Here was a beautiful travel feature.

I don't think it's an accident that
a) the algos give this stuff to me, and
b) the British FT is publishing wonderful nature/Nordic stuff.

The coolcation trend (#1537134) and general obsession with the Nordics (#1603955, #1519566). Yeah, I get it. We just do life better up here (no offense!).

I learnt to ski when the industry traded on a simple fantasy of blue skies, deep powder and wide grins — possibly accentuated with some luminous lip balm. Jeopardy was the risk of a forfeit after losing your bread in the fondue. Times have changed. Perhaps it’s a reaction to ever more crowded pistes, soaring prices and interchangeable corporate resorts, but ski movies, magazines and marketing campaigns increasingly fetishise remote adventures and vaguely self-improving challenges

...I especially like this observation: hard, suffering work; slow, meticulous and intentional adventure:

Camping, reaching distant slopes by boat and ski touring (forgoing lifts to climb uphill using textured skins stuck to the bottom of skis) are all in vogue. The goal is “type-2 fun” — that is, enjoyable in retrospect, if miserable at the time.
This, then, was “type-2 fun” and it was absolutely glorious — the sort of experience that stays with you, maybe the best thing you can do on skis

Launched last year, Klättermusen Experiences (KMX) is bang on trend (“our favourite thing about ski resorts is not visiting them” snarks another post) and though it offers trips from Chile to Kazakhstan, we were heading to its “spiritual home”: Nuvsvåg, a village of 80 people in the far north of Norway, accessible only by sea, with neither lifts, restaurants nor bars.

"My emotions might have been elevated by relief at being on dry land but Nuvsvåg seemed a blissful spot, perhaps the most peaceful place I’d ever been."

LOL at this snarky brand/corporation commentary

KMX is an offshoot of Klättermusen (“the climbing mouse”), a venerable Swedish outdoor clothing and equipment brand, founded in 1975 but now suddenly fashionable among those looking for something more niche than The North Face or Patagonia. It’s not alone in branching out into running its own trips — Norrøna, Arc’teryx, Shackleton and others offer guided adventures, presumably keen on the halo of authenticity that it brings to the business of selling waterproofs

Love this dedication, the almost/definitely spiritual aspect of just you and the mountain, step by step...

We drove 10 minutes out of town, then put skins on our skis and set off up an almost flat valley, moving beside a stream in the grey half-light. After an hour, we hit the slope at the head of the valley, climbing up a glacier that offered a ramp to the gleaming ice cap above, conversation left behind as the effort of ascent grew.
At the top we found ourselves on a dazzling high plateau of ice — we struck out across it like Antarctic explorers, curving round to the 1,175-metre peak of Loppetinden, the highest in the region, with a 360-degree view of ice, snow and Prussian-blue fjords. Hidden in a cairn was a visitors’ book; in the previous year only three other people had been there.

...these colors and vistas are what I live basically_ daily.

Absolutely wonderful (and personal, first-person narrative!) story of snow, Nordics, adventures. LOVE. IT.

archive: https://archive.md/66Uad