2025-05-30 21:49:24
I used iA Writer for the very first time on December 19, 2013. I know this because that’s the datestamp of the document that sits at the bottom of my iA Writer file list. In the years since, I’ve used the app to write almost everything, across three years of university studies, three different employments, one freelance career, and lots of different sites about video games, movies, technology, and web development. In addition to most of the stuff I’ve posted here, of course.
I’m not writing this in iA Writer. Recently, I’ve almost completely replaced iA Writer with the text editor and personal knowledge base Obsidian.
Like iA Writer, Obsidian is a Markdown editor. In the unlikely case you’re not familiar, Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax. To italicize a word, wrap it in asterisks. To create a list, start a new line with a dash. To add a horizontal separator, add three dashes on a line. The point of Markdown is that the structure and formatting of a document should be readable at a glance, even in pure plain text. Once finished, the formatting can easily be applied in editors with Markdown parsers, like the WordPress block editor. Simply paste the Markdown text in the block editor, and the formatting styles are applied.
Many text editors show the Markdown formatting characters more or less as-is. iA Writer does some light inline formatting, like rendering text wrapped in asterisks as italic, but it still shows the asterisks applying the formatting at all times. Headings are bolded, but the hash characters that determine the heading level in Markdown are always shown to the left of the heading text. As you may have guessed, that’s what inspired the styling of content headings on my blog.
Obsidian only shows the Markdown syntax while the element with the Markdown syntax is selected. When it’s not, the styles are rendered as formatted HTML. It’s taken some getting used to after years with iA Writer, but after I tweaked the default styles in Obsidian (more on that later), I’ve grown to like it.
Markdown in iA Writer.
And in Obsidian, which renders the formatting.
Unlike iA Writer, Obsidian is structured like a knowledge base or wiki, with the full folder hierarchy and their text files shown in the left sidebar. If you’ve ever browsed documentation for any type of online service or developer tool, it will likely look familiar. Since this knowledge base is populated with your own content, it’s up to you to decide what text files to include and how to structure them. When you first launch the app, the sidebar is completely empty. If that gets you excited, Obsidian is probably an app for you.
Since you can collapse and expand all folders, it’s pretty easy to find what you’re looking for regardless of how large or deep your structure is.
This is what my Obsidian folder structure looks like as I’m writing this:
- Attachments (images embedded in text files)
- [Year]
- Design
- Assets
- Development
- Snippets
- Personal
- Cars
- Dogs
- Storm
- Taki
- Hikes
- Home
- Other
- Projects
- andersnoren.se
- Admin
- Blog
- [Blog Posts]
- Themes
- [Themes]
- [Other Projects]
- Work
- Admin
- [Clients]
- [Projects]
- EventsAt first, I thought I would only use Obsidian to keep track of static information. Code snippets, design resources, hike plans, project to do lists, and so on. I’ve ended up doing pretty much all of my writing for blog posts in it as well, modifying the folder structure as needed to keep everything neat and tidy. Since everything is synced with the iOS app (as well as Android, Linux, or PC), it’s easy to access information and create new drafts while on the go. It works with iCloud, but I’ve opted to pay for Obsidian Sync ($5/month). Given how much value I get out of it, it seemed a crime not to support the developers in some way.
I don’t put everything in Obsidian, of course. If I want a note easily accessible and secure, I add it to my 1Password vault. I also still open iA Writer every now and then if I want to jot something down quickly, or if I want to copy-paste something from a form in the browser because I’m afraid I’ll lose it in an unintentional reload. (I don’t use the Apple Notes app.) Pretty much everything else finds a home somewhere in my Obsidian vault.
My biggest gripe with Obsidian is the reading experience, and especially the spacing between elements. If you add a paragraph, followed by a second level heading, followed by another paragraph, the default spacing looks absolutely terrible:
Ugh. The tightness around the heading makes the document hard to parse at a glance, which is extra noticeable in really large text files. The spacing is equally as stingy around tables, images, embeds, code blocks, and pretty much all elements that are not paragraphs. Initially, I found myself compensating for it by inserting extra line breaks, but that gets you into trouble when you copy your writing and paste it somewhere else.
Fortunately, Obsidian is built with picky designer-developers in mind. The app supports themes that let you modify the appearance of pretty much everything, but rolling my own theme seemed a bit overkill for some spacing tweaks. Besides, there doesn’t seem to be support for custom themes on the iOS app. (There are plenty of community themes to choose from, though.)
Instead, I added my changes to a little CSS file called tweaks.css that Obsidian includes by default and syncs with the document vault. Changes you apply there carry over to wherever you’re logged in, including the iOS app. By using tweaks.css, you can also have a community theme active separately.
By adding the following, I set the bottom spacing of headings to equal the body font size, and the top spacing to three times that:
.cm-line.HyperMD-header {
padding-bottom: var(--font-text-size) !important;
padding-top: calc(3 * var(--font-text-size)) !important;
}That combined with some extra vertical spacing for other common elements improved my experience with Obsidian by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, some of the calculations in Obsidian seem to count on margins not being used to set spacing between content elements, and when you use padding to set spacing between elements, you can end up with spacing being doubled-up since paddings don’t collapse like vertical margins do. Nitpicky? Maybe, but when you create an app in the “personal knowledge base” product category, you’re going to attract nitpicky users.
My tweaks.css file is still a work in progress (I haven’t even gotten to the typography yet), but I might put it up on GitHub down the line. I’ve also installed the community plugin “Smart Typography“ by Matthew Meyers, which automatically replaces dumb quotes (") with smart/curly quotes (“). An iA Writer feature I found I couldn’t live without.
While it’s great that Obsidian makes it easy for users to fine-tune the appearance of the text editor with CSS and community plugins, they really should do a better job with the default styles. There’s no excuse for a text editor to have a poor reading experience out of the box.
Obsidian is built with Electron, so unlike iA Writer, it’s not a native Mac app. I’ve found that doesn’t bother me much. It does look a bit awkward alongside other MacOS apps, but it’s still snappy and sturdy. Given that I have Visual Studio Code, Figma, Linear and 1Password open pretty much constantly, I suspect my aversion to non-native apps has been worn down a bit over the years.
There’s still work to be done for Obsidian to offer a first-class visual experience, but if you share my affinity for structuring content and files, I suspect you’ll fall in love with Obsidian just as much as I have.
The post Replacing iA Writer with Obsidian appeared first on Anders Norén.
2025-05-23 22:19:05
Ever since me and Rebecka moved to the Swedish mountains back in 2023, my small collection of books about graphic design and web development have gathered dust in moving boxes in the garage. A couple of weeks ago, they finally got to see the light of day again after I got a new bookshelf set up in my home office. I was surprised by how nostalgic it felt to unpack them all.
While in the process of sorting out which book goes where on my new shiny shelves, I started to think about which of them have been the most useful to me, or meant the most. There’s no shortage of design information and inspiration to be had online, but there’s still something to be said for sitting down in a comfortable chair with a large book and a cup of coffee. Of all of my graphic design books, these five are my favorites right now.
Here’s a question I ask myself every time I enter a book store with a fun graphic design section: Do I need another book about typography? Probably not. I still find one in my bag when I get home at least every other time. Usually, they tread the same ground as the ones I already own, covering the fundamentals of typographic dos and dont’s. I just can’t help myself. If I had to choose a single typography book to recommend to someone, especially someone looking to build a solid foundation for getting deeper into typography, it’d be Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton.
It isn’t the most in-depth book on typography on my shelves (that prize goes to The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, which is dense), but it covers the fundamentals of pretty much everything, from letters to layouts, with lots of examples of typographical rules being applied in practice, ranging from Johannes Gutenberg to early 2010 websites. The web design examples in my second edition do age the book somewhat, but I’m guessing that those have been updated for the third edition released last year, which also includes more up to date technical information about creating typefaces and using fonts on the web.
Also, there’s a certain charm to the pixelated screenshots of decade old versions of websites like Subtraction and Design Observer, which can now only be seen on Archive.org (with the images if you’re lucky).
Saying “Fuck you, pay me” to a certain generation of web designers is likely to bring up an image of Mike Monteiro standing in a stark white conference room, yelling those exact words in front of a captivated CreativeMornings audience. You can still watch the video on YouTube, and once you’re done, I recommend you pick up Design is a Job, which expands on the subject into an entire book.
Unlike the other books on this list, it covers the more practical aspects of being in the design business, like finding, managing and sometimes sacking clients, charging for your time, presenting your work, and dealing with feedback. It’s a good read for any designer, but invaluable if you’re starting out as a freelancer. I turned to it often when I had just set up shop and needed someone to tell me that my clients wouldn’t value my work unless I did.
A Book Apart is no more (RIP), but you can still buy Design is a Job from Mike Monteiro directly. I haven’t read the second edition but it seems to include more information about ethical design, which Mike Monteiro has talked about in a separate presentation that’s also on YouTube. Another quality book on that subject is How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy, which was a strong runner up for this list.
I like structure in all things, and pretty much every design I work on has a twelve column grid keeping all of the content neat and tidy. I occasionally try to create something less rigid and more free-form, but I usually come crawling back to the comfort of columns and gutters before long. Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockmann was my first book about grid layouts, and it would probably be the more obvious choice for this list since it’s an undisputable classic. (It also looks great on the shelf.)
However, when I’m looking for layout inspiration, I usually find myself reaching for Making and Breaking the Grid by Timothy Samara instead. It includes a broader selection of example layouts, both old and (relatively) new, and you’d be hard pressed to find much about “breaking the grid” in Josef Müller-Brockmanns book. Since Making and Breaking the Grid came out 20 years after Grid Systems, it also feels written with the assumption that the reader has already read Grid Systems. If in doubt, get them both.
There’s not much about designing grids for the web in either one, of course, but the fundamentals of grid layout can – in theory – be applied to the web just as easily as to posters from the 1960’s. I only wish the WordPress block editor was as grid-friendly in practice.
I don’t have a lot of monographs at home, but I do like this one by Michael Bierut. The dust jacket is starting to become worn from me taking it out and flipping through it. It’s an interesting collection, including his work for Saks Fifth Avenue, Museum of Arts and Design, United Airlines, MIT Media Lab, and more, presented beautifully in a chunky 25×25 centimeter volume with great print quality.
My only real gripe with the book is that there isn’t enough to read about each project. I’d happily take another couple of pages about the challenges for each one; especially since I know I enjoy his writing from another Michael Bierut book on my shelves: Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design. I’ve tried to get hold of his second essay collection, Now You See It and Other Essays on Design, but it seems to be out of print.
This one is actually a recent addition, so it didn’t have to spend two years in a moving box before going up on my shelf. There’s no aspect of design that I struggle with more than color, so I’m always on the hunt for resouces that help me find and combine colors. I bought this little book on the recommendation of Diana Costa, who I work with through Automattic. It’s a collection of 348 different color combinations originally curated by Sanzo Wada (1883-1967) for the 6-volume work Haishoku Soukan (The Complete Collection of Color Combinations), which was published in the 1930s.
There’s no shortage of directories for color combinations online, but the quality is often really poor, the tone inconsistent, and instead of making me feel inspired, browsing through them makes me stick to grayscale for the rest of my life. Flipping through A Dictionary of Color Combinations makes me want to put up new tapestry and pick up watercolor painting. I’ve found myself reaching for it every time my inspiration needs a jolt. Plus, it’s a beautiful little book.
The post My favorite books on graphic design appeared first on Anders Norén.
2025-05-16 22:43:00
Last year, I spent a weekend building my WordPress theme Pulitzer while documenting the whole process in a thread on Twitter. Since then, Twitter has become a hellish nightmare place that I want nothing to do with, so in January this year, I deleted my account and moved over to Bluesky.
The Pulitzer thread and everything else I’ve posted on Twitter was purged in the move, and I’ve been asked a few times if the thread can be read somewhere. Fortunately, I now have somewhere to direct those people to. Birgit Pauli-Haack has published a summary of the entire thread on Gutenberg Times, with screenshots and code snippets and all. Hopefully it’s of some interest if you’re curious about how modern block themes are built.
The post How I built my Pulitzer WordPress theme in a weekend appeared first on Anders Norén.
2025-03-28 23:42:33
This March, I spent 13 days skiing the Southern Kungsleden trail the 250 kilometers from Sälen to Fjällnäs in the Swedish mountains, with all of my gear pulled behind me in my pulk. It was my first winter ski trip longer than a few days, and a trial run for a much longer one that I hope to complete next winter. This trail diary is translated from Swedish (with some help from Google Translate) from the updates I posted on my Instagram during the trip. You can find a lot more photographs and videos from the adventure there.
If you’re interested, you can take a look at the route I followed here, and my very extensive gear list for the trip here. For more background on the Southern Kungsleden trail, check out this folder about the trail (in English).
It was perhaps a bit ill-conceived when, sometime in the 1970s, they decided to name the new hiking trail between the Transtrandsfjällen mountains in Dalarna and Storlien in Jämtland the Southern Kungsleden. If you don’t notice the big S in ”Southern”, it’s easy to think that it’s the southern end of the more famous Kungsleden in Lapland, between Hemavan and Ammarnäs, which I hiked a few years back. It wasn’t in Hemavan that I started my winter adventure earlier today, in other words, but at Sälen’s Högfjällshotell in Dalarna. For two weeks, I will follow the Southern Kungsleden past Transtrandsfjällen, Fulufjällets National Park, Drevfjällen, Grövelsjön, Långfjället, Rogen and Rödfjället before ending the trip at my partner Rebecka’s family cabin in Fjällnäs. It will be my first long winter hike and my first visit to the mountains south of Grövelsjön.
The first chance to stock up is at the store in Flötningen by the Norwegian border, which I reach around day seven, and I could feel every day’s ration of food and fuel (two spare days, so nine in total) as I made way up to Östfjället, illuminated first by the evening sun and then by the full moon. Even in the final days leading up to trip, I worried that lack of snow would force me to go for one of my backup plans further north (including the southern Kungsleden with a lowercase s). I’m still not entirely sure that snow conditions will allow me to complete the trip, but at least I couldn’t have wished for better weather on day one.
My plan was to go further today, up to Källfjället and maybe down the other side, but around seven in the evening I decided to call it a day and pitched my tent beyond the Östfjället rest hut after five kilometers. If you’ve dragged skis, pulk and 40 kg pulk bags on public transport for seven hours to visit new mountains, you might as well see them in daylight.
Källfjället gave me a tough start to the day, but after the climb I was rewarded with views of both Fulufjället and Grövelsjöfjällen off in the distance. After the descent to Källfjället’s rest hut, I soon reached the border of the Transtrandsfjällen nature reserve, where the trail wound its way between low-growing spruce trees in hilly terrain through Synddalen. I stopped at the Kläppenskjulet wind shelter to replenish my energy, and had a chat with some cross-country skiers who have a cabin in the area.
The climb up Lägerdalsfjället is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done on a pair of skis. The pulk was insistent on pulling me back down to the rest hut, and after a few hundred meters I threw in the towel and finished the climb in my ski boots, with my skis on the pulk. Once at the top the wind was blowing 10-15 meters per second, so I didn’t stay sweaty for long. Then it was back down into another fairytale forest valley, and back up to another mountain – Östra Granfjället. I’ll feel the altitude difference in my legs tomorrow, but the last part to Närfjällsstugan went faster than expected and also took me through a dramatic ravine with large hanging snow drifts. It turned out that I timed my visit to an event arranged by Snowracer magazine, and several dozen snowmobiles stopped during the lunch break.
When Southern Kungsleden left the snowmobile trail at Västra Granfjället, I had neither ski nor snowmobile tracks to follow for the first time on the trip. It was just me and the red winter trail crosses. That may have been smart of everyone else and stupid of me, because it was also the first time on the trip that I had to navigate around snow-free patches of terrain. When the downhill slopes started to get steep, I released the break rope on the pulk, and with the help of it and a lot of slaloming in the spruce forest, I made it down to the Granfjällssätern break cabin without involuntarily embracing a single tree trunk. From the cabin guest book, it seems that I am the first visitor of the ski season.
As I continued along the trail from Granfjällssätern, it felt quite reasonable that no one had skied it for a while. My guess is that someone had set up the winter trail markings along the winding, hilly and tree-strewn summer trail and hoped for the best. When the winter trail followed the summer trail up a steep, rocky ridge instead of heading out over the adjacent ski-friendly bogs, I gave up and skied off-trail the last bit to the snowmobile trail. It was a happy reunion. I had planned to camp tonight, but the scant amount of snow persuaded me to stay in the Lillbäckstugan wind shelter, which is located next to where Lillbäcken empties out to Fuluforsen. Luxury on a winter trip is not having to melt snow. Nice after a tough afternoon.
Today, three items had to come out of the pulk for the first time on the trip: the sunglasses and sun protection, because the sky was almost cloudless throughout the morning, and the long ski skins, for the 10 kilometers and 300 meters of elevation gain up to Lilldalsstugan. The cabin is located at the northern mouth of a winding U-shaped valley between Mellanfjället and Näsfjället, and has a magical panoramic view of Fulufjället. On the sunny side of the cabin, I met another skier with a pulk in tow for the first time on the trip. She had run Southern Kungsleden a few years ago, so we exchanged some experiences of the parts of the trail closest to Sälen. This time she was out on a spontaneous ski tour of the area.
After lunch and changing back to the short skins, it was off north and downhill, and after the morning it made for four fast and easy kilometers. I had checked the forecast for the rest of the day during lunch, and the promise of winds of 15-20 meters per second convinced me to take a shorter day and let the climb up to Fulufjället wait until tomorrow. The unmanned Björnholmsstugan overnight cabin is located one kilometer inside the southern national park border, and all eight beds were available when I parked the pulk outside at three o’clock. A night of cabin coziness for 200 Swedish kronor (~ 20 USD). Affordable.
Fulufjället took my breath away as soon as I reached the middle of the round mountain Östertangen, 300 metres above Björnholmsstugan where I spent the night. There were no peaks in sight, just 360 degrees of flat, snow-white horizon. Like skiing in a jar of sugar. The wind picked up the higher I went, and when the peak was reached and I started to slide down towards the Tangådalsstugan cabin, the gusts were probably blowing upwards of 15 metres per second. The guest book in the cabin said that an Eric set off on snowshoes towards Tangsjöstugan the day before. The last guest book entry before that was from September. The balaclava went on before I went out into the wind again and started following the snowshoe tracks north.
Halfway to Tangsjöstugan, a small black dot appeared next to the trail markings on the horizon. It turned out to be Eric from the guest book, who had slept one night in Tangsjöstugan and was now on his way back to the car. We stood and shouted over the wind for a while before continuing in our separate directions. After a while I was back up on 959 meters of elevation again, and after a morning of uphills I felt fast when I got to ride on the flat the last part to Tangsjöstugan. The cabin is of the same eight-bed model as Björnholmsstugan and is beautifully located at the heart of Fulufjället.
I considered continuing a little further and spending the night in the tent, but the sound of the wind howling outside the windows persuaded me to extend my coffee break to an overnight stay. Pretty soon I was joined by a guide with two German tourists and a company of sled dogs, and the wind howled for over 20 meters per second out on the mountain while we sat by the stove and talked about winter adventures with whiskey in our glasses. Kristin from Sörsjön has been running guided dog sled tours on Fulufjället since 1997, so there was a lot to talk about. Cabin comfort night two.
Today I got the mountain weather I dreamed of before the trip. A few degrees below zero, light wind, and enough clouds in the sky that you don’t take the sunshine for granted. The kilometers to the privately owned Rörsjöstugorna flew by, and in the clear weather I could see both Drevfjällen to the west, Grövelsjöfjällen to the northwest and the ski slopes och Idrefjäll with Städjan and Nipfjället in the background to the northeast. The word “Kiosk” caught my eye in the corner of my eye at Rörsjöstugorna, and after a while I was sitting in a wind sheltered snow pit with a cup of coffee, biscuits, chocolate and locally made elk sausage. I stayed there for a long time.
The skiing continued with expansive views and small elevation changes all the way to the shoulder of Brattfjället, where the snowmobile trail took me down to the small village of Gördalen and out of Fulufjället National Park. I’ll definitely be back here. Maybe on a guided dog sled tour…? The descent was exciting after a lot of skiing on the flat earlier in the day, but the thought is always in the back of my mind that every meter of altitude you lose will be have to be regained later. In previous days I’ve slept at a low altitude and started the day with climbing, but I wanted to save myself that tomorrow.
When I started to climb my way up from Gördalen, I skied without my shell jacket for the first time on the trip, and every zipper on my bib pants that could be opened was open. The pulk at least feels noticeably lighter since the start of the trip. Halfway up, a sign told me that I was inside the Drevfjällen nature reserve – a roadless wilderness and the largest old-growth forest area in Dalarna. My home for the next two days. The tent was pitched among the birches just below the tree line. Snow depth: 60 centimeters.
Right after breakfast I realized that the snowmobile trail I was following over Drevfjället was not marked on the map. My first thought was that the trail had been redrawn somewhat, because the trail I was following ran parallel to the trail on the map about 800 meters southwest and slightly higher up the mountain, but when I skied down towards Drevsjön and my trail did not turn north towards Drevfjällsstugan I sensed something was wrong. A bunch of snowmobile tracks veered off off-trail in the direction of the cabin, and after following them for a few hundred meters I arrived at the cabin and the trail I had planned to follow all along. The stove was still warm from the last guests, and served as a drying rack for clothes that had already become damp in the warm weather.
The skiing in the old forests of Drevfjällen was nice, with many gnarled and twisted old pines and some preserved mountain pastures, but the combination of the very well-maintained and easy-to-ski snowmobile trails and a few degrees above zero and sunshine meant that I soon switched to autopilot. Six snowmobiles passed during the day, which was fewer than I had expected. Based on the amount of tracks on the trails and in the terrain, the nature reserve must be a snowmobile hotspot on the weekends. I saw neither skiers nor ski tracks all day.
After lunch at Fågelåsen, the trail gained altitude above the tree line, and the autopilot was switched off when it was time to climb. From the shoulder of Vithågna I had a view of Grövelsjöfjällen to the north and the highest mountain in the Drevfjällen to the west: the 1185 meter high Härjåhågna, which is crowned by border cairn 136. As I stood admiring the view, I realized that for the first time on the trip there was no wind at all. It was nice to stand there in the silence. The trail had also started to freeze a bit in the afternoon, so I ended the day with a good glide past the Röskåsen overnight cabin and back down into the pine forest where I pitched my tent. When the sun went down, the northern lights came to visit.
Today went by quickly. Partly because it was cold last night, so the tracks were nice and hard when I woke up. But the real explanation must be the magnetic pull of Flötningens Gränsbua, the border super market that I reached after lunch. My only longer break before I got there was to admire the first snowfall of the trip.
I actually had enough food to get to Grövelsjön, but after a week with the food I brought from home (except for the kiosk visit at Rörsjöstugorna on Fulufjället) it was wonderful to be able to browse freely among the store shelves. Like all super markets close to the Norwegian border, tobacco seemed to make up a large part of the inventory. After I pitched my tent at Källåsen north of Flötningen, I had sausage and flatbread rolls with beer for dinner and a bag of pick and mix candy for dessert.
The luxurious mountain life continues the day after tomorrow, as I will stay one night at Grövelsjön mountain station before continuing north towards Fjällnäs. If my need for more food was a bit arbitrary, my need for a shower is a lot more pressing. I think the snowmobile riders are starting to smell me through the exhaust fumes.
When I woke up, the only white thing in the sky was the soft peaks of Grövelsjöfjällen, poking up above the treetops. It had been a cold night, which was good news for me. Today I was going to get past an obstacle that the Dalarna County Administrative Board had warned about on Facebook weeks earlier: a few kilometers of the snowmobile trail closest to Guttudalskojan had been plowed. In the worst case, I thought I would be able to ski in the forests next to the road for those kilometers, and for that, a it’s nice to have a frozen snow crust to ski on.
The plowed winter trail was fortunately an anticlimax. There was enough ice left on the road for me to be able to ski around the gravel patches. I soon arrived at the Guttudalskojan overnight cabin, which at least on the inside was stuck in the 1950s in a very charming way. I took a coffee break in the sun outside. The reason the winter trail has been plowed is that there is logging going on in the area. Why they should cut down a small strip of mountain forest between two nature reserves, next to one of the County Administrative Board’s overnight cabins and by a popular hiking trail is beyond me. I’m glad I got to see the area before the devastation.
Eventually, the Southern Kungsleden trail left the plowed road and followed the winter trail into the Långfjället nature reserve, through pretty pine and birch forest to the old mountain farmstead Valdalsbygget, which is located a stone’s throw from the Norwegian border and also has an overnight cabin. Here the winter trail became a tracked ski trail, which after another coffee break (you need many coffee breaks) I continued to follow towards Grövelsjön. The cross-country skiers in fast clothing stared at me and my pulk. Maybe I skiing against the track direction.
About an hour later, I found a tent site above the tree line a bit from Silverfallet, only three or four kilometers from the Grövelsjön mountain station on the other side of the valley. Tomorrow will be a short day with a lot of rest time before I continue north towards Fjällnäs the day after tomorrow. I’m about as excited about resting as I am about continuing skiing. That’s how it should be.
I’ve arrived at the Grövelsjön mountain station! A place I have many fond memories of. The day was spent resting, eating, washing, drying, charging and shopping before the trip continues north towards Fjällnäs tomorrow. The shower was the most anticipated item on the agenda. The staff probably got tired of me asking if the room was ready a dozen times, but it was at least partly out of concern for the station’s other guests. After nine days on the tour, I didn’t exactly smell like a summer meadow when I stepped through the entrance doors.
After a hearty breakfast at Grövelsjön, the trip continued north. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so the motivation to take on the climb up Långfjället came easily. Of course, I had a coffee break with a view of Storvätteshågna, the highest mountain of middle to southern Sweden, and with coffee and some biscuits in the tank, I then quickly headed down to the County Administrative Board’s cabins by Lake Hävlingen.
The fastest winter trail north from Hävlingen goes directly to the Rogenstugorna cabins across the lakes to the north, but my planned arrival day isn’t until Friday (day 15), so I’m in no hurry to reach the end of the trip. Instead, I followed the winter trail east that goes back up above the tree line and past the Swedish Tourist Association (STF) Storrödtjärnstugan cabin. The freshly snowmobiled track up from the lake was so icy and slippery that I had to double-check that the skins were still there, and so narrow that my skis repeatedly got stuck in rocks and gravel on the sides when I tried to make my way uphill. I wish you could see yourself in that moment, with panicky eyes as you tense every muscle and desperately hold on to your poles to keep from falling flat on your face (whereupon the pulk pulls you down to the bottom of the hill to a Looney Toones sound effect). After sweat, swearing and a little bloodshed, I finally made it up to the tree line where I ate a packed lunch from the mountain station with a view of Töfsingdalen National Park. Another place to visit sometime.
After another bit of climbing up to Slagusjön, the effort was rewarded with a fun downhill to the Storrödtjärnstugan cabin, where I took the opportunity to add to my collection of cabin patches. I had to restrain myself from continuing to ski down the winter trail to Rogen in the afternoon sun. Instead, I put that energy into hunting for a nice tent site. Finally, I found a plot with a patio where I could sit on the thawed mountain heath and admire the view of Rogen during dinner.
Today’s 18 kilometers were probably the most boring of the trip. That’s because 14 of them took me across the frozen surface of the lake Rogen, and even with the wind at my back (5-10 meters per second in the middle of the lake) it’s quite tiring to ski past a seemingly endless line of trail crossings from morning to afternoon. I stopped at the Rogenstugan cabin and had a chat with the cabin host, which was a nice break from the monotony. I also bought a beer at the cabin store. “Because you’re worth it” is not the Carlsberg slogan, but those were the words I heard whispered when I saw the can on the shelf.
I pitched my tent next to Bustvålen on the small strip of land between the Rogen and Rödsjön lakes. The forecast calls for strong winds after dark, so it feels good that I’ll stay the night in the forest. After the tent was up, the snow melted and the bags unpacked, I set off to admire the local supply of wolf lichen and look for running water. The simple pleasures of the mountains.
”Klabbföre” is a Swedish word describing the dreaded snow conditions when the half-melted snow gets stuck beneath your skis, and that’s what I woke up to. During the morning, every single snowflake that had fallen during the night seemed to stick to my skis until I was walking on stilts. When I arrived at Skedbrostugan, I took off my skis and scraped and brushed until there was not a single ice crystal left, and after that the skis got along better with the surface. I had great skiing all the way to Broktjärnskojan, right next to the beautiful Rödfjället. It was snowing quite heavily and I had been looking forward to a break indoors.
In the door I met three skiers who were on a trip from Ramundberget to Grövelsjön. One of them had a bit of a bruise on his face after he fell on the steep downhill slope from Rödfjället, but he said that his glasses took the brunt of the impact and that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. It looked pretty bad. The slope that was so steep that he fell on the way down, I was now going to climb, so there was a long coffee break in the cabin before I started. Considering how little the pulk weighs now, it is probably the hardest climb on the entire Southern Kungsleden.
It was a nice reward to get up to Rödfjället and get a little view of Tänndalen’s familiar peaks.
13 days after the trip started at Sälens Högfjällshotell in Dalarna, I reached my partners family cabin in Fjällnäs and completed my first long winter adventure. I finished with a nice morning on the snowmobile trail that runs over the Storkläppen mountain, between Svansjön and Tänndalen’s ski lifts, where I had a view of the entire valley and towards the higher peaks to the north. After arriving at the cabin, I hung things out to dry, showered (three times), spent some time in the sauna, ate pizza, had a bottle of red wine, and lay on the couch a lot. I’m tired, but very happy and satisfied with the trip.
I highly recommend the Southern Kungsleden trail. For me, who has never visited the mountains south of Grövelsjön, it was fun to see both Transtrandsfjällen, Fulufjället and Drevfjällen on the same trip, and Fulufjället in particular has me keen on return visits in both winter and summer. Apart from a tricky ski trail close to Granfjällsstugan in Transtrandsfjällen (and the plowed snowmobile trail at Guttudalskojan), there has been good skiing all the way, despite a winter unusually skimpy on snow. It was nice to see the stretch between Grövelsjön and Fjällnäs again, but from a new perspective and in the wintertime.
If all goes well, me and my pulk will be back in Grövelsjön in February next year to start an even longer ski trip, all the way up to Treriksröset, on the ~1 300 km Vita bandet (White Ribbon). But before that, I’m going to enjoy the summer season.
The post Skiing the Southern Kungsleden Trail appeared first on Anders Norén.
2025-01-10 20:16:51
The snow has been taking its time here in the southern end of the Swedish mountain chain this winter, and in lieu of skiing and winter camping, I got around to building another free WordPress theme.
It’s called Spiekermann and is designed with blogs and portfolios in mind, but like most block themes, it can be used for pretty much anything. You can download it from WordPress.org, read more about its features here, or check out the demo.
The most eye-catching features in the theme are the asymmetrical grid on archive pages, and the offbeat typeface used for headings, Alpha Lyrae, which blends pixelated characters with sans-serif ones. Alpha Lyrae is prominently featured in the footer of the theme, where the site title is scaled up to fill the entire width of the screen. Spiekermann includes other type options if you don’t like your headings chunky, as well as ten different color schemes to choose from.
Spiekermann is named after German designer Erik Spiekermann, who in addition to designing FF Meta and writing Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works designed a print that’s been hanging in my office for the past couple of years. I’m a big fan of his.
That’s Spiekermann! I have some other theme designs in the pipeline as well, but I hope you won’t get to see any of them on the WordPress.org theme directory for a while. If you do, it will have been a very disappointing winter.
PS. I’ve deactivated my Twitter account. Long overdue. You can find me on Bluesky these days, although I likely won’t be very active there either.
The post Introducing Spiekermann appeared first on Anders Norén.
2024-12-18 17:50:46
Our original hiking plan for this August was a one-week trip to Jotunheimen national park in Norway. With the start date only days away, me and my partner Rebecka decided to heed the weather warnings and change our plans. We’ve been looking forward to visiting Jotunheimen for years, and we didn’t want to do it during a week of constant downpours and non-existent views.
Instead, we set our sights on Vålådalen nature reserve, just three hours from home, where the forecast looked much better. Vålådalen is a classic hiking destination in the Swedish mountains. At its heart lies a large valley with old-growth forests, surrounded by some of the most beautiful fjäll in Scandinavia, and the large tourist station that serves as the starting point for most visitors is easily accessible by car and bus. Despite that, neither of us had visited it before. I’ve become a little bit obsessed with visiting all of the cabins belonging to the Swedish Tourist Association (STF), collecting a cloth cabin patch as a memento from each one, and I drew up a route that would allow us to visit four of them on our hike in and around Vålådalen. Five, if you count the Gåsen cabin, which was shut down last year.
The route is a variation of the classic route Vålådalsfyrkanten, with a detour to the closed Gåsen cabin to the west, and a loop around the Anaris mountains to the east. It looks like a fish on the map, so we’ve dubbed the route Vålådalsfisken (the Vålådalen fish).
We got going around three in the afternoon after lunch at Vålådalen mountain station, where my mother worked for one season in the early 1980’s. After one kilometer, we realized that we had hiked in the one direction and had to double back. Once we got on track again, I tried to catch a piece of cheese Rebecka tossed me with my mouth, and managed to punch myself with the grip on my hiking stick, giving me a split lip. Not the most auspicious start, but all was forgiven once we reached the tree line and got views over the Vålådalen valley behind us. To me, lush forest valleys are best experienced at a distance. At least during mosquito season.
We arrived at the STF Stendalsstugorna cabins just past seven, after 14 kilometers of hiking. The main cabin was rebuilt from the ground-up in 2014 after the old one burned down. It seems comfortable and convenient with its multiple modern gas stoves, solar panels and a massive deck facing south, but it lacks the coziness of the classic STF cabins. I added another cabin patch to the collection and got a quick chat with the cabin host before we continued.
West of Stensdalsstugorna, the trail climbs up to a 1 000 meter plateau between the peaks Tobbege and Stäntja, with beautiful views on all sides. On our left, Lill-Stensdalsfjället basked in the last sunlight of the day as we made camp. The clear sky meant that we could spend the evening with the vestibule of our Hilleberg Helags 3 tent rolled up and tucked away until it was time for bed. Neither of us had any regrets about our change of plans.
The 14 kilometers from Stensdalsstugorna to the Gåsen cabin are some of the prettiest 14 kilometers I’ve ever hiked. From the moment we packed up our tent east of Stäntja to us arriving at Gåsen a few hours later, we had stunning views over the surrounding mountain tops, culminating in the panorama you get over Helags and Sylarna from the shoulder of the mountain Gåsen just northeast of the cabins. Lovely stretch of trail.
The Gåsen STF cabin closed permanently on January 1 this year, to reduce the disruptions to the reindeer in this part of Jämtlandsfjällen. One room in the main cabin is still left unlocked for emergencies, so we had a peek inside. Seeing Gåsen for the first time made me regret not visiting it while it was still open. It’s a spectacular location, and still well worth a detour for the views alone, even if you have to spend the night in a tent instead of a cabin.
From Gåsen, we turned east into the Härjångsdalen valley and started the descent back into Vålådalen, with more great views over the pearl necklace of lakes in the bottom of the valley. We hiked a little too fast and too far, though. I wanted to get to the Vålåstugorna cabins before seven to make sure I’d be able to buy my cabin patch before the store closed for the day. We made it just in time, but it wasn’t worth ending the day with a relentless march to meet a self-imposed deadline. The keepsakes from the hike aren’t more important than the hike itself.
The cabin host in Vålådalsstugorna recommended tent sites a few kilometers further down the trail, but when we got there, they were already occupied. Then the rain caught up with us. Faced with the choice between a tent site right next to the trail or a potentially nicer tent site further ahead but with a wet Shiba Inu in the tent, we chose the former. By then, we were all pretty wiped. Fortunately, a patch wasn’t the only thing I picked up in the cabin shop. When you drink it in the tent after a long day on the trail, Carlsberg is, in fact, Probably The Best Beer In The World.
As you can see by the number above, day three went long. Too long. Vålåstugorna to the Lunndörrstugan STF cabin was a pretty stretch of trail, especially with the view into the U-shaped valley Lunndörren towards the end. We arrived around lunch and discovered that the cabin host was out on a hike, so I missed out on my cabin patch from Lunndörrstugan. Probably karma for my insistence on us arriving in time for the previous cabin the day before. The cabin hosts are always present in the morning and evening to help visitors, but can be out exploring in the middle of the day. Me and Rebecka have talked about volunteering for it some future summer season.
After Lunndörrstugan, the trail continues to one of the most famous locations in Vålådalen nature reserve: The gravel pyramids in Gröndalen. The landscape here has to be seen to be believed. It was formed during the end of the last ice age, when the ice sheet covering Northern Europe melted. The entire valley looks like a sandbox for giants. As we entered Gröndalen and took aim on the mountain pass that would take us to the Anaris cabin, we passed near the site of the 1978 Anaris disaster, in which eight skiers lost their lives to a sudden winter storm. There’s a commemorative cross marking the site of the accident by the old winter trail, but we left that for another visit to Vålådalen.
Instead, we took on the 300 meter ascent to the pass between Stor-Anahögen and Aaresketjahke. After a short break to admire the view over Gröndalen behind us, we continued south into Hällådalen and towards Anaris, which had already started to don its fall colors. I did get a cabin patch there (depicting a trout – fitting given what we’ve named our route), and we had a chat with the very friendly cabin host. I read a feature recently saying that Anaris is one of the least visited STF cabins, where days can pass without any visitors, but this evening, there were no less than eight hikers there at once. Me and Rebecka were the only ones not staying the night.
We wanted to be back by the car pretty early the next day, so we continued a few kilometers up to the pass between Kraapa and Kruptjie, where we set up our camp. The smart move would have been to make camp before we reached the pass, to get more shelter from the wind, but we were too tired to care.
We had planned to make an early start on the fourth and final day, but not quite as early as 5:30, which was when Rebecka woke up to rain splashing her in the face. The wind had turned during the night and was pummelling the tent from the north with gusts up to ~20 m/s, pulling one of the ground pegs lose. The large stones I had placed on the south-facing pegs, now downwind, helped little. We decided to skip breakfast in the tent and quickly packed up. Taki, to his immense credit, was the least stressed of the three of us.
We followed the summer trail to the Staalavielie rest hut where we planned to have breakfast, but it was occupied both by a German couple that had spent the night and an army of midges. Instead, we continued south on the winter trail towards the Issjödalen valley up to the tree line, where we found a lovely spot with a view over the forest.
I say winter trail because it’s marked as one on the maps provided by Lantmäteriet, the Swedish mapping agency, but the sign by the Staalavielie hut put it down as a summer trail as well. I suspect there was a summer trail there at some point, since the path following the winter markings was pretty well trodden in spots, but there were no traces of wooden planks covering the many marshlands we had to cross.
It was a relief to reach the proper summer trail by Issjön, where we took a moment to inspect the royal hunting cabin before we followed the luxurious forest trail back to our car by Vålådalens fjällstation.
Do we recommend the Vålådalsfisken route to others? Yes! We got to hike through the old-growth forest in the heart of the nature reserve, but also experienced the wide-stretched views from Gåsen to the west (head of the fish) and the dramatic mountain passes around Anaris to the east (tail of the fish). Our big mistake was to do it in just four days. According to our phones, the route is about 120 kilometers. Five to seven days would have made more sense, and been a lot more enjoyable.
Still, Vålådalen nature reserve made a good first impression on us, and we’ll definitely be back. Maybe in winter next time.
The post A summer hike in Vålådalen appeared first on Anders Norén.
