I was attending a three week space science and technology course at the local university in Kiruna, Arctic Sweden – my stay in the Arctic however was for six weeks.
For the course there were about 20 students in total, from the UK, Sweden, Belgium, Myanmar, Spanish and Bangladesh. The course covered space science, rocket technology and human spaceflight. We were fortunate to have instructors from ESA and NASA instructing us as well as Marco Runco Jr., former NASA astronaut.
The Weekends
Expeditions were lanched every weekend in the Arctic wilderness. A three day canoe trip was launched which I followed up with guiding a trip to climb the highest mountain in Sweden, Kebnekaise (2115m). We left on the Friday afternoon and summited on Saturday 9pm after a 12 hours (including summiting another mountain enroute) – the descent brought us back to our camp at 3am extremely tired.
7 days in the unknown
Having finished the course most of the students ventured back to their home countries. I still had four weeks in Sweden and planned to spend it in the mountains. Edmund also had a week left before he jetted off to China for a year! So armed with new maps we planned a seven day hike including a couple of 2000+ metre peaks.
Whilst on the bus towards the furthest point away from civilisation we got talking to a few Swedish guys who told us a way to avoid 
taking a ferry (which costs money!) and we gladly changed our whole plans to save us the £8! (we had no money!). This also meant that we were completely off any marked trails for the main part of our planned route – I was sold!
We were off the bus at 6pm and walked across the dam into Sarek National Park. The first few hours were hard going, through bogs that slowed us down totally and with the rain and wind We made camp just before total darkness considerably shorter than we hoped for on our new planned route.
The second day we carried on hoping to make up lost time. My knee started to give me problems and that coupled with the time lost we decided not to climb the mountains and we carried on to make camp by a beautiful turquoise lake.
The third day we were off to a slow start despite the beautiful weather – as Edmund threw his bag into a river and thus soaking all his belongings! My knee was getting worse and required a number of restrapping attempts before it became bearable. Our plan today was to join onto a marked trail and continue along it through what was said to be an extremely beautiful valley. We found the trail and continued along it. Making camp at the beginning of the valley as the weather started turning.
The fourth day the weather broke. Raining heavily, this coupled with the heavy foilage of the valley meant that everything including everything in our bags was soaking. This was the hardest day – the terrain was muddy, marshy and littered wit fallen trees, at times the water was half way up our calves. Our plan was to get to the end of the valley (which we didn’t appreciate in the slightest!) and arrive just in time for the last speed boat across the lake. But we missed it by about 30 minutes so we hunkered down for the night in the atrocious weather.
The sun was out strong the next day, a total contrast from the day before. We got the first speed boat across the lake and from here on we joined onto the Kungsladen (Kings Trail) and it felt like a motorway compared to the terrain we had covered the previous days – we covered close to 30km.
The last day was an easy 7km walk to Saltolaukta where we get the boat across the river and the bus back to Galivare and the train back to Kiruna. We had covered well over 100km and it felt good to give my knee a rest!!
