The river Skellefteälven today
Between the seasons
Still a lot of snow in Skelleftehamn, still freezing temperatures every single night, still no rain since last year (if I’m right), but …
… spring comes nearer. According to smhi spring has already come to the town Skellefteå some days ago. Seems to fit, because I saw the first coltsfoots in bloom in Skellefteå yesterday. Unlike Skellefteå, Skelleftehamn is located by the Baltic Sea and the Baltic Sea is still covered with ice that cools down the air and causes the beginning of spring to delay by several weeks.
The snow piles on the first two images are remnants of the continuous snow clearing the whole winter. When walking around while taking these photos I experienced snow depths between 0 and 60 cm. Round 60 cm of snow lie in my backyard, too. At least all fences look out of the snow again.
Translation:
| English | German | Swedish |
|---|---|---|
| coltfoot | Huflattich | tussilago |
Small tortoiseshell
Yesterday I saw the first butterfly of the season on the icebreaker Baus. It was a small tortoiseshell. Today I saw another one fluttering in my sunny front yard. It rested on one of the wooden panels and I wondered if and how it can survive after such a long winter with no flowers around.
I sneaked into the house, fetched the camera (it still had the telephoto lens on) and made a shot for this blog. I made it from the street with a distance of 5 metres because I didn’t want to disturb this little fellow. The photo is a 100% crop of the original image, otherwise you would see only a small orange spot.
Small tortoiseshell · nässelfjäril · Kleiner Fuchs · Aglais urticae
Breaking the spring ice
This morning I saw not only the ice fishermen, but also the icebreaker Baus clearing the ice in the port of Skellefteå in Skelleftehamn. In the afternoon I remembered, that I had come into contact with K., one of the crew members on Facebook some weeks ago. I had asked if it was possible to go with the Baus to take photos sometime. K. had answered that I should just go there and ask the people. And so I did today.
I met a guy who works on the icebreaker and learned that it’s hard to make some kind of appointment. In winter no one knows exactly, when ships will arrive or depart due to the weather and the ice conditions and therefore neither when the Baus would start. But they would actually leave in twenty minutes to clear the ice for the ship Ice Star and I was allowed to join …
Sixteen minutes later I was at the dock again, this time with better clothes and my camera equipment that I got from home. How good that I live so close.
I was allowed to enter the Baus and say hello to the captain on the bridge.
He welcomed me, showed me some of the controls to steer the boat and allowed me just to go round everywhere to take photos. I didn’t want to disturb him, because he had to focus on his work and my plan was to make photos, not to interview the crew. At first I went up onto the top deck.
The water was completely covered with crushed ice. Some of the ice floes were at least half a metre thick. Slowly the Baus departed from the dock and I went down to the bottom deck to be closer to the icy sea.
While the Baus was slowly moving back and forth I went on every possible deck. I really enjoyed that freedom that you never can have on bigger ships as e.g. the Hurtigruten ships.
After some time of waiting and some time of moving around the way was clear for the Ice Star. Slowly it departed and followed the cleared channels between the solid ice where it with increasing speed left “Skellefteå Hamn”, the port of Skellefteå in Skelleftehamn.
While my eyes followed the Ice Star I spotted something blue at the horizon. Water! Somewhere behind the island Gåsören the ice had started to break and now open water covered the Baltic Sea behind Gåsören. Maybe the next paddle tour is closer than I think.
The Baus already had started to turn around (the previous photo shows the funnel at the rear) and return to the dock. I enjoyed watching the different types of ice.
Until now, the trip was extremely calm, now it started to get more rumbling, because Baus now went through packed ice – crushed ice that had frozen together and now was split into large irregular chunks. Great channel-like cracks developed in the ice, which soon closed again.
After some more minutes the Baus arrived and after thanking the captain for the opportunity to follow I left the icebreaker. The whole trip took less than 90 minutes, but felt much longer. I’ve been living in Skelleftehamn for almost eight years and it was a great experience to see my place of residence from a completely new perspective.
Thanks a lot, crew of icebreaker Baus!
Seeing the blue open water was a welcome spring sign. I saw two others today:
The first butterfly of the season, a small tortoiseshell that fluttered around the top deck of the Baus and (perhaps less romantic) the first teenager in shorts in front of ICA, the grocery store. I’m still waiting however for the first wild spring flower in Skelleftehamn.
3× black and white
Roof avalanches
Rumble! Roar!! Crash!!!
It’s three a clock in the night. A tremendous noise that shook the house had just waked me up. An earthquake?
No, it was a roof avalanche. It’s the time of the year when temperatures rise and vary between frost and thaw. This causes the snow to partly slide down the roof until all of a sudden large parts of the snow cover can fall down with an enormous crash. And since the snow layer had been frozen over the night this type of snow avalanche would not bury you, it would knock you out or even worse.
There are much larger roof avalanches than the small one on the photo. Yesterday a facebook friend experienced a roof avalanche home. We wrote about 20 to 30 m³ having slid down with blocks weighing between 40 and 150 kilos!
So if you see a sign in the street with the word snöras just give that place a wide berth to protect yourself.
From winter to summer in seven days.
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.
Wonderful rain
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.
Well, Spring, we’re waiting …
Another snow shower in Skelleftehamn. On 102nd February 13th May! Winter is stubborn this year.
One and a half hours later … still snowing …
Next morning: In the night it was snowing strongly and the temperature was round 0°C. At 5 o’clock 8 cm of snow covered the car, the roof and the grass in the garden. But it already had been starting to get warmer and the snow had started to melt. That’s the ugly side of snow weather. I guess in the afternoon the snow will have melted away completely.
And then, Spring? It’s your turn. Show, what you can!
Late spring snow
When I came back from Germany on Sunday it snowed. On Monday and Tuesday some snow fell, too. And so it did today. In the morning a snow shower arrived that was so severe, that everything was white again after a short time. It was quite unbelievable that we have the 10th of May!
Anyway just like the last days today’s snow melted away quite soon and two hours later it was gone. Hardly believable that this short winter-intermezzo had taken place today.
But the conditions here are nothing compared to other places:
- In Katterjåkk in the Swedish mountains there’s still 183 cm of snow.
- On the mountain Mannen (1294 m) in Rauma, Norway it’s almost twice as much: 359 cm!
- The German mountain Zugspitze (m) tops it with 410 cm today!
- Oh yes – I almost forget – Fonna near Jondal in Norway is a sure bet for snow. 500 cm at 1200m, 800 cm at 1450 m!
So, compared to other places we already have Spring in Skelleftehamn despite of the snow showers and the low temperatures. Let’s see how it will be in six weeks. That’s midsummer!