EUROPEAN DIVIDE TRAIL - A Day In The Life As A Bikepacker
I'm riding the European Divide Trail from the trail head up in the frozen shores of Northern Norway, through the vast wilderness of Finland and down to the deep forests around the Arctic Circle in Sweden. During the first three days on the EDT I made it through the Norwegian section and almost the entire Finnish section, and I was just about to cross the border into Sweden. In this extra long episode I will take you along a whole day on the EDT. The ins and outs of my daily routines. All the way from packing down my tent in the morning to finding a campsite in the evening. During the day I encounter wild animals along the road, both large and small. And of course I do a little bit of a mosquito dance at the end as well. So will you be my riding partner for this
fourth day along the EDT here in the Arctic? This place, this place is swarming with mosquitoes! [Music] Good morning and welcome to day four on my tour here along the European Divide Trail. Just after I shut off the camera yesterday and got got into the tent the sky is basically opened. I realized I was quite lucky to find this lean-to shelter or Laavu as they call it here in Finland, because I stayed dry pretty much all throughout the night. However this morning there is some sort of dampness so the rainfly was kind of damp. So I'm just drying it off on the back side of this lean-to shelter now in the morning. For the first couple of nights I've
had really bad sleep. I've had a leaking sleeping pad that has kept me up all throughout the night. I've been basically putting in air every hour or every other hour or so. So it's been quite a a task. I decided to seek out the leaking hole or holes as it turned out to be yesterday, and I found two of them so I've been duct taping them. And with a positive result, because I this
night I only had to get up once and put some more air into the mattress. When I come back home again I'm going to do a proper check on on the whole sleeping pad and fix it properly. But duct tape will have to do for now. So this is a big day, we're going to cross into Sweden after about 60 or 70 kilm. It has been raining throughout the night so I I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the trail isn't that wet and slippery. But I'm guessing it's been sunny out for a couple of hours
so I hope most of it has dried up since then. So let's pack up the tent and hit the trail again! [Music] And we're off to a great start! We have clear blue skies and and just perfect riding temperatures. I think it's about like 18° C right now. I like it to stick this way all throughout the day [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Okay, it seems like we have a bit of a problem up here. But I'm guessing this is only to fence off the different reindeer territories. I'm going to see if I can get through this. However the surface isn't as smooth as back on that gravel road so I'm in for a bit of a bumpy ride here for the next maybe 10 or 15 km. And just as I was packing up this morning I guy drove
by and saw my bike and tent and came over to talk to me. He was also avid bikepacker, and he told me that this road coming up here was a bit bad, but he looked at my tires and thought it was going to be okay. But he he advised me to go back and take the paved road instead. But I kind of want to stick to the European Divide Trail as much as I can, so I get the real experience. But yeah, we'll have to see about this one [Applause] Well as they say, it's all part of the adventure. The thing here in Scandinavia
and Finland is that private roads are accessible to bikes. When they're fenced off like that with a with some sort of gate it's only for cars. Bikes and pedestrians are always allowed to use these private roads, so you shouldn't let any barriers or gates turn you off if you were to approach them during your ride here on the European Divide Trail [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Yesterday I told you about the benefit of going here in the early part of the season. I started now in late May early June to avoid most of the mosquitoes. The bad part about this season is that the roads have just thawed up after the snow. As they prepare the roads for heavier trucks
and forestry machines and so on, they put a lot of these very big gravel, almost pebble like stones on top of the surface, as you can see here. At least on these smaller Forest Service Roads. It's quite slow going when you're cycling on these types of roads. If you go later on in the season it's going to be pushed down by the vehicles that drive on on the surface, and it's going to be much smoother. But now in the beginning of the season it's pretty tedious and slow going We've come on to a another road now, and this one is almost as bad as the last one. There aren't that many pebbles on the road surface, but it's very uneven and the worst thing: take a look at that climb over there! There's this Swedish guy that's out now and trying to set the fastest known time on the European Divide Trail called Andre Jonsson, and I was following his journey. He started about 2 weeks weeks before me, and when he was passing through this area he
had to push his bike through the snow. So it's only been like two weeks since the the the snow disappeared from these basically unmaintained roads. So I was quite lucky to be able to to start when I did. Otherwise I would have been pretty slow going walking and pushing your bike through the snow in these woods. The thing is we've been having a really severe winter up here in the north part of Europe this year. I mean back home in Skellefteå we had like at least a meter of snow for basically the whole winter. And spring was about one week long. So we went from having
a meter of snow until we got 25° warm weather in about a week. So everything thing melted away pretty quickly, we had a lot of problems with flooding. That kept me pretty worried about this trip, because this is way further up north than I live. So I thought the spring was going to be a couple of weeks late here as well, but seems like it's dried up for for the most part. And for the first couple of 2 or 3 days I was basically just riding on paved roads, so I guess that helped out a lot as well. I have about 1 and 1/2 km left on this unpaved road, then I'm going on
to a bigger paved road up ahead here. It's been quite slow going so far, but I think I'm going to be able to make up some distance when I when I hit the paved road coming up here in a couple of minutes. Actually the road surface isn't that bad right now, I'd like to stay on more of these types of soads. I don't like the the pebbles, but I don't really mind going on these roads either I just stopped here to have a short snack break at this lookout point and trail head.
I'm just passing through what seems to be Finland's third largest National Park Since I left camp this morning it's basically being hills all over the place. Yesterday was super flat, this day has been the total opposite. And I've also been dealing with a quite nasty head/ side wind. And after I get to the border which is in about 20 km I'm going to turn slightly to the South which means I'm going to head right into the wind. So it's going to be probably even worse, but hopefully once I get to these smaller gravel roads some of the wind will be taken out by the surrounding trees. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the wind is going to die down in the afternoon. But I'm not complaining, I've had nice roads and landscapes around me. So now I
just want to get to the border town Muonio and have a bit of lunch. So so far I've gone about 47 km in 2 and 1/2 hours, and the temperature right now is at 22°. So it's perfect riding temperatures. This is my new Garmin solar powered bike computer that I just bought. And I want to
send a special thanks to all of my patrons who made this purchase possible. Big thanks to you! I've been really enjoying using the by computer so far and if you'd also like to be a patron of the channel and help me out and send me on journeys like the one I'm on right right now. You can check out the link in the description below and find out how you can support the channel as well Finland is known for being super flat but this day has proved the difference. And Finland is not a big Alpine skiing destination, but however up here in Lapland they do have some ski resorts. Levi and Ylläs are probably the most well known. This one behind me called Olos is also one of them,
but this one isn't that big. It's basically the same height as the one we have right in the middle of town in Skellefteå where I live. So this is a pretty small one if you ask me. I'm just 7 km away from the border town Muonio now and I'm really starting looking forward to lunch. I have a big descent coming up here and hopefully I'm just going to glide into town Take a look at this funny sign that I found at the side of the road [Music] [Music] [Music] I just made a stop at the supermarket and look what I bought. Since this was my last day here in Finland I had to pick up some extra finish chocolate and finish licorice. That one is my favorite. For lunch I'm going to have a taco salad, and I bought some cookies for the rest of
the day to enjoy, a couple of bananas, a protein shake plus mineral water for lunch. Now I'm just going to look for a picnic table to have my lunch, preferably down by the water. Plus I'm also going to see if I can find a gas station to fill up my water bottles before I go over the bridge over to Sweden. I've had my lunch, I found a table but it wasn't exactly the most picturesque surroundings. It was just outside of the supermarket. The next order business was to find some water and in a
few of the K markets that I've been to earlier they've had a toilet or a sink to fill up your water bottles. But they didn't have that this time, so I had to check the map and look for a gas station. There were three of them, and the two first didn't have any water. But this one the third one looked a little bit bigger and they had a store inside with a nice toilet, where I was able to fill up my water bottles again with some fresh cold water. I also noticed that
there was a another bikepacker parked just outside. I couldn't see him or her inside, but I guess him or her is doing the same kind of route that I'm doing, the European Divide Trail. So I'll probably meet them later on. Finland sort of has the same system with the government owned liquor stores as in Sweden. This one called Alko the Swedish one is called Systembolaget, and I'll show you that later on. In Finland you can buy beer and cider in supermarkets, but if you want hard liquor you have to go to one of these government owned Alko stores. And these are just
found in major towns, so this is the first one I stumbled upon on this trip. They're not open all the time either ,that's the same thing in Sweden, it's kind of a limited opening hours. They're basically open between 10 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. in the afternoon and closed on Sundays of course That's where I should have eaten my lunch Nice little town this one, Muonio. Now I'm only a couple of kilometers away from crossing the border
into Sweden, so this is the last you'll see of Finland on this bikepacking trip. My bags are pretty jam packed with the finish delicacies in the form of licorice and chocolate, that's what the fins are known for. You should look out for for the Finnish brand called Fazer, that's my favorite. We have them in Sweden as well, but couple of different varieties of them here in Finland. Once in Finland, right? By the way the bikepacker I saw back at the gas station, I saw him later on cycling through town and it was a he. I don't know which direction he was going in so he might be able to catch me later on here. Since I'm stopping and filming all the time
so I'm quite slow going. But at the same time he seemed to be carrying along a crap ton of stuff, so I think my setup is a bit lighter than him, so I should be faster. Well let's aim for the Swedish border. Ruotsi, here we come! Ruotsi means Sweden in Finnish. We're just about to
turn make a right turn up ahead here science. It says Ruotsi where the white car comes out from So we're back in Sweden. It feels kind of strange to be back in Sweden after only a couple of days [Music] It seems like I've joined up with the Sverigeleden, that's the Swedish Trail translated directly into English. That's a network of very calm and low traffic roads here in Sweden
and usually I prefer Sverigeleden over Eurovelo in here in Sweden, because the Eurovelo is made up by some guy sitting down in France and Sverigeleden is created by people that live around here. By cycling clubs and so on, so it's usually very nice roads with very little traffic. I'm glad to stumble upon Sverigeleden here. Let's do an old classic. For those of you who have been here on this channel for a couple of years you know about this one. It's the Swedish pronunciation quiz, and let's try together and pronounce this thing over here That is the Norrskensvägen or in English the Northern Lights Road I'm at 100 kilm right now and I plan to go on for about 40 more. That seems to be my daily average, 140. But there's rain in the air, and I'm just turning off right now to a
gravel road. I don't know how long I'm going to be able to continue, and it's supposed to rain throughout the night, so I'm going to select my campsite carefully. I stumbled upon this place, but it's too early in the evening to set up camp. [Music] It's some sort of hut with a fireplace inside. I mean I would have been able to just sleep on this, but at the same time it says here do not camp here please. So I don't think they want any visitors around here
Let's see what's in here It's a woodshed This sign here says Bad, and that means to take a swim in Swedish. I'm go down this trail down to the beach and see what the beach looks like Not that much to write home about. And I'm guessing the water is pretty cold as well. I also have a picnic table here and some sort of shelter here. If I were to find one of these shelters again tonight I'm definitely going for camping inside one of those, because the weather forecast says it's going to rain all throughout the night. So my tent is probably going to be a bit wet, to say the least. I'm going to have my banana and protein shake here overlooking the lake down below [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] In my mind I've been complaining for the last two hours about boring paved roads, and now I'm finally on a gravel road, but can feel the drizzle in the air. The weather forecast says
it's going to be raining real soon. These kind of Roads can be a nightmare if rained upon. I can see the tire tracks like slipping all over the place. They're fine now because they're dry. The next little village is in about 19 km, so I really want to make it to that town and don't want to get get stuck on this, and start riding on these kind of roads tomorrow morning. Because then it's going to be a mudfest. So I'm going to make a move on and get to the next little town or village as fast as I can. As I said, this is where the real adventure begins! [Applause] I can also see that people have been cycling on this track pretty recently. I can see fresh
tire marks from from bikes here and there. I think it's nice that this trail is becoming more and more popular, and I hope to by doing these videos also showcasing it a bit more. I mean don't get me wrong these kind of trails are kind of the the thing I've dreamed about when planning on going on this trip, but it's just lousy timing with the with the rain coming in. I mean riding on on these kind of roads when it's dry is no problem at all, but I don't want to see what they look like after a whole night of rain so I'm pushing on [Music] I can see the rain just pouring down in front of me, maybe 10 km ahead and in exactly the direction I'm going in as well. Better be careful there. Parkolombolo, that's where I'm going
It's ust sand all over the place here. But the road is super fun, it's hilly, almost like a pump track. Up and down all the time and quick turns. Yeah, really enjoyable! Okay, now things got a little bit more interesting here. I think this is some sort of popular road for all terrain vehicles and also some sort of forest service road, because there's a washboard thing going on here. I'm guessing there've been driving here with pretty heavy machinery. So it's a bit tricky to find the right line here so I don't have to go in all these washboards all the time That's why I'm not looking at straight at the camera all the time. I'm keeping my eyes on the surface here. Split vision Mike, you got to use split vision!
Not to complain, but the the Garmin is saying that I have about 150 M climb for the next 4 km and the sandy trail here is getting real soft due to the rain. So it's quite difficult right now. I just had to endure my first hike-a-bike up a big hill here and when I came up that hill I was met by a gate that I had to open and close. I'm guessing for the reindeers. Everything takes more time than than I would have wanted. Now it's raining quite a bit here and I'm 10 km
away from the town. When I started out it was 20 km, so I've done about half. But the rain is just increasing now, so it's just going to get more difficult. Okay I think it's rain jacket time now. Well to quote Alanis Morissette: isn't it ironic? As soon as you
put your rain jacket on the rain kind of dies down. But I think I'm going to keep it on for now, I just open it up. The problem with putting on the rain jacket is that you get so sweaty. We have a expression for that in Swedish called pest eller kolera. I don't know if there's any corresponding saying in English, but that kind of means the plague or the cholera. Either you get wet from the rain or you get wet from the sweat from inside of of your jacket. I guess a quote
from another '90s icon, Bart Simpson, is pretty fitting right now. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. However I am though glad for having a proper GPS or a bike computer at this moment. During all of my bikepacking trips before I've just been navigating with my phone. And navigating with your phone when it rains is such a hassle. First have to pick it up of your pocket or your bag all the time and when the screen gets wet gets pretty useless. I've been in those situations a lot before, when I'm just standing around holding up the phone so it don't the screen doesn't get wet and panic starts to set in. It's quite comforting to
have have the GPX-track on the Garmin down here, and it's just just beeps and tell me to turn left or right. I have one less problem anyway. As you can see the the track is getting quite soft here and I was just passed by a car. I wonder how that car is able to drive here. It wasn't a four-wheel drive or anything, just an regular car. I'm glad I have these wide tires on the Kona. My touring bike would definitely have problems going through this. Bringing this one along was a smart choice Not another one! I'm finally at the top, and the rain has died down. I find myself just standing around here listening to all the birds. I can hear a cuckoo over there and a cuckoo over there,
and life is great sometimes, right? I can't hear a single car or anything. Probably because there aren't any in 10 kilm at least in every direction. All I can hear is birds and the occasional mosquito. The mosquitoes has started coming now,
I'm guessing it's due to the rain so I better make a move on so they don't try to sample me. I think we have about 5 kilm left to Parkolobolo, the the next little village [Applause] I'm a bit afraid right now. I saw something running across the road up here and it definitely wasn't a fox or anything or a reindeer. It looked like a perhaps a wolverine or a
bear cub. I'm just going to try to pass this pretty quickly and I'll be quiet from now on What was that animal? It's like dark brown, but it's spring so the bears can't have cubs right now can they? It must have been a wolverine or something. I'm past that area now anyway. I don't want to running into any of those animals right now. I think I have enough problems as it is. I just passed the
gate there so must means that I'm approaching some sort of civilization up here. Yeah, I can see first red house now. Very typical of Sweden. We love our red houses with white corners [Music] A classic Swedish sommarstuga or summer house I came to a sort of a crossroads here and my Garmin is going to act up on me now, because I was actually supposed to turn right back there, but I turned left instead. Because turning right would mean that I would go on a detour of about 50 km or so, and I think most of the those 50 km would be on soft sandy roads like the one that I was just on. And I'm planning on camping here in a short while. And going on that road tomorrow would have been really miserable. So I'm
making the smart choice of taking a little bit of a shortcut, and skipping out on a part here. That part would have taken me to a town called Lainio, where they have this really cool bridge crossing, with a with a ferry, with a manual ferry. But I'm going to have to skip out on that ferry right now. I think I'd rather go on these paved roads if it's going to be raining like crazy, like it's going to be tonight. I'm going on this one and see if I can find some place to pitch my tent later on It looks like the weather is better in that direction and that's exactly where I'm headed. And I also checked the weather forecast and looks like there's a a rain cloud
cover that is just above where I am right now. That's the weather app that I use when I'm on my bike tours here in Scandinavia. It's a Norwegian weather app called yr.no, and it's pretty great because you get a 180 minute timeline of where the clouds have been and where they're moving. So if it starts to rain you pretty much know how long that rain is going
to last. And according to the weather app we're right on the edge of of the rain cloud cover. So if I go just 10 or 15 km to the west should be out of the worst of the rain for couple of hours at least. I think I'm going to go in that direction and if I see a nice place to pitch my tent I'm going to do so. Otherwise I'm going to ride in that direction. Okay we got an animal spotting up here again, I don't know what it is this time. It might be a fox or something, I'm going to be a bit careful. Yeah, definitely a fox. Foxes are often quite curious, so I'm betting this one is going to sit here in the ditch and watch me go by. Let's see if we can spot him!
It seemed like he wanted to hide away this time. Like I told you, it's quite nice weather in that direction compared to where I'm right now. Now it's starting to drizzle a bit again so the rain is definitely coming Rabbits are fun. They just sit there like nothing in the world is going on
What's great about the Arctic is that the sun is up all night. What's also bad about the sun being up all night is that you never get the sense of being done for the day. I'm well into my ninth hour of riding time and it's about 900 p.m. now in the evening, and I should have stopped long time ago. But as long as I feel fresh and the sun is out, your mind tells your body can go on for a few more miles, it's it's okay. I really have no
plan. There's a river going sort of along this road, about a kilometer away from here and this road goes over that river in about 10 km. So I'm going to see if there's any nice place along the river there, otherwise I'll go to the next town called Junosuando and see if I can find a place there to camp. They also have an Ica Supermarket that opens at 9 a.m. tomorrow, so that'll be perfect for for breakfast for tomorrow. But as I said as it feels like right now I can probably go on for a couple of more hours. But I guess at some point I I have to stop [Music]
Well the rain is back again but I have a about 4 km until I'm at the bridge that crosses the the river. I'm looking for that as my end point of the day. I hope I can find some sort of place to set up camp there. The reason why I want to be near the river is that I only have about half a bottle left of drinking water. So
I want to get some water from the river in order to make my dinner later on [Music] Well, of course nothing goes to plan. The river was too unaccessible to go down and fetch some water and they had some sort of an Ica here, but no water tap or anything outside. So I need to find some water now, desperately... So I'll continue on to the next town called Junosuando. I'm not sure, I think it's about 15 km or so from here. I think I solved my water situation Now the trick is to just find a place to get down there and fetch some water. Score! I think I'll filter this when I get to camp though because this place, this place is swarming with mosquitoes! Woo! Okay, Mike now it's time to stop being wishy-washy and find yourself a camp spot. It's only a couple kilometers until I reach Junosuando and I really want to camp before
that so that I can visit the Ica tomorrow, when it opens at 9:00. Because the next supermarket is about 150 km south of here and that closes at like 5:00 p.m. so the Junosuando is the only Supermarket I'm going to be able to pay a visit to tomorrow. So make sure to find a camp spot now! I found this road leading into a lake here and it looks promising. The only bad thing is that it's going to be mosquito infested. But I'm just going to jump into my tent and
I'll eat inside of the tent, so I think I'll manage. I think this will have to do. Let's clear off some of the pine cones and pitch my tent. Don't laugh at me! Sometimes you have to take one for the team. I want to film while I set up my camp here and dance with the mosquitoes. Let's see if I can get my rain pants on at least so I won't be eaten to death. And it's starting to rain as well, so everything is going just as planned Rain pants, where are you? I didn't bring any mosquito repellent on this trip. I didn't think
there were going to be that many and I've been pretty lucky so far. I hate having mosquito repellant on me when I don't have access to a shower, so I'd rather just dress up Okay, let's clear this[Music] You always forget one or two, and then you wake up in the middle of the night feeling them sticking through your sleeping pad. That'll do, I guess. I don't really mind being bitten by the mosquitoes, but it's more that you get so freaking stressed from them just hearing the sound. It feels like they're everywhere. The trick now when I have one of these tents is to do this quickly, so that that
the inner don't get wet. But it's just a very light rain at the moment. I've done this in in France before in the pouring rain and everything got into the tent, so this is no problem at all [Music] Finally inside of the tent and I've also done a little supper here for the evening. It's almost 11:00 p.m. now so I'm not going to eat that much before I go to bed. Just getting into the tent is a bit tricky, because every time you go in and out you bring along at least 20 mosquitoes. So
you have to sit and chase them for a while. But luckily the mosquitoes that are now in the beginning of the season are pretty stupid, so they just dance around and and don't really harm you once they're inside of the tent. They just want to get out again. Today turned out to be a pretty long day, I think the total was over 150 km. But aside from the stretches like the one that I had today on the sandy trail back there with very steep climbs, it's been pretty smooth sailing. So I've been doing some big miles every day. I think it's nice when you kind of mix it up with both adventurous trails that lead you to places you never would have seen before. And also these stretches where you can make up some some distance. That's great with this trail,
that there are always options. You can either go on more adventurous gravel trails or if it's like this evening rains you can opt and go out onto to the main road instead with with paved roads. Tonight I think I was passed or met like 10 cars in the last 2 or 3 hours. So there are hardly any cars out on the roads here. So you're pretty fine whatever you do. I guess that's also part of the adventure, not knowing what tomorrow will bring. I hope that I'll see you tomorrow, or for you next week as the adventure here in Northern Sweden continues. And if you can't wait
for that video you can check out my travels that I did with Ryan van Duzer last year here in Sweden, by clicking the link up here in the corner. Otherwise, until next time have a good one!
2024-08-15 00:03
