Back in late 2016, when Netra and I first met, one of the first photography adventures she talked about was her time in Abisko, northern Sweden, two years earlier. Abisko is located 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, and it is the best location in the world to see Aurora borealis, the northern lights. This is simply, because the microclimate in Abisko is so good and conducive to clear skies, that if you were to spend three nights in a row here, you would have an approximately 80% chance of seeing the lights. Interesting, that as I was researching into the solar maximum phenomenon , I learned that in 2014, when Netra first visited, it was the weakest solar maximum on record.
One thing Netra said over the years, that it would be amazing if we could visit Abisko together one day. That day came sooner than we had planned. The fact I must take leave over Christmas due to company shut down is not ideal, as to try and go away somewhere, places get crowded and stupidly overpriced. But 2024 gave us a turn in condition, that made us decide to visit over the Christmas/New Year period. The snippet from Google maps below shows where Abisko is locatied in the far north of Sweden. The red line represents the approximate location of the Arctic Circle, and Abisko lies 200 kilometers north from that point. It’s a long way from Stockholm and all flights arrive into Kiruna, from where only a train or bus, or an expensive taxi will take you to Abisko.
Sometime in October last year, a solar maximum was declared by NASA and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). This means that aurora activity in the earth’s polar regions should be fantastic for a while. The cycle from solar minimum to solar maximum is around 11 years, this means that when the next solar maximum will occur, I will be over 60 years old. Who knows where we will be in life by that stage?
We began to scramble for accommodation and flights. It was a tough one, as our friendly airlines in the skies love to take advantage of the upcoming holiday season and charge passengers roughly two to even three or more times what a normal airfare would cost at other times of the year. Gotta love this capitalist mindset for this kind of money-gouging greedy behaviour, but it is what it is. You either stay home, or shut-up and pay the price if you want to go, but maybe shed a tear or two.
We were keen to go to Budapest first (and it’s pronounced Budapesht, BTW) for Christmas, but there was simply no accommodation in our chosen area in Sweden for the following week. Therefore, we had to reverse our plans and start in Sweden, then come back home to Australia via Hungary. However, I will write more about Hungary in the next blog post .
Abisko was booked pretty heavily, but we managed to secure four nights in a row at the STF Touriststation, then we decided to shift to Björkliden, eight kilometers west, for the next four nights. We are fortunate to have a good connection in Abisko who runs the different activities and tours, so we booked four activities with them to make sure we don’t miss the lights and some of the other cool experiences, such as the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, east of Kiruna.
Our flight took us via Dubai, then onto Stockholm – where we arrived just after midday – then had to wait for five and a half hours for the final flight to Kiruna. We booked one night in town, and organised a dog sledding experience with the Kiruna Dog Sled team for the first morning. After a 37-hour trip to Kiruna, we were exhausted and went to sleep by midnight. Up the next morning, early for breakfast, then to meet the guide for the dog sledding. Since we were up in Sweden’s north in the middle of winter, we never saw the sun. Around 9:30am there was a bit of dawn-like light, followed by twilight for a couple of hours, then dusk-like light and total darkness by around 2:00pm or so. The sun never rises for a couple of months and it can be a bit depressing spending all that time in darkness. But, when there’s aurora to photograph, it’s really not a big deal.
The dog sledding was simply awesome, and we had an absolute blast in the icy conditions as the excited dogs pulled our sled through snowy fields, among the trees at a seriously fast pace. These dogs LOVE the work, they live for it! The love the cold and the exercise, they are specifically bred for these conditions and their behaviours show nothing but plain, puppy-like joy as they howl and bark, getting ready for the mornings run with the sleds. In places, the trail was so tight, that if you stuck your leg out, you’d risk snapping it in half. That was also part of the all too important safety briefing, that if your foot slides off the sled rail, you yell out to stop immediately, otherwise you could get a serious injury.
When we arrived back into Kiruna, a mere 10-minute drive from the Kiruna Dog Sled home base, we eagerly awaited our bus transport to Abisko. By the time the driver arrived at 2:00pm, it was dark, cold and windy. We began the journey to Abisko, which is an incredibly beautiful little town. Passing traditional Swedish houses on the streets in Kiruna, then in the countryside, we were amazed at how similarly red many of them looked. Apparently, that was the paint colour available, so they all painted with the same paints. The odd yellow house stuck out, but red seemed to be dominating. When we arrived into the STF Touriststation, we unpacked, went for dinner then waited for the bus to take us on the Aurora chase, one of the activities we picked from Lights Over Lapland, the tour operator that we know in the region.
A friendly young, Malaysian woman came to collect us all at 8:00pm. Joey is passionate, loves the aurora chase and really takes care of all the guests on the tours. She is of the tour guides with Lights Over Lapland, she has intimate knowledge of the different locations, the scenery and opportunities for the guests, which made her, and other guides with Lights Over Lapland, extremely valuable to our visit.
A quick check of arctic suits (we hired our own from the touriststation) and we were en route to chase the lights in the sky. A few kilometers down the road, back east towards Kiruna, we got the first whiff of the things going on in the sky above. A thin veil-like haze, that slowly shifts like a moving cloud but holds its shape to some degree. When the geomagnetic activity is not too strong, this haze is the only visible sign, that you have aurora. Once you mount your camera on a tripod and take a long exposure, the green light becomes evident on the captured image file.
The activity was mild by any standard, but we still managed to get far better images than what we have during all of our aurora chasing in Australia. Quick trips to Tasmania were often fruitless – or with very little results showing for the expense and effort. We did try in places like Canberra back in 2016 and 2017 – and drove down during weeknights to catch some action. In reality, it was a waste of time. The lone road we stood on several times by ourselves well into the dawn hours, has now become a circus at night apparently, with photographers lining the road in big numbers. No thanks…..
We moved the bus in the opposite direction, towards Norway, once the aurora fizzled out and went looking again. We pulled up at a small rest stop near Riksgränsen, a small village close to the border. Joey took some brewing things to the little hut 50 meters from the highway and began to make a hot beverage while we checked the sky for activity. It didn’t take long for a better show to eventuate, and while still not incredible, it was better than when we first stopped for images. Unfortunately, Netra’s tripod broke, so she was forced to shoot hand held for most of the aurora shots, at 1 and 2 second shutter speeds. The OM System in camera image stabilization made the possibility of creating sharp images hand held at such low shutter speeds a breeze!
We spent around two hours here, shooting the lights as they intensified, died down, intensified again, then died down for good. The warmth of the bus was a welcome change from the cold temperatures outside.
The following day, I went for a short walk from the touriststation to just be out while there was minimal evidence of any daylight. I didn’t see a lot of wildlife, since being cold and miserable, few birds were hanging around a small building, where they were being fed by the occupants. I had male and female Bullfinch, Willow and Great Tits feeding, then the odd Northern Raven flew past with their characteristic, loud calls giving them away. I was forced to shoot at very slow shutter speeds and very high ISO values to get any half decent images in the dim light. The images of the birds below are presented brighter than the ambient light was at the time.
We were looking forward to another aurora chase that evening, after dinner. Things happen quickly, and as we were in the middle of dinner, we had people all talking about the lights going off outside. Needless to say, we finished quickly, headed to the room and grabbed the gear that was already. We just had to put our arctic suits on for warmth.
When we walked outside……….the corona of the aurora was just about over us. It was amazing, and more powerful than the night before. We were completely blown away and so many people staying at the touriststation were outside (most with their phones) trying to capture the grandeur. We made our way to the rear of the buildings where we had a good view of the mountain atop which the Aurora Skystation is located. By this time the ring was over the mountain, a green ring, it was spectacular and the sky exploded with green in all directions. What a magnificent sight it was indeed. It died down after about 40 minutes and we could make our way back to the room and keep our eyes peeled for a few more hours.
The following evening, on the 22nd of December, we were planning to head up to the skystation. However, conditions were awful with heavy cloud and some snow, so we ended up cancelling our ascent in the chairlifts. The ascent would have taken 30 minutes up then the same amount of time down, but we just did not want to expose ourselves to the cold unnecessarily. With temperatures hovering at the -10 °C mark, with windchill adding up to another 10 degrees in the negatives, it was a smart move to stay in. We hoped, that our final night in Abisko on the 23rd of December would prove more fruitful with another Lights Over Lapland activity planned, called the Ultimate Aurora Adventure.
By the evening of the 23rd, we were excited, as all indicators for a good show were present. Fabian, our German guide from Lights Over Lapland collected us at 8:00pm and took us over to a native Sami camp located barely a kilometer from the STF Touriststation. There were some nice buildings and structures to photograph with any auroras once the lights were on. We talked a while and set-up our camera equipment and tripods only to start seeing the best show we have experienced for the entire Sweden trip.
By 9:30pm the geomagnetic storm peaked and we were seeing the greens and purples in the sky with the naked eye, and to say it was magnificent and mesmerizing isn’t saying enough. Neither Netra, nor I, have ever seen a lightshow in the sky this intense, and colourful. Of course, there are times when it’s even better than that night, however, we were more than satisfied with our results considering the enormous effort in traveling here and putting up with low temperatures (-19° C) and heavy snow. The small hut with the fireplace inside gave a lovely additional prop to show off the lights going off in the sky above it, and once we had a warm drink and started to really feel cold (after about 3 hours) we decided to call it, walk back to the bus and return to our accommodation.
Christmas Eve saw Netra and I catch the train over to Björkliden to the west, where we stayed at the Hotel Fjället, up on the mountain. The microclimate was so different here, that after the first night, when there was a little bit of green above, we saw snow, and wind, and snow and wind and repeat over and over. Opening the room window to the east, the first thing I noticed was the famous mountain formation called Lapporten (the Gates to Lapland), which is a famous landmark. I quickly switched to the 40-150mm f/2.8 zoom and grabbed some photos from the distance, and gee, I was glad I did. We never saw the mountains again because of the snow and wind storms for the next four days.
A visit to the Ice Hotel and the Sami reindeer village on one of our days based out of here was barely consolation for missing out on more lights in the sky, but it gave us an opportunity to really unwind and truly do absolutely nothing for a few days. The dinner on Christmas Day was fantastic, a three-course set menu in the restaurant and while I am a big eater, there was truly so much food, that I was just not able to finish it all.
The Sami reindeer village is a small establishment, where we did a short tour of the Sami way of life with a lovely, though somewhat opinionated, young Sami woman. She talked about their relationship with the land, the animals and plants and how their lives were changed over time by the other cultures inhabiting their lands. Sápmi is the area covering the territories of the Sami native peoples and it covers northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. After the tour, Netra and I wandered into the enclosures to meet the reindeer, which were easily approachable and were used to being fed. However, we felt, that perhaps it is not a great idea to let less mobile people, or children that are too young, to enter these enclosures, because the reindeer were quite assertive in their behaviour when they could smell the dried lichen feed we offered them. They would suddenly raise their heads, which meant the antlers could easily hurt a person not comfortable around animals. Wild, or domesticated, it makes little difference if one gets accidentally impaled by the sharp antler of a reindeer. That was our thought anyway.
The Ice Hotel is truly a remarkable place, where ice sculpting artists are invited every year to present their ideas for sculptures to use in the rooms of guests. During the day, the rooms are completely vacated and visitors can indulge in the many different sculptures created for the current winter season. Each sculpture is made from one or more blocks of ice – from the Torne River, weighing 1,700kg. The sculptures last winter were made by 70 people (40 were artists), from a total of 1,200 individual blocks of ice totalling 25,000 cubic meters. They refer to the building material as snice (snow + ice) and each art suite contains about 8 tons of ice. The sculptures were truly magnificent.
This pretty much sums it up, but we are already planning a minimum month-long stay next time in our own hire car, as one week is simply not enough to take it all in, and get amazing photos of ALL the wildlife and ALL the aurora. So time better fly until the next visit!
You can find more images in our gallery by clicking right HERE.
All that was left for us was to wait until the 28th of December so we could travel by air to my hometown, Budapest in Hungary, where more amazing adventures were waiting for us.