Neil Williman vs Sweden

Comment Share Posted on Sunday January 8th at 9:35 p.m. Tweet

Skiing in Sweden summed up in a few photos and fewer paragraphs.

I've recently spent more than a week in Sweden, mainly skiing in Åre, and so I'm now I'm an expert on Sweden, Swedes and Swedish mountains. So take a seat, grab a bite to eat and let Papa Neil spin you a yarn about ‘åka skidor i Sverige'. Or more likely you'll just look at the pictures, in which case you're not reading this anyway, which is fine.

1. Sweden is:
Dark and Cold in winter (that capital c is not a type-o). To make up for this the Swedes wear brightly coloured clothes and all have saunas in their houses.

2. Swedes
As mentioned all wear bright clothes, and all have fancy ski gear even if they're not good at skiing, which makes a nice ski fashion parade if nothing else.

3. Swedish mountains
Got smashed by glaciers a while ago so they're mostly less steep than NZ mountains. They have pretty good snow (better than NZ but not as good as North America) but it gets a bit wind affected. And in mid-winter the lifts close at 3pm because it's dark- the sun goes down at 2:30. Lifts with lights stay open till 4:30. Then they close, groom the pistes and open again at 6:30 for ‘night skiing'. I had to have this explained to me that it's not ‘night skiing' till it's been groomed again.

Anyway here are some pictures. A huge thanks to Daniel Warberg for shooting with me and letting me use the photos here. As a side note these were all taken on the same day, we got to shoot both the sunrise and sunset while the resort was open, within less than 6 hours.

Also here is a video of my time in Åre. This youtube version has a bonus clip of me trying to cross country ski in powder, not featured in the vimeo version that you may have seen, as well as the music and credit details.