During our last week of July vacation, Graham and I went on a backpacking adventure on Sörmlandsleden, the awesome 1100km trail system that winds through the forests and coastline of our region. We have done some Sörmlandsleden trips before, and intersected it many times on our bike trips, but this was the first time doing through-hiking on it rather than an out-and-back. We aimed high; when all was said and done, it was about 100km on some of the most remote sections of the trail. Monday we hiked with our packs to the train station and took a train to Flen where buddy Linda picked us up. We had an awesome grilled salmon dinner together with Linda, Linn, and Lai, one last sleep in comfy beds, and then Linda drove us to the trailhead at Malköping so we could start on etapp #20.
This multi-part post is organized by day rather than theme (just to change things up). The listed km for each etapp (stage) are those given by Sörmlandsleden.se, but our GPS showed about 1 additional km for each etapp. This could be because we didn’t walk in a straight line, but I think more likely that the surveyed estimations from the original trail data were not made with the most up-to-date methods.
Day 0: Monday a walk to the train station (4km) and a great dinner chez Linda
Day 1: Tuesday we started at about 11:00 (After a nice breakfast at Linda’s!) did the following segments:
- Etapp 20 Malmköping to Henaredalen 6km
- Etapp 19 Henaredalen to Ånhammar 12km
Edit from Graham: The GPS measured a total of 23.2km with an elevation gain of 378m.
We slept in a pasture by a small lake/duck pond about 800m into Etapp 18. It seemed to be full of 150 female mallards, mostly doing a murmuring purr-quacking and occasional yell-quacking. There was a small structure by the lake and tire tracks through the grass leading up to it. In the morning as we ate our breakfast a pickup truck arrived… and it was the duck farmer! He was there to spread out some grain for the ducks – all adolescent domesticated mallards destined for a restaurant or table somewhere, once they grow up a bit. I chatted with him a bit about duck agriculture and then he headed off; shortly after, so did we (thinking that for meat animals it looked like a pretty good duck life).
Starting etapp 20 in Malköping 
Cool stone pile at a trail junction 
Graham taking in one of the many lake views 
Following the orange trail markers 
Hårsyra or wood sorrel grows all over this regions 
Graham checks out on of the many vindskydd we encountered along this route 
There are a lot of swampy parts which we traversed on narrow board walkways like this one 
Lingon among the lichen on the rocks 
Getting close to the end of our first day in a forest of very old oaks 
Our tent spot by the duck lake 
making dinner by the old mill 
night 1 view form the tent
More photos and stories coming in future posts. 🙂