took some photos and continued up through the forests, where the path not only got much smaller, but much snowier as well.
I went up the snowy and slippery path through the forest and came first to a Hotel with a parking place. That’s exactly those things I don’t want to see, when I’m outdoors to enjoy nature. Anyway it was just a short interruption, now another way climbed uphills. I wasn’t alone at all and so many people had used the same way before me, that it was almost completely snowless.
Soon (but a bit out of puff; we don’t have mountains in Skelleftehamn) I approached the first top. Not the Feldberg but the Seebugg (1448 m). I guessed that the very top of the Feldberg itself would be quite crowded and took a rest between these two tops.
You see the rubber boots? Quite good for snow but too warm when not cooled by the snow. I put them off while resting right after having taken this photo.
But the Feldberg (1493 m) was near and I continued my tour on the broad snow-ploughed street-like way.
From the top I had several views.
First of all I saw many other people. Then the snow covered slopes other white mountains nearby. Behind them the green springlike lowlands.
And far away in the south I could recognise the faint snow covered mountains of Switzerland, some of them are almost three times as high as the Feldberg!
Many people had sneakers on or flat shoes, but down jackets that I considered much too warm. Since I had left the forest I only had a t-shirt on because I found it really warm, even on the top. On the other side I was probably the only one with rubber boots on today. They belong to my usual baggage, while mountain boots don’t. Anyway the rubber boots have one advantage when combined with a waterproof camera. You can make pictures like these:
You might have guessed it. This photo was taken at/in the Feldsee not on the Feldberg.
The descent was quite unspectacular and much shorter, since I took another way. A bus brought me back to the very same train station were I’d started the tour four hours ago.
What a late spring we got this year. Still the seasons feels quite wintry and many of the fields and meadows are still covered with snow, only partly and slowly being defrosted by the spring sun.
The migrant birds however had started to fly northwards already – first the Whooper swans and geese, then the Common cranes.
I caught another bird by chance in mid-air and asked for help on Facebook not knowing what kind of bird it was.
This flying fellow is a Smew and according to the comments on Facebook I got it seems to be quite rare here. A photographical chance hit.
Since I was already quite near Bjuröklubb on my “bird hunt” I took the last 12 kilometres to the parking place at this peninsula. Parts of the northern bay Gärdviken was still covered with ice – apparently thick enough to bare the two ice fishers who sat or lay upon it. But round the eastern part that is more exposed to the sea the water was open, only some ice floes that stranded at the shallow shore indicated that summer is still some months away.
| English | German | Swedish | Latin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whooper swan | Singschwan | Sångsvan | Cygnus cygnus |
| Common crane | Kranich | Trana | Grus grus |
| Smew | Zwergsäger | Salskrake | Mergellus albellus |
Friday, 31 Mars: I rehearsed for next days jazz concert with AÅO Trio and Hans Åkesson and it was sunny in Skellefteå.
Saturday, 1 April: I played that concert at the very same place and it snowed. April weather!
Sunday, 2 April: It continued snowing and a new layer of 5 cm of snow covered Skelleftehamn. What a nice birthday present for a winter lover like me!
Still Sunday: While the ice fishing season in Skelleftehamn is finally over, the ice fishers on the big lake Burträsket beside the town Burträsk took advantage of the last days of save ice. And it was many of them!
Monday, 3 April: We had a great late winter day with blue sky above our heads and fresh, white snow under our feet, when we took a promenade along the river Skellefteälven. We – that’s not only Annika and me but also my mother who visited me for some days. It was the first time that she came outside of the summer months and I’m really glad that she got some nice winter impressions.
Yesterday, 4. April: Yesterday it was almost 13 °C in town.
Today, 5. April: it was colder and partly cloudy, but we got a fantastic sundown. What a colourful contrast to the dull weather the ice fishers had experienced.
And the weather next weekend? Well, I don’t know and the weather institute neither. That’s two weekend forecasts of the SMHI – the 1st from Monday afternoon, the 2nd from Tuesday morning:
When it’s as warm and sunny as today many ice fishers enjoy sitting on their little folding stools on the ice, that still covers a small part of the bay Kallholmsfjärden in Skelleftehamn. I guess it’s both the glorious springlike weather as well as the knowledge that there may not be many opportunities left to set foot on the ice and do “pimpelfiske” this season. The open water in the background is quite near.
Some hours earlier: I stand at the very edge of the peninsula Näsgrundet and look at the Baltic Sea, which is partly ice covered and partly open. As it looks, I could both walk and paddle to the island Gåsören. I do neither nor. I don’t dare walking since the ice may be weak and I’m just too lazy to take the kayak today.
Yesterday Annika and I went to Vännäsby , 25 km away from Umeå, to view the 30th Vindelälvsdraget which is the world biggest draught dog relay according to the organisers. It started in Ammarnäs in the Swedish mountains on Thursday and ended just in Vännasby on Sunday. That’s a distance of 381 km in three and a half days.
Some of the competitors used a sledge pulled by four to six dogs, but most of them skated on skis and had one or two dogs dragging (more or less). They came along on the frozen river Vindelälven, turned into the river Umeåälven, which they had to leave right after the bridge. Some of the teams managed it perfectly while others had to shout höger! (right) to the dogs several times until they obeyed. The river bank is quite steep and was a real challenge for the discipline of the dogs. One of them just rolled in the snow while the skier tried not to slip and fall, while some others were shortly distracted by the smell of the grilled sausage by the trail. However all teams managed to come up where there were only some 100 metres left to the finishing line.
The speaker at the finishing line was great. His talk was so “adagio”, laid back and completely free of any stress. I really enjoyed his almost zen-like moderation which was the total opposite of the normal sport presenters stressful reporting attitude. My kudos!
Some photos:
Links: Website / Information pdf (both in Swedish)