When I saw the fog moving above the river Skellefteälven this morning I had to interrupt my drive to work to take some pictures. It was the coldest morning that I experienced here since last winter. Air temperatures were still above zero but the first ground frost was visible.
When it comes to seasons I like winter the most, but autumn is so beautiful, too.
It’s still quite warm in Skelleftehamn, hardly below 10 °C the last nights, but today it rained and some of the birch trees start casting off their leaves. Summer 2018 is history, autumn is coming.
After two weeks in Iceland Annika and I arrived in Skellefteå today. The first thing I saw after leaving the airport building was this front loader.
The banner fixed to the shovel says “Visst är det kul att skotta snö!”. In English this means: “Sure it’s fun to shovel snow (manually)!”
That’s an interesting welcome in the middle of September.
Bathing in the Baltic Sea is still fun but it starts getting chilly. Today water temperature was round 13 °C, that’s 5 °C less than two days ago. Maybe the strong gusty wind has been mixing the warmer surface water with colder water from the depth.
If the water temperature drops below 10 °C you can call it winter bath. I guess, that will not be long.
The July in Sweden was the hottest since 1756, when temperature measurements began. In Skellefteå it was extremely warm as well in July: 29 days had a maximum temperature above 20 °C, 19 days of them above 25 °C.
There is however a place of eternal winter in Skellefteå, just 3 km away from the centre.
Is it a glacier? Is the ice age coming back? No, of course not, this area is just Skellefteå’s snow dump. The last winter was long and snowy and more than 13000 trucks transported snow to this place until the end of April. This resulted in a snow pile of 25 meters in height – another record.
No wonder, that there is still a lot of snow left despite the warm summer. At the edge Tussilago was flowering as if it were spring. The snow was surprisingly clean, only grit and a bit of rubbish showed that I was near civilisation.
Call me stupid, but I had to touch the ground to feel the icy snow – yes, it was cold. It may be tempting to visit this place on a hot summer day, but that’s maybe not the best idea. For one the place is anything but beautiful and for another not without risk, because there could be invisible holes under the icy snow. I was extremely cautious while taking these pictures.
If you would ask me about the strangest place in Skellefteå in summer, the Skellefteå snow dump was definitely a candidate.
The weather of the last weeks has been hot, mostly too hot for me. Even today’s thunderstorm and heavy rain showers didn’t manage to cool down the temperatures below 20 °C. I’m really longing for cooler weather. Since I cannot change the weather itself I can only provide some winter photos from the archives. Voilà:
Last Tuesday at 4 o’clock in the morning a car approached Tallvägen, the street where I’m living. The car is a Saab 9-5. This car once belonged to me, now it belongs to friends who live 1100 km in the South. They had come to paint my house together with two more helpers that would arrive at the airport in the evening.
I still can hardly believe that four people could paint a house within two days, but they managed. It was exhausting work due to temperatures up to 30 °C and not a single cloud on the sky.
The first day we went out of bed at 3 o’clock (!) to use the less hot early morning hours. Especially Astrid hardly stopped painting until 21:30 and I considered making doping tests. The next day we started at 7 o’clock but it was soon so hot that we took a long, long siesta to avoid the heat. Beside of small details we finished the painting in the evening.
I write “we” but as a matter of fact I didn’t help at all with the painting due to problems with my elbow. I provided small help here and there and paid all the food but I have a very bad conscience anyway. On the other side, Astrid and Hein did not work for free either. It’s their payment for the Saab 9-5 mentioned above which I gave them last year.
While Astrid, Nicolas and Luka focussed on painting, Hein – a professional carpenter – also replaced rotten parts of the facade, lifted the winter garden so that the door opens and closes again and fixed many other details. I’m extremely grateful.
Here’s the team:
Here’s the result (choose your favourite photo):
Thanks a lot for your fantastic help!
@Nicolas und Luka It was really nice to meet you.
@Hein und Astrid: Have fun with the car, it’s yours!
This evening a hedgehog sniffed around in my garden. It ignored the water bowl, probably looking for food. I put on my big telephoto lens to take a portrait but the hedgehog had other plans. It approached so fast, that it soon was too near for taking pictures. And it came nearer and nearer until it almost bumped into my leg. It sniffed a bit, considered me as completely uninteresting and continued its way through the grass of my backyard.
Thanks, Astrid for the Photo.