Introduction Halden is border town close to the south west region of Sweden. Halden is also a municipality (AKA a county) that is interesting geographically for hikers for a variety of reasons. If you single it out on a map you will notice that the municipality juts into Sweden, making it possible to hike from Sweden into Norway from any direction on your compass. For instance, you can walk south into Norway at the southern end of Iddefjord, which makes for the rather rare sentence: "I hiked south into Norway." But I would also say that the Halden area of interest because it is beautiful ..read more

    Introduction Dalsland is one of my favorite places to hike in Sweden. It has several marked hiking trails (and a number of unmarked ones as well), many lakes (some massive in size), various nature reserves, and the Tresticklans National Park. It also has a low population density along with a vast amount of thick, beautiful forests, which makes for great, if not more challenging, hiking adventures in relative isolation. There are many hills and cliffs in the area, which also make this place unique, in that some routes call for scrambling and/or climbing to one extent or anothe ..read more

About 10 years ago I was on a self imposed mission to fully explore this one big patch of woods about an hour away from my home here in Sweden. It began with looking for a good spot to pick wild mushrooms. The deeper I hiked looking for delicious shrooms, the more I fell in love with the area. So I bought a map of the area and just really got into trying to walk across and up and down and all over this chunk of woods. There were a few local hiking trails that went through it, but other than that and an occasional hunter during hunting season, these woods seemed like they were all mine. Like I ..read more

  Introduction Nordvärmlandsleden is a roughly 55km hiking trail that follows the Klarälven river valley in northern Värmland county.  The trail technically has a southern terminus in the village of Branäs, but this guide and trip report will cover the trail from the village of Ransby (just across the river from Branäs) to the northern terminus in the village of Höljes.  This section is a continuation of my alternate Swedish E1 trail called The Troll Trail/Trolleden.  Click here for more information on this trail system. Here is the official website for this trail in En ..read more

An Abridged Guide to The Troll Trail: An Alternate Trail to the Swedish E1 Long Distance Hiking Trail Version 3.0 By Cesar Valdez Note: If you prefer to download a PDF file of this guide, you can do so here. Foreword This is a condensed but full guide to The Troll Trail, a long distance hiking trail that I created. The longer, unabridged guide--which includes additional details on the various areas/sections, hundreds of photographs, and trip reports of my personal experiences hiking the trail--can be found on my blog (click here). The goal of this shortened guide is to provide ..read more

Introduction It's been a while since I posted a big breakdown of my various gear combinations.  Back in 2015 I wrote one that focused on my sleep systems, for example.  That's the last time I did a big breakdown here on my blog, but I've written and discussed sleep systems quite a lot on various forums, such as the UL subreddit. One such post over there got a fair amount of up-votes and positive feedback, which was me making a case for using only two quilts to take care of one's year-round backpacking needs. I called it a case for a two quilt system, and you can read that post here ..read more

  Introduction This section is a continuation of my alternate Swedish E1 trail called The Troll Trail/Trolleden.  Click here for more information on this trail system.  The southern end of this section is the south tip of the huge lake Röjden, which is a nice place to swim and has a few trail shelters.  The northern end of this section is the village of Ransby, which has a bus stop, a few resupply options, and a hotel.  Note that bus service here is limited, as this is fairly isolated/low population area.  One small supermarket is in the ski lodge area of Ra ..read more

  The usual disclaimer: I bought this shelter with my own money and I am not sponsored by MLD or any gear company.     This is one of my favorite UL shelters that I have slept in to date, and a welcome addition to my go-to shelters.  As I have been exploring more and more of Scandinavia, I've been going into the mountains all the more.  And after trying a few different options together with my wife, we fine tuned our couple's kit, but my solo mountain trip kit was lacking.  I considered just taking my Nemo Hornet 2 to use as my solo palace.  But after using ..read more

Introduction This section is a continuation of my alternate Swedish E1 trail called The Troll Trail/Trolleden.  Click here for more information on this trail system.  The southern end of this section is the town of Charlottenberg, which has a train station, public library, hotels/hostels/B&Bs, and resupply options.  At the northern end of this section is the big lake Röjden, which has campsites with trail shelters on both the north and south shores of the lake, and about 4km down the highway to the east in the hamlet of Röjdåfors there is a bus stop.  Note that thi ..read more

Introduction This section is a continuation of my alternate Swedish E1 trail called The Troll Trail/Trolleden.  Click here for more information on this trail system.  The southern end of this section at the village of Älgå connects Glaskogen Nature reserve to Pilgrimsleden Värmland.  Pilgrimsleden can then connect to another trail called Kyrkleden past the village of Koppom, which in turn then connects to the border town of Charlottenberg.   Here is the official site of Pilgrimsleden, which is maintained by the Swedish Church.  It has some PDF maps and info, but only in Swedish. Ky ..read more