New ice climbs in Lapland, Sweden

In 2016 I traveled to Swedish Lapland for the first time, to shoot a documentary about the Sami, the reindeer herders of northern Europe. On that trip I noticed see some icefalls that according to the Sami almost nobody climbed during the long Lapp winters.
 
With a group of friends, I returned to the Stora Sjöfallet National Park the following winter and for a week we climbed some of those icefalls. During that time I got to know some local people who told me about other walls with icefalls located in more remote valleys and with more complex approaches.
 
This is how in the winter of 2019 I convinced some good Italian mountaineering friends to return to the area. After a long approach we reached a wall described on the maps as Nieras and we climbed the longest and most classic ice fall of the wall. 300m of grade 4+ with very beautiful sections, like the obvious tube at the beginning of the second pitch. We named the route Tio Charli, to remember Giovanni Giarletta, a good friend of my Italian colleagues who died a few months earlier in a mountaineering accident.
 
2020 was a hard year due to Covid, but we finally returned in March 2021 with the aim of exploring different walls with more ice falls for 15 days. In particular a wall that on the maps was indicated as Kungsleden in the Sarek National Park.

After some contact with the locals, I managed to get the group of climbers transported on 2 snowmobiles with trailers packed with our material and the tents. We camped at the base of the wall below the ice climbs, and surrounded our tents with a high wall of blocks of compact snow to protect us from the strong winds.
 
The result were 10 new ice falls between the grade 3 to 6. There would have been 3 more icefalls worth climbing, but due to the large snow fields at the top and the high risk of avalanches on their upper slopes, we judged it unsafe to climb them:
 
On this trip we also returned to the Nieras wall and climbed another 2 new ice falls-Together with Tio Charli from 2019, this wall now offers a small selection of very good routes from 4+ to 5+.
 
Before leaving, we visited the valley where the previously known icefalls are and climbed some smaller drips that had not been ascended before.

by Rafa Valdillo

Italian climbers 2019
Marco Beccalli, Giorgio Benedusi, Luigi Mario Drago, Marco Gianola, Francesco Milani Capialbi

Spanish climbers 2021
Pere Montasell Bach, David Graells Colillas, Jordi Vigatà Altimira, Genciana Meneses Ribas, Juan Pablo Sabbione Kedinger, Guillermo Velasco Vadillo, Joan Picola Zarra, Eva Benedico Mora, Jordi Serralta Aparici, Javier Fanlo López

Info: rafavadilloexperiences.com