Mearns men take on highest peaks in Sweden and Finland

Alistair Beeley and Roger Owen of Stonehaven Mountaineering and Hillwalking Club have climbed the highest mountains of Sweden and Finland, both in Lapland and inside the Arctic Circle.

Kebnekaise, at 2,100m the highest point of Sweden, required a 19km trek to a mountain hostel. The following day they climbed a technical route that required a glacier crossing, a traverse along a snow field and a climb up a rock face that had an anchored steel cable most of the way.

They rejoined the normal route at around 1,800m before ascending the final summit.

Alistair and Roger then drove another 350 miles to the settlement of Birtevarre and set off to walk from Norway into Finland to climb Halti, the highest point of that country.

At 1,380m, Halti is low but very remote and underfoot was a true arctic landscape of boulder fields interspersed with short grasses and reindeer moss.

Roger said: “There had been dire warnings of the perils of navigating up here where blizzards could arrive out of nowhere and compass work had to bear in mind a magnetic deviation of 10 degrees.

“But 40 years of Scottish hillwalking is great training for those conditions. In the event the weather was fantastic and the views from the summit superb.”

At the cairn marking Halti the guys met a Finnish climber who had taken three days to get there.

The duo said it was well worth the effort reaching the two peaks and it was another successful expedition for the pair of self-titled “older mountaineers”.