Europe’s wildest pilgrimage route: a trek through the mountains of north-west Sweden

A remote 18th-century chapel deep in Sami lands is the goal of the Präststigen, a 37-mile trail that traverses some of the country’s most spectacular scenery I wasn’t exactly in “Sunday best”, but I had made some effort. Well, I’d changed my underwear for the first time in a couple of days and given myself a baby-wipe bath. Still, as we filed into the chapel at Alkavare, I felt more a member of an expedition than a congregation. We sat on the low wooden benches, waterproof jackets rustling and leather walking boots stamping on the flagstone floor to keep warm. Fortunately, the priest, Mogens Amstrup Jacobsen, appeared to be a “man of the Gore-Tex”, as well as a man of the cloth, as he unzipped his own black rain jacket to reveal his dog collar. As the service began, the Arctic wind whipped through cracks in the dry stone walls, insulated only with reindeer hair, and candles flickered in their brass sconces. I had hiked to Alkavare following the Präststigen , or “Priests’ trail”, a 37-mile (60km) route from Kvikkjokk that could stake a claim as Europe’s wildest pilgrimage route, and certainly one of its most beautiful. The Präststigen follows the path that priests would once have taken to the chapel, built in 1788, to perform a service each summer, and today, on the last weekend in July, intrepid hikers and perseverant pilgrims can attend that same service. Alkavare sits on the western border of Sweden’s Sarek national park, home to many of the country’s highest mountains and steepest valleys, yet with no campsites or tourist huts and only scant sections of the more famous Kungsleden trail. There are no other marked paths and to hike here means wild camping, a heavy backpack and a sense of adventure. It was described by famed Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld in 1926 as vår sista stora vildmark – “ our last great wilderness”.

The Sami, Europe’s last Indigenous population, have braided themselves into these landscapes as tightly and beautifully as the thread of pewter in their traditional handicrafts. The Sami word for the Laponia area is Sápmi , the same word they use to refer to themselves, highlighting the indelible link between people and their environment. Sarek sits on the Sami’s traditional reindeer herding grounds. While they might now use motorcycles and snowmobiles to follow and herd the reindeer, their knowledge of and kinship with this landscape remains undimmed. So, not wilderness, then, but certainly wild. To even reach the start of the Präststigen, I had crossed the Arctic Circle on the road north from Luleå, met with Christian at his warehouse in Jokkmokk (home to the famous Sami winter markets each February) to load up our rucksacks for the six-night trip, and journeyed an hour farther west to the town of Kvikkjokk. From there the trailhead was a short boat ride across Sakkat lake. The first section of the trail climbed steeply, switchbacks tightly coiled in birch woodland; wild blueberries and cloudberries littered the path. Eventually we left the woodland and reached the ridge for our first proper view of Sarek. Away to the north was the cloud-covered summit of Bårddetjåhkkå, where in 1911 Swedish geologist Axel Hamberg built an observatory to conduct meteorological and glacial studies. We were following the guidebook Priest’s Path by Hans Fowelin (currently only published in Swedish), and while there was no marked trail, Fowelin had plotted a path of cairns we were supposedly to follow.

While some were solidly built square towers, most were little more than one rock propped up against another, mere whispers of waymarkers in a landscape of scree and moraine. Alongside the familiar buttercups and heather there were bright blue blossoms of mountain gentian, red ptarmigan berries and otherworldly looking wild angelica, a source of vitamin C for the Sami. Sarek was visited by botanist Carl Linnaeus during his epic expedition through northern Sweden in 1732, and the first part of the Priest’s trail is sometimes referred to as Linnaeus’s trail. On our fourth day of hiking Alkavare chapel appeared on a bluff above the glacial blue waters of Alggajavvre lake, surrounded by high peaks and valleys. It was utterly beautiful. I had a grin on my wind-burnt face for most of the day, one that even wading across rivers (a common feature of hiking in Sarek), shin-high in glacial meltwater, failed to dim. After rowing across the Miellätno river, using one of the rowing boats left on each bank by the park rangers, we climbed up to the chapel late on Saturday evening where Jacobsen greeted us with a beaming smile. View image in fullscreen Priest Mogens Amstrup Jacobsen was flown in by helicopter to lead the service. Over tea, he told us he had been dropped off by helicopter at Alkavare with his family on Friday morning and this was his first time leading the service here. Others in the diocese no longer volunteered. “It is physical, hard work and the days are long,” he said, before heading off to re-tar the chapel’s roof and fix one of the rowing boats that had come loose and floated away down the river – returned, later, swinging beneath a helicopter.

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