The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
White nights on the slopes inside the Arctic Circle
Richard Orange checks out the remote Swedish ski resort where the sun never sets in summer
The white nights of summer bring out a rare wildness in the otherwise measured Swedes. On one such evening in mid-May, by the time the lift dropped us at the summit at Riksgransen, the world’s most northerly ski resort, there was already a jubilant hubbub.
Some of my fellow skiers and snowboarders posed for photos with the sun hovering over the Norwegian mountains behind them; others, apparently already half-cut, heaved crates of beer to rocky outcrops where they held sundowners in silhouette. We just sped straight down.
My legs felt leaden after a day spent mastering the six off-piste runs that snake down the front of the Riksgransen peak with Joel, a mustachioed young guide from Gothenburg, who ended every sentence with the word “najs”, Swedish slang for “sweet”.
But as soon as we got going, I accessed new reserves of energy and found myself racing once again down runs such as Branten (the steep one), Uffes Vag (Ulf ’s wall) and Rimfors. The sun was so low over the pistes that it turned the ski tracks gold.
“Will the sun even set?” my skiing companion asked, in the chairlift between runs. It’s a question well beyond my school geography. The Arctic Circle, we agreed, marked where the sun does not set at midnight on midsummer, but midsummer was still nearly a month away on my visit in May. Then again, we weren’t at the Arctic Circle, but more than 100 miles north of it. From May 8 to May 22, the lifts in Riksgransen reopen twice a week between 10pm and 12.30am, to make sure guests can experience skiing on these amazing white nights.
“It has to be something a bit exceptional; a small event in the week,” said Christophe Risenius, the resort’s marketing director, explaining why they don’t do it every day. When there is enough snow, Riksgransen also reopens at the end of June for midsummer, the biggest celebration of the year in still-slightly-pagan Sweden.
According to a Swedish television executive I met at one of the resort’s small restaurants, it’s magical.
“I brought my daughter here from London, and we were skiing in T-shirts,” he said. “She could not believe that she was standing on a mountaintop with blue skies at midnight, and that we could then ski down. It was absolutely fantastic.”
Skiing so late in the season is the glory of this resort on the far northwestern tip of Swedish Lapland. Swedish skiers know this. I joined them for the very last week of the season, when the snow, for the most part, was buttery and spring-like.
I reached the resort on the night train from Stockholm – one of Europe’s great rail trips. In mid-May skiers leave the city with the cherry blossoms in full bloom, then wake up in northern Sweden where the winter ice and snow is only just starting to thaw, passing rivers swollen with meltwater, and hour after hour of snow-speckled forest.
Then the mountains spring upon you, with awe-inspiring views of the Lapporten, two peaks divided by a deep U-shaped glacial valley, and the ice-covered Tornetrask lake. This dramatic
arrival is the epitome of this off-thebeaten-track destination, which beginners and small children would do best to avoid. Riksgransen is not for the faint-hearted.
The award-winning Niehku Mountain Villa, a few hundred metres up
from the 600-room main resort, is known to an international ski elite, who take their private jets to Kiruna Airport and are whisked by helicopter to the remote outpost. But you don’t have to be a wealthy daredevil to enjoy the very best of Riksgransen. The resort has a lot to offer those on ordinary budgets, with the 15 marked pistes representing only about a third of the skiing made accessible by the lifts. There is an equal number of off-piste runs that boast fluffy powder well into late-season, and for the rest of the winter are enough to challenge the most experienced powder hounds.
Then there is ski-touring on the many surrounding peaks, starting with Nordalsfjallet, which you can hike up in ski boots in half an hour on a welltrodden track.
After nearly two hours of night skiing, the sun did indeed set, dipping behind Norway’s Bukkefjellet mountain in the distance. But that didn’t bring darkness. The surrounding peaks turned a pinkish peach and, while the slopes around us stopped sparkling, we still had more than half an hour’s skiing to do before the lifts closed.
Riksgransen is the Swedish summer skiing secret that keeps on giving. Najs!