When Snow Has Covered The Forest

Stockholm finally get covered in snow. It starts like two days ago. Me and my wife just arrive home after 5 days cruise to St. Petersburg in Russia, tired and a little exhausted. We sleep for couple of hours. She wake me up with scream. “Snow!” After some weeks being teased by the “Shy” snow, now we actually see grass, roads, covered in white blanket of snows. Look so soft and like it calls me to play on it. I go out and took a picture.

The next day, my wife asked me “how does forest looked on snow?” I was like, “Glad you asked!” we quickly prepared some food and hot tea in a thermos, our usual go-trekking-kit.

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We are hitting this forest, or in Sweden they call it Naturreservat, called Gömmaren. It is only few kilometers south of IKEA Kungens Kurva (in Stockholm there are two IKEA). I have written how to find walking trail in Stockholm on my other blog, in case you want to know. For my wife, this is the first time she saw and touch snows. So she was pretty excited. The casual shoes now changed to winter boots so we can walk firmly without worrying the snow enter the shoes.

Everything is simply white. Trees, paths, bench on the road. This is one thing I like about snow. With the sunny weather, our walk couldn’t get better. We got sunshine into our eyes, making its way through the branches of trees. The sky is blue. The path are getting smaller and we know we are in deeper woods. We saw lakes turned into ice. I touch the ice using tree branches and it looks strong and thick. My wife throw a small stone, try to break the ice, but the stone bouncing as it was thrown to a glass. We slowly try to step on it and I succeed with some fear.

me stepping on the ice
me stepping on the ice

There are a lot of path in the forest and we just pick one based on our sense of direction. We do see google map, but we don’t use GPS to add more challenge to it. Along the way, we saw footprints and dog footsteps on the snow. Sometimes bicycle’s tire prints. The lake is quite big. Few bridges is set to connect two short edges. We met two cyclist trying to cross on the ice but in the last minute, they decide not to cross and took another path.

In total, it is about 10km walk when we get into a bus stop on a small road in Huddinge. We enjoy this kind of walk, and obviously will do the next one soon.
Are you joining us?

red on white
red on white
iced lake
iced lake
do you want to sit?
do you want to sit?

the rest of my photo on this walk is uploaded to my online photo gallery

Satu

Written by Satu

01 Jan 2016