Spring winter in Norrbotten

Enjoying the snow and sun after a long winter

Just a short check in after I’ve been M.I.A. again. Or, more correctly, I’ve been enjoying these last days of snow and the easter holidays. You really have to because the sun is out and the snow is diseappering fast. It’s still cold in the nights so the snow freezes and creates a nice floor for skiing and other activities outdoors. But. During the days, when the sun is out, it’s really warm, or at least after a long winter of -20 degrees celsius, +7 degrees is warm and the snow melts away.

I took this photo of snow mobiles while skiing on the Kalix river close to where the river meets the sea, outside Billerud Korsnäs paper mill. And. That’s another thing I’ve been thinking about, nowadays the public image of the north of Sweden, Norrbotten or as some people prefer to call it Swedish Lapland (which is not the correct term for most parts), is all about nature and forests and all that. But. Norrbotten has a lot of natural resources that are processed here and have been for a long time. Along the coastline of the Bay of Bothnia there are paper and steel mills, which are very scenic since there’s still so much nature surrounding them. And, this is the history and the foundation of Norrbotten. We have natural resources like trees, steel and water which are transported along the rivers, railways and roads to the coast where they are processed and distributed. It’s the back bone of the region. So just to present a more proper image of the region I choose to show images of paper mills too. And, it’s a pretty one.