Abisko, May 15, 2020. Nothing is as it should this winter, except mountain guide Stefan Palm’s raccoon look. Despite the fact that it has snowed five metres, or more, in the Riksgränsen mountains, and even though everyone I meet manages to throw out a comment about spring being delayed and that no one can remember a winter with worse weather, Stefan Palm is sporting classic tan lines from sunglasses. This is what he has always looked like, or at least how I have always seen him up here for more than 30 years. Stefan is one of Sweden’s most famous mountain guides; his workplace is wherever there are mountains and snow, all around the world. Every year, from the end of March to the end of May, Abisko Mountain Lodge is Stefan’s basecamp.

— But I have to add that Stefan got those tan lines during the last couple of days. He didn’t look quite like himself before that, says Kristoffer Borg, who works at Brasserie Fjällköket.

— On the other hand, nothing is as it should this winter.

Stefan smiles. His weather-beaten tan is a result of spending a couple of hundred days a year on skis. He has been doing this since he was old enough to decide for himself what he wanted to do.

Born to ski

Stefan is in Abisko with his family: wife Pia and son Max. His daughter Robina has just gone to Amsterdam, where she studies communication. If you were to define skiers, the Palm family could very well be that definition. Max Palm won – as the youngest winner of that competition ever – the Nordic Freestyle Championships in the winter of 2019. That same year he won the Freeride Junior Tour, which he repeated the following year. Max Palm has overtaken most normal and not-so-normal skiers since he was 12 years old. Max is up here because he had hoped to defend his title in the Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships, but unfortunately, the event was cancelled. His mother, Pia, has actually won the SBMC three times. What goes through her mind when she watches her son ski?

— Well, to be honest, it’s scary during competitions. But otherwise, if we ski together or when I watch him go, I’m very calm.

— Max has amazing control. I’ve seen him, you know, ‘get charged’ basically all the time since he started skiing, so I know that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to skiing.

That Pia would ski was more or less written in her DNA. Her family consisted of and still consists of skiers. Her parents loved the mountains and skiing; her cousins were skiers too. When the family went on holiday, they packed the children into the car and went to the mountains. Pia became a ski instructor. She ended up in Riksgränsen after the kind of experiences we normally abbreviate as curiosity. She went there and instantly fell in love with the place as well as a blond guy working at ‘Sporten’, which is what the ski school in Riksgränsen was called at the time. During her time in Riksgränsen, Pia won SBMC three times and ended up on the Swedish Interski team representing Sweden’s ski schools worldwide. She climbed the mountain Muztagh Ata, 7,546 metres high, and for a long time, she held the ‘height record’ among Swedish females. Naturally, Pia walked up Muztagh Ata to ski down. She walked in ski boots that were five sizes too big, so her feet would not get frostbitten.

Skiing was not as obvious for Stefan, growing up not far from the golf courses in Skanör-Falsterbo in the southernmost part of Sweden. But somehow, his mother had decided Stefan would do something with that adventurous spirit of his, and she sent him up to Kiruna to study mountain sports. (To be on the safe side, ensuring the boy would be accepted, she had filled out the application as well as forged his signature.) This is how he, raised near Sweden’s southernmost tip, came to be defined by Sweden’s Arctic destination.

Skiing also gave Stefan and Pia the direction they wanted in life. When summer came to Riksgränsen at the beginning of June, they took a flight to New Zealand. They worked there during the southern hemisphere winter. When spring claimed that part of the world, they flew back north, to the Alps, before returning to Riksgränsen sometime in March. A cycle of winter, snow and travelling around the world. These days their home base is Chamonix in France, where Max goes to school and develops his skiing talent, and it is actually not that far from Robina’s school in the Netherlands. But since Stefan still lives his life as a guide at the world’s best ski resorts and heli-ski lodges, home base is something we can take with a pinch of salt. Wherever he lays his sunglasses, that’s his home. Today he guides in Iceland, Japan, Russia, Norway, Chile – where he is called Sabueso Sueco, ‘the Swedish scent hound’ by Chilean mountain guides who marvel at the Swede’s ability to sniff out the best skiing – and here, of course, from his northern base at Abisko Mountain Lodge.

Responsibilities and footprints

In many ways, Pia and Stefan introduced heli-skiing to this part of the world. In the 1990s, they returned to Riksgränsen after one of their journeys and suggested it ought to be offered at the hotel here, too. You can have many opinions about heli-skiing and travellers who arrive from all corners of the globe by plane. Talking to them about it, both Stefan and Pia say that they understand the problem and contemplate it, but because their guests know that some of the best heli-skiing in the world is actually found right here, the equation for the company is simple.

Dick Johansson also says:

— We talk about this all the time. Our responsibility and our footprint. But now it seems not many new skiers come in wanting to heli-ski. On the contrary, more and more young people want to do ski touring.

— Some want a combination, of course: perhaps be flown into an area and then do ski touring. But in general, there’s no influx of new clients who only want to get flown up the mountainsides.

— We’re aware of our impact, and we try to do other things in a sensible manner. But of course, if we wouldn’t be able to do it, we wouldn’t be able to run this facility. It’s always tricky, no matter what you do, he concludes and smiles a sad smile. They love the mountains.