It was late August when I arrived at the outer limits of the Stockholm archipelago. Much of the Northern Hemisphere was still luxuriating in all-out summer splendor, but Sweden’s long summer days of nearly 24-hour sunlight had distinctly ended. I had traveled to the archipelago, an area covering 30,000 islands, islets, and granite skerries in the Baltic Sea, to immerse myself in the islands’ remote landscapes. I would be traveling along part of the Stockholm Archipelago Trail, a new 270-km hiking path (approximately 170 miles) that stretches across 22 islands off Sweden’s east coast, making it possible to venture deeper into the outer archipelago.
By the time I arrived, the archipelago had just entered a period of in-between, a sort of ethereal season between the summer and fall, when bright days move rapidly into longer, inky-dark nights. Gone were the boats that crowd the archipelago’s harbors in the midsummer, as were most of the visitors who keep the area’s inns and guesthouses buzzing through the season. Some islands had already returned to being completely uninhabited or were down to their single-digit year-round population. And yet the air and water temperatures were still warmer than in the rest of the country, a mild 68 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nature lovers have long flocked to the archipelago, hiking around the islands under the national principle of allemansrätten: the right to move freely in nature, even over privately owned land. It’s an essential tenet of Swedish culture, this concept of open access to the outdoors for all. Yet until the creation of the new trail, there was no formalized network of hiking paths in the archipelago, making the more remote islands a logistically intimidating place to explore—particularly when temperatures drop. When the new trail is formally completed by the end of October, it will extend the hiking season beyond the summer months, offering clearly delineated routes to safely explore the islands’ rural beauty without the crowds.
The hiking trail, when complete, will be divided into 20 sections and weave through a smorgasbord of landscapes, from accessible flat sandy walks to more vigorous treks through birch forests peppered with blueberries, lingonberries, and juniper, and challenging scrambles over lichen-covered granite boulders on the coast. Carved out painstakingly island by island, the trail unfolds an average of 9 miles of hiking paths per island (or about 4.5 hours of walking). It isn’t entirely completed on foot: The trek is connected by a series of boats, allowing hikers to move from island to island by public ferry, taxi boats, and private charters. While there’s the option to camp on every island of the trail, it is also possible to opt for inns, guesthouses, and even hotels during the summer (some do remain open throughout the year). And because this is Sweden, it’s worth noting that all but two of the islands have saunas on them.
