Northern Hemi Season Trip Report thingy - Sälen, Sweden
-20 degree days must be fun!! Tis report is making me even more excited to be there!! Hopefully Sweden doesn’t use up all of it’s bluebird days before feb!!
hahah trust me, it won’t. Bluebird and Dec/Jan almost never go in the same sentence. Dark and icy do however….that is why I’m so glad it has stayed so cold. It has kept the snow nice and dry!
I am loving this report !!!!
Top work cords 
Best you get some bacon on the plate next time, will take it to another level 
Keep sharing the strange and different customs, highly entertaining. 
I had kinda forgotten about snow and have been quite happy surfing and doing other summer stuff the last few weeks. Reading this thread has just wrecked that for me!
i got a wetsuit so hopefully next is asurfboard. lol and time to learn .
Last few days have been fun. Had a crazy day at work on sunday. 8.30am-5.30pm cleaning apartments, with only a 10 minute break for lunch.
I’ll do a post on the weekend about work and what it entails.
Had a day in the park at Lindvallen on Monday. Its so sick there. We park about 50m from the chairlift! And you can ride 1 foot forty of those metres down to the non-existent queue! It had snowed all day while we’d been working on sunday, so we got there for first lifts in case there was some snow on top of the groomers. We were the 3rd & 4th people on the chair. (swedes love sleeping in). There wasn’t any pow on top of the groomers but it was super soft.
Excited dork on first lift!
Up the top we were in a cloud and the light was so flat, I couldn’t see more than 2-3 metres in front of me, but it didn’t matter as we were amongst the first ones down, the slope hadn’t been tracked out yet, so I wasn’t going to come upon sudden bumps etc. Here’s a pic Freddy took when the light had improved a bit!
At the moment, the pink park is sectioned off in the lower-middle of the main slope. Its usual home is the slope on the other side of the chairlift, but they are in the process of making heaps and heaps of snow for all the kickers there.
I got my guts up and did the other jump that is in the line there at the moment. The gap between kicker and landing isn’t that long, but it is steep and sends you skyward! My first hit I straight aired and didn’t wind the windows. 2nd I did an alright shifty which I was happy with, but after that I just kept winding the windows! Not sure why….but I have to say - it is so fun being that high in the air and looking down at the landing. Here is a pic of me taking off. The light is so flat that it is difficult to see the landing, but you can see the faint blue outline of the spraypaint where the landing begins in the bottom left.
Freddy is normally an excellent photographer, but we’ve been really struggling as the display on our digi cam is broken after freddy crashed into a skier in perisher and had the cam in his pocket, so you just have to press and hope you have good timing!
Yesterday we went to the mountain that we can see from our loungeroom window - Hundfjallet (Dog mountain). Only parts of it were open, but I was super keen to go check out the Trollskogen (troll forest) which is a narrow green run through the pine trees built especially for kids/families. Trolls are a big part of the folklore of sweden and norway…I guess sort of in the same way I read books about Bunyips when I was a kid, kids read stories about trolls here.
The troll forest run features hundreds of life size wooden carvings of heaps of animals (wolves, horses, deer, owls, woodpeckers & so many more) and a lot of them have sound that is activated when you go past & some just run on a loop. There are also carvings of different people, like a dude playing the accordion (and he was hooked up with sound, playing a swedish folk song), 3 or 4 mini cubby house size wooden huts for kids to go into and heaps of other scenes. One cool one was two wooden outhouses directly opposite each other. It had sound running on a loop. When you open the door, there is a funny old lady sitting on the loo and she tells you to close the door cos the wind is cold. Then she starts calling out to her husband, who is the person in the loo opposite. Its pretty funny & I can see kids finding it hiliarious!
The Accordion playing dude
Statue riding thread?
Overall, the whole thing was seriously cool! We just rode through there once but it was so cool that we went back and unstrapped at the top of the run & walked down, so we could look at everything properly. Its pretty rad, because hundreds of hours of time and effort have gone into creating this magical place & its not like it makes them any money or anything.
The troll run is right on the edge of the part of the mountain that is open at the moment, and we spied some untracked tree runs that would require a bit of a hike. It isn’t fresh snow really, but the epic thing here is that it has been well below zero for ages, so the untracked snow is still really dry & nice! We were going to go there today (thurs) but just as we were getting ready to leave, our work called us pleading for us to come and work and help them out of a tight spot as they hadn’t scheduled enough people to work, so we went. Hopefully we get to do it tomorrow instead.
Highpoint of the day was finally receiving my personal number from the tax office in the post. So now I can function properly in society! I’ll write a bit more about personal numbers in another post….oh yeah and the other high point was our boss inviting us to go to the Norwegian resort of Hemsedal sometime in April for a company end of season trip. One of the big bosses of the company owns some lodges there, so pretty sure accommo would be free & also discounted lift passes. Frothing to go there! Its just over 5 hours away & a lot of the big scandi photo shoots happen there, as they often have monstrous kickers. They have a red park line that is 800m long, so I’ll be so keen for that at the end of the season!
Loving life!
Another great post!
Man that first chair looks icy cold!
A Swedish White Christmas
Merry Christmas to everyone. Hope you all had a lovely day with nice people and yummy food! I certainly did. Swedes celebrate on Christmas Eve, so monday was the day.
We worked super hard on saturday and sunday and it snowed the whole time. There was 10cm fresh on both mornings of the weekend, but we had to work, so I just tried not to think about the snowboarding fun we were missing out on.
Our boss split us up (we usually work together) and gave each of us one of the new, young kids and said ‘show them how to work hard and fast’ - so we did! I got home and raced to the toilet after I realised I hadn’t even peed all day! I had also forgotten to take my sneakers with me with my orthotics in them, so I could hardly stand up by the end of the day & my feet ached something shocking when I was trying to get off to sleep.
We did the same thing the next day with the young ‘uns & the boss said we’d done the job well. We were really busy, as there was about 250 arrivals. Check out time is 10am and Check-in time is either 2pm or 4pm, so there is a lot of work to get done really quickly! Pretty sure that next sunday we have about 500 arrivals to get done, gonna be very hectic! AFter work we were wrecked, so we just ate dinner, enjoyed a sauna and then completed Halo 4 campaign that we’ve been doing in co-op mode. It was so freaking rad!
Monday morning we drove the 4 hours home to Fred’s family. There was a big difference in snow levels since we were last here at the beginning of december. Here is that same pic again for comparison!
Around Dec 1st
Dec 26th
By the time the late lunch/christmas dinner came around at about 4pm, we were starving, as we hadn’t eaten anything since we had breakfast in Sälen at 8 in the morning. We spend the time inbetween wrapping our presents and hanging out with the fam (Fred’s bro, bro’s gf, their crazy dog, grandma, uncle, aunty, dad and step-mum) and we watched the traditional swedish christmas Disney cartoons that are on every year at 3pm.
When dinner time finally came, it was worth the wait for sure! On the Julbordet (Christmas table) was the following: Swedish meatballs, christmas ham, different types of pickled herring, cheeses, prinskorv (sort of like cocktail frankfurts but better), Boiled eggs with caviar, boiled potatoes, salad, shrimps, swedish potato bake (has onion and anchovies in it & is called Jansson’s Frestelse if someone wants to look it up) and bread.
There is a lot of the above that I don’t eat cos I’m weird with food, but i’m sure some of you foodies will be interested in what swedes have for a christmas spread! By way of drinks there was Julmust (swedish christmas soft drink, sort of like coke but different in a way I can’t explain), Schnapps of all different kinds (tried a good few of them) and beer.
After that it was presents time, which was fun. After that, Santa turned up! The guy next door (his name is Ulf) is in his late 50s or early 60s and he dressed up, braved the cold (was about -8) and went around the neighbourhood to visit all the families and hand out presents to all the kids.
He dropped in to our house to say hello and we gave him a shot of schnapps to help warm him up before he was on his way again.
After everyone left, I talked to mumsy on skype and then to my brother, his wife and kids, which was rad & then off to sleep.
Today we didn’t do much, except we went for a nice walk around Sjötorp. Took some pics of the iced over harbour & canal lock.
Beach volleyball anyone? A balmy -6 degrees out!
The view out on to Lake Vänern
That is about it from me for now. We’re hanging here for the next few days & going to Gothenburg (Göteborg) to catch up with some of Freddy’s mates before we head back up to Sälen on friday or saturday.
Epic blog, cords!
I’m looking forward to staying up-to-date with your adventures. Looks like it’s been pretty amazing so far.
The view out on to Lake Vänern
Can you explain this pic for a little bit more? Are you standing on the lake looking towards a peninsula of land with more lake in the background?
Is that a jetty in the middle of the picture? A boat on the right, mid frame, half out of shot?
or you can tell me the Lat and Long and I will google earth it
Awesome start. Love the height you are getting in the jump pic!
Azz - I’m standing on the edge of the boat ramp, looking across the bottom harbour, then there is a bit of lake, and then there is a bit of land, which is just another piece of the ‘mainland’ that juts out quite far. And yeah, that is the jetty in the middle, and the boat belongs to an eccentric old dude in the village who always leaves his boat in the water all year around.
If you paste this into google maps, (58.83885,13.974983 ) I think(!) it should put a green arrow exactly where I was when I took the photo, and I was looking pretty much straight to the west.
If you zoom all the way out, you’ll see how truly enormous the lake is.
We’re back from Sjötorp now and looking forward to going riding tomorrow. They put a storm warning out on the radio this afternoon though - I’ll be spewing if the weather ruins my plans for riding. Pretty sure that Pink Park has moved to its proper home on its own slope while we were away, so frothing to ride there. Because of work and being away for xmas, its been a week since I last rode and I’m feeling a bit grumpy about it!....Totally a first world problem, I know. Other first world problem for the day is how many people there are everywhere, now! We knew it was going to happen, as the 2 weeks over xmas and new year are the busiest of the season, but it is still surprising to find all this traffic where there was none a week ago, queues in the supermarket when you’re just trying to get milk, chaos in the carpark etc etc! Its nice though that all the families get a chance to get away and go skiing together.
The neighbourhood we live in is pretty much all holiday rental houses, so we were the only ones on our street & the surrounding streets since we got here, now almost every single house is occupied.
Other news is that thanks to my darling mum, we got some xmas money that we decided to spend on new boards. I thought I was deadset keen on a Bataleon Airobic, but ended up going with a newer version of Freddy’s old board, an Arbor Draft 2012. Having ridden his old one a few times this season, I think its the kind of board I want to ride next and will help my riding. The Airobic can wait for some other time.
Arbor Draft, 2012. 150cm
Freddy went for the DC Ply 2012 150cm. I nearly got the same as him, but wanted to go for a straight reverse camber, not the hybrid this time.
Now we just have to wait for them to arrive
Cords this new you is a bit of a shock!
I think every post on here you are spending money!
hahah really? doesn’t feel like it to me. Feels like I’m working all the time. I’ve already worked way more days since I got here than I worked in the previous 5 months altogether….and I probably only worked 20-30 days in the first half the year altogether as well.
We got the boards on super special (last years models), and the two of them together cost less than most people pay for one board in Aus, plus, it was our christmas presents from my mum 
Oh I understand just funny!
I almost pulled the trigger on the DC ply the other night whilst drunk at a mates (we always seem to get drunk and buy snow gear together…)