FROZEN

Adventure and beauty awaits anyone willing to brave the Arctic wilderness of Swedish Lapland

An adventure-filled trip to the Arctic Circle.

OUR PLANE NOSED down through a layer of ice fog and shuddered hard, as if at the sudden view: a mist-shredded scrap of forest, all but buried in snow. “Welcome to the Arctic,” the pilot said, as we bumped down on a runway of ice and packed powder.

It was the end of January, and we had arrived in Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden, 144 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. Around us, snow-clad forest spread away for nearly 390,000 square kilometres. Squalls shook the cabin as we taxied. The storm was out of the north-northeast, and I tried to picture where that wind had recently been – a strip of Finland, a ribbon of Norway, the Barents Sea, and before that, probably the polar ice cap. Brrr.

“Tell me again,” I said to my wife, Kim. “Why are we coming to the Arctic in the winter?”

“To see the aurora borealis,” she answered cheerfully. She loves the cold, she says – it wakes her up.

Minutes later, we were escorted out of the airport building towards a pack of yelping dogs. An apple-cheeked guide named Espen Hamnvik, who wore a fur-trimmed parka, handed us each a coat, heavy snow pants, a hat and boots. “There is your sled, Kim. Pete, this is yours,” he said. “There are your dogs.” After showing us how to use the brakes on our sleds, he gave a mittened thumbs-up and mushed off into the snowy woods.

Our Alaskan huskies barked and yowled and strained against their ropes. Another guide yanked the lines loose, the sleds jerked, and we were off, into the heart of Swedish Lapland.

What we had come for, aside from the northern lights, was a taste of the indigenous, historically nomadic Sami culture and an understanding of why the northern Swedes are so crazy about winter. We’d stay first at a remote lodge accessible in winter only by dog team or snowmobile, then we’d take a train some 260 kilometres south to sleep in Sami-style canvas tents. From there we’d move to the vertiginous Treehotel. We’d be outside most of the time, and we’d try not to lose any digits to the cold.

My dogs were the size of border collies. Bred for racing over long distances at great speed, they were running so fast that I had to grip

Clockwise from top left: Guests at Kenth Fjellborg’s Arctic lodge return from an expedition; the UFO at the Treehotel is one of several rooms suspended above the ground, including the Mirrorcube and Bird’s Nest; the aurora borealis lights the sky over the sauna cabin at the Aurora Safari Camp, located just south of the Arctic Circle; Lars Eriksson, a member of Sweden’s indigenous Sami population, has been working with reindeer for six decades

the handlebar as hard as I could. The trail was narrow, and twisting through trees with limbs bent with snow. There were sudden swoops and dips, branches to duck under. The dogs careened around the corners and we almost capsized; they charged down hills. Every time I stepped on the brake to slow down, one of the lead dogs threw a look back over her shoulder, and I could read

WE THROTTLED OUT OF THE WOODS ONTO THE WHITE EXPANSE OF THE LAKE, WHERE TWO REINDEER WERE SUNBATHING

her thought like a cartoon balloon: Let me run!

We swished out of the trees and onto a frozen lake. It was 10.05am and the light was muted, like the onset of dusk. The wind was driving the snow sideways, and I lost the lead sled in the squall. Then there was only white – above, below. Only the smooth slip and jostle of the wood runners underfoot, the biting frost on cheeks, the panting of the dogs.

We followed Espen as he turned his team into the woods. In the trees there was a small conical hut. Pale smoke wreathed from the stovepipe. We tied up the sleds and went inside to find a popping open fire, and a veteran dogsled racer and master chef named Stefan Lundgren, who served us reindeer stew and lingonberry cider. I glanced at Kim. “Magical,” she said.

At dusk, which fell at 2.50pm, we ran the sleds up to a cluster of low, pine- clad buildings at the edge of another lake. This was Fjellborg Arctic Lodge, our accommodation for the night. The storm had spent itself, and candles flickered in carved ice sconces outside the half-dozen cabins. Under its covering of fresh snow, the world looked like a scene from a Christmas card.

We sat on reindeer skins around the fire as the light faded behind the treetops, and the temperature plummeted. The only sounds were the crack of flames, the creak of snowladen trees, the murmur of quiet conversation.

Our cabin had a sauna, and we baked in it. Then we sat outside in a hot tub and peered into the lidded sky, hoping it would clear for the northern lights. It didn’t. I admit I wasn’t too bothered: for dinner Stefan had made us cured-reindeer brioche, arctic char and a dessert with three kinds of chocolate, served with rich black coffee.

NEXT MORNING, the sky had cleared. Kenth Fjellborg, the proprietor of Fjellborg Arctic Lodge, showed up

on a snowmobile, and as Espen had done with the sleds, he kept it simple. “This is your machine. Here is the ignition, the throttle, the brake. Keep your feet tucked in here in case you tip over.” Big smile. “Let’s go!”

Kenth is a master dog sledder and a consummate storyteller. In 1994 he ran the Iditarod dog sled race – 1600 kilometres through Arctic Alaska. In 2006, he guided Prince Albert II of Monaco to the North Pole. I asked him what he did in his free time. “Moose hunting. It’s my Arctic-male version of yoga.”

Off we went. We throttled out of the woods onto the white expanse of the lake, where two reindeer were sunbathing. We zoomed onto the river Torne and along a well-beaten track marked with storm poles. Our faces froze, our eyes squinted against the blast. There was Kenth’s village, Poikkijärvi, a string of small houses along the southern bank.

Across the river was the hamlet of Jukkasjärvi, home to the Icehotel, the famous hotel that melts every spring and is rebuilt every autumn, when artists from all over the world come to each carve one of the dozens of rooms. There is an ice bed with a reindeer skin inside each – essentially an ice cave with a steady temperature of around −5°C.

Kim and I walked into a room with a herd of ice sheep jumping over an ice fence, their fluffy wool made of thousands of little ice balls stuck together. We laughed. The artist, Luca Roncoroni, said he created it so that guests who were worried about sleeping in sub-zero temperatures could count the sheep and fall asleep more easily.

That night, no aurora. The next morning I woke very early to see if I could catch it. The Swedes have a name for the polar twilight, usually at its most pronounced around dusk, when the long shadows merge. They call it blå timmen, the blue hour. At dawn, as I walked to the edge of the lake, that name came to me. The sky was the softest blue. And the snow. And the trees. Every shade of blue – blue merging to slate beneath the trees, to ultramarine in the water-clear sky overhead. And in the south-west, a silver-blue half-moon was setting.

I felt giddy. So often, when we travel, we come for one thing and are blindsided by something else. I realised that I was loving winter again, the way I had as a child, when there was nothing better than sledding.

THE AURORA SAFARI CAMP outside of Luleå was our next stop. Its name virtually guaranteed a sighting. It was also a chance for even deeper immersion: we were staying in conical tepees with cloth skins inspired by traditional Sami lavvu shelters. The mercury pegged at −23°C for two days. At night, Kim and I took turns stoking the little woodstove every

hour and a half, stepping outside each time to scan for northern lights – and seeing only icy stars.

The camp was perched on a wide river covered with snow. One morning we took out snowmobiles. The sun, just over the treetops, was brilliant, and it turned the distant rime-frosted ridges to gold. On the islands, the trees were sheathed in ice. I accelerated over the unbroken, glittering snow. Behind me, a plume of powder sprayed six metres into the sunlight, where it blazed with gold.

That night, Fredrik Broman, the camp’s proprietor, fired up his sauna: a big tent with a woodstove, on a float, frozen into the river. Outside were blocks of clear virgin ice. I sweated away happily, before f lipping back the door and tumbling out into the sub-zero darkness in a gush of steam.

But still no lights. Four nights down, two to go. We’d been ice fishing with Kenth, snowshoeing with Fredrik and today we were going to see a legendary Sami named Lars Eriksson. He came out of his weatherboard house in traditional dress of dark blue felt trimmed with strips of yellow, green and red – sun, earth, fire – and reindeer- fur boots. He had a flowing white beard. “It’s Santa Claus!” Kim whispered.

We walked in chill sunlight into a field among Lars’s reindeer, where he fed them handfuls of spongy moss. “My family has been here for seven generations,” he said. “In 1958 I started with the reindeer.” When the animals migrated up to the forests in the west, his family would move behind the herd on skis and camp for weeks at a time.

“We follow nature and how we feel – slow, slow, no stress.” Now, he said, the 3000 Sami families that still herd reindeer move them with all-terrain vehicles and trucks; they have to take other jobs to pay for the machines and fuel, and there is too much stress. “Not good for the deer.”

He took us into a log cabin for lunch, and Kim asked him if anyone still joiks, or practices the Sami singing she had heard about. Lars inhaled deeply, then he sang. A deep, strong descant with the broken melody of a forest wind. He stopped and smiled. “Wow,” Kim murmured. “What does it mean?”

“Having friends,” he said. “The sun is out.”

OUR LAST NIGHT was at Treehotel, on par with the Icehotel in terms of

weirdness. Owners Kent and Britta Lindvall commissioned different architects to build rooms up in the pines. The most famous may be the Mirrorcube, skewered on a single tree, with mirrored surfaces that reflect the sky and boughs such that it seems to disappear.

We were staying in the UFO. Standing at the base of a pine tree in the sub-zero darkness, we pushed a button on the trunk and zmmmmm, a ladder descended. Inside, the pod had a projector that threw swimming galaxies onto the curved walls. We lay in the dark and drank tea and watched them, knowing that this might be as close as we would get to a light show.

At 10.30pm we put on long underwear, boots and parkas, and climbed down from the UFO. We tromped through the snow to a clearing. Nothing. Not nothing – a billion heedless stars. We climbed back into our spaceship. “It’s okay,” Kim said. “This whole trip has been like a dream – who needs the aurora borealis?”

But she woke me up at 1am anyway, and again we tramped up into thigh- deep snow. Stars, stillness. At 3.30am she started awake from a dream. “C’mon,” she said. “One more look.” We trudged back up to the clearing.

“Oh,” I murmured. There was Orion shooting his arrow, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades. And there was something moving between us and them. A scrim of pale light, almost like a cloud, except that it was crowning over the trees and shooting rays across the sky.

Slowly, without sound, it was cascading in great waterfalls of light, shimmering in curtains the colour of clouds. It felt, to me, like the spirit of winter, who has sung silently to these forests since the beginning of time. Kim reached a mittened hand for mine, and we stood in the clearing, transfixed, until we could no longer feel our fingers or toes.