Trip 42 — Fasta Åland Walk

Day 8: Around Långbergsöda and Orrdalsklint
Thursday, 27 June 2024

Today: 34917 steps/25.77 km/16.01 mi/5h 16m
Total: 275648 steps/217.01 km/134.84 mi/40h 2m

Saltvik has good acoustics. As I left the B&B, a chorus of cattle sang out from far down the road, an adagio reveille from a tuba ensemble. When I turned right at the roundabout, a rooster called me to attention with a trumpet solo. The sounds bounced off the trees and the mountains to which I was heading, polishing the symphony with mild reverberation.

After an hour, I turned left onto a forest path. This was the bottom of the route up to Långbergsöda, one of Åland's highest points and the site of a Stone Age settlement. The narrow path meandered through short brush and then became wider as it took me over the broad boulders to which I've become accustomed in Åland. Near the top, a couple of stone fields remained from about 10,000 years ago, left behind by the receding Yoldia Sea as it morphed into what's now the Baltic.

Farther up, at the edge of a thick pond, floated a replica of a Stone Age canoe, part of a reconstruction of the settlement. At such an altitude, with so much forest between here and the sea, it was startling to think that this was once a launching point for fishing boats into the open water.

The official route ended at a parking area, the upper end of the Långbergsöda trail as shown on the posted map. But the path continued as a gravel road past a gate to curl around to the next mountain to the west, the slightly higher Orrdalsklint. Ideally, I wanted to reach the Orrdalsklint and come down the other side, if I could find a way through the boulders to the next network of roads.

The road ended just below the Orrdalsklint's summit. It was an easy climb for about two minutes to the top. A red house was shrouded in trees, a firepit suggested joyful gatherings during the dark seasons, and a lookout tower allowed for expansive views of a few dozen of Åland's northern islets. This was Åland's highest point, 129 meters, plus a few more for the tower.

I studied Google Maps' satellite view carefully. From the nearest bend in the road, I appeared to be only a couple hundred meters from a place that resembled a rough path, which itself was only a couple hundred meters from an actual road. If I could get there, then I could return to the roundabout in Saltvik without retracing any of the outbound journey. It would also bring me down under the other side of the Kasberg — the peninsula where I'd had to turn around yesterday.

There had to be some kind of path. Centuries of use wouldn't make Orrdalsklint a stub trail. I scoured the forest for anything that resembled a way through.

I picked a succession of open rocks and plunged into the forest. It was most certainly not a path, but the trees weren't so dense as to prevent progress. I kept to the rocks as long as possible before descending through dense underbrush: crispy moss, springy grass, and broken twigs. The vegetation came up past my knees. I wasn't sure what I was tramping on; I hoped there weren't any stinging nettles. With each step, I prepared myself that the ground might be farther down than I predicted, since it was thickly covered.

I checked the map on my phone frequently. I was generally heading in the right direction but I had to bank left soon. I looked for a place to do that, continuing the gradual descent. Occasionally there were strips of low-lying vegetation between boulders, and I had to lower myself slowly into a narrow chasm and then climb back up.

I was near the vague, rough path on the map, but where was it in real life? Perhaps the area had changed since Google photographed it. What was supposed to be a rough path was instead a vast morass of broken branches and twigs between me and the real road.

I had to scramble across. It wasn't pleasant; each step had the possibility of snapping a branch and scraping my skin. Most of the plants were prickly, but there was one plant that was especially soft and felt wonderful brushing my legs.

I came to a downed tree trunk about waist-high and climbed up to get over it. I wasn't sure where to step down from it; the ground was littered with twigs and branches of unseen depth. I held onto a branch for balance, but it snapped as I stepped down. I went down with it, and another branch scraped my face as I landed.

It could have been much worse; I wasn't bleeding, and it didn't hurt much. I stood up and continued.

But crossing this field of branches was exhausting. Eventually I saw where the boulders resumed, and I strode over to them as though they were old friends. Now I could resume a quicker pace. I hoped they wouldn't dead-end at a cliff.

They didn't. It was a short incline followed by a careful descent, and then I reached the road near a place called Fagervik. I turned left, and then left again, and eventually I came back to Route 50 to return to Saltvik. After the rough exodus, my pace was slow, and I moaned like the cattle on the way back in: the tired wail of a tenor saxophone, announcing my weariness to the village.

After a stroll through town to the 13th-century church and down to the beach, I dined under the linden trees in the B&B's courtyard: cold salmon and salad with the rest of my nödsill. There will be ample food options from now on; I need no more emergency herring and it was better to eat it than continue to carry it. Then I brought some vanilla-cloudberry and chocolate-mint ice cream up to the terrace. The cows down the road bellowed again, now sounding more like elephants: trombones and cymbal crashes.

The gash on my face looks worse than it feels. The swelling is enough that I can see it peripherally, but it doesn't hurt. If that's the price of stomping through nature, it's a small one: I'm lucky that I wasn't impaled in the eye, and that I didn't step on a cluster of bees, or slip down a boulder. And there are no more unknowns on this walk; every turn is planned from now on.

Or is it? It doesn't even take a trailhead marker to beckon me to a place of beauty.

Go on to day 9