Why Hyssnaleden?
Although I have done a lot of day hikes, I haven’t been camping since I was in my early 20s, and have never camped solo. Several sections of Bohusleden really require you to spend at least 3 or 4 days out in the woods, if not longer. Rather than diving into such an experience, I decided a 2-day trip would be good to test the waters. I’m glad I made that choice.
I hadn’t heard of Hyssnaleden, but a student mentioned it one games night when I said I was looking for something to test camping, and sent me a link to a useful website with information about the trail. There were a couple of potential camping spots, but because it is a loop and you can start and end at various points, it was unclear how far into the loop the camping place would be. The loop was 40km and in Marks kommun. It was easily reachable by public transport, and only around 1 hour from where I live. It seemed like a nice place to explore.
Gear Prep
I bought a sleeping bag (a Sea to Summit Spark Women’s down bag with a comfort rating of -1 degrees celsius, making it a great 3-season bag which packs down fairly small). However, I was lucky enough to be able to borrow the rest of the camping equipment (tent, air mattress, stove and even water filter) from a parkrun friend. I think I got it all cleaned up and aired out well enough after the hike.
One thing I didn’t check (and probably should have) was my backpack. It’s from 2009 and hasn’t been used since I moved to Sweden. It’s a unisex pack rather than women’s fit, and it is rather big and heavy. I think it’s a 65-litre pack. I still struggled to fit everything in it though. Despite the ultra-light tent and sleeping bag, it still weighed around 12kg, a lot of which was the weight of the pack and the weight of water I was carrying (2 litres). However, if anything I wish I had taken more water.
Day One
I ate a proper dinner (chick pea and tomato stew with cous cous) for breakfast before heading off to catch the tram, followed by the number 300 bus. I pressed the button for the stop as soon as we passed the preceding stop, and also stood up and stood by the door. The driver still forgot to stop, and I had to run up the bus waving at him before he let me out further along the road. That added a bit of distance to my hike, but I soon found the trail, just a little further on than intended.
The route begins in Hyssna and starts off taking you through villas and farmland, before heading uphill into a beech forest. It was a hot day, and the climb was harder than I expected due to a combination of the heat and the huge backpack which, I soon realised, was probably not optimised to fit me. I was glad of the hiking poles at least. There was a nice bench to sit on at Torberg with lovely views over fields, forest, and a church. I also tried to adjust my pack here, as it was feeling uncomfortable. The hike continues largely uphill from that point to Stromsås, with another downhill and uphill before reaching the treetop cabins. I did not meet any other hikers on this part of the route, or see anyone other than on the asphalt sections of the route such as heading through Slätthult. This made it really peaceful, and I appreciated being able to hear birdsong, and to have time to think about recent life events.
Around lunchtime I reached Lilla Hålsjön, and was delighted to discover that there was a dry toilet at the beach area next to it. It hadn’t been mentioned in the online guide, so it was a bonus. I didn’t need to fill up with water there, and decided to continue on towards Stora Hålsjön. The beach was small and busy, so I continued on and stopped to eat something in another forested section in the shade. I had packed some sandwiches for the first day, and was aware that I should probably eat them before they melted or became dangerous to eat due to the hummus spoiling in the heat.
Stora Hålsjön was beautiful, but I didn’t find the alleged beach area and campground. To be fair, that information came from Gemini rather than the trail guide. The lake is huge, and the trail takes you away from the lake, up a relatively steep climb. The payoff is a stunning view over the lake, which has an almost perfectly square, tree-covered island. The path then takes you back down towards lake level, and I took advantage of that to get some water from the lake before heading off to the wilderness camping site. Not having used a water filter before, and having about 750ml of tap water remaining, I decided only to get water in the 650ml bottle that comes with the filter, rather than mixing tap and lake water, or getting lake water and finding filtration was a problem or tasted odd. This was a mistake, as I realised later on.
I arrived at the campsite around 4:40pm, and was the only person there. I was very glad to be able to remove the pack, which had been getting more and more uncomfortable, even with the slowly reducing food and water weight. I worked out how to get into the vindskydd (wind shelter) and stayed in there for a while, avoiding the blistering sun. I had reapplied sunscreen twice, and wanted to try to avoid applying a 3rd time. I felt really sweaty and sticky, and the alleged water pump at the campsite did not exist. I was also slightly concerned that I had only hiked around 18km. Gemini said the campsite was 22 or 23km into the hike going counterclockwise, but at 18km I was looking at around 22km for day 2, probably on worse sleep than the first day.
As I was chilling in the vindskydd, I suddenly heard an odd noise, which I thought might be farm machinery. It was not farm machinery, but turned out to be a drone. This was followed by a young German couple on bikes, who were also looking to stay at the campground. I said hi but stayed in the vindskydd whilst they got set up, both to give them space and to stay out of the sun. Whilst there, a car drove up and parked closed to where I wanted to set up my tent. I was worried this spot might be really popular. It was a father and son. The father asked the couple if they planned to stay overnight, then he decided to go elsewhere with his son. Maybe because they were local and could camp out there another night, or maybe because they didn’t want to make small talk with random tourists. I was happy enough with it just being 3 of us. The guy had a YouTube channel (I asked, because of the drone) which I subscribed to. His most popular video is about cycling around 3500km to the North Cape. He and his girlfriend were cycling around Sweden not following a designated cycle route, but were heading towards Gothenburg to get the ferry to Denmark before cycling back south again.
Camping
I set up tent around 8:00pm, which went better than I had expected. I’d tried to set it up in the apartment but of course you can’t peg things out there. I had already got instructions from Simon on how to blow up the air mattress, which I did inside the vindskydd hiding from the drone. I sent him a photo of the tent and he mentioned that I hadn’t pegged out one of the guy lines. However, there was no wind and the ground was really flat, so I just left it and it was fine. I had taken all of my food and toiletries and hung them in a bag on a tree branch a reasonable distance from the tent. Gemini had been insistent that you should do that, not because of bears (which aren’t really found this far south), wild boars, or wolves (both of which have been spotted but tend to keep their distance from humans) but due to rodents and other critters.
The air mattress, air pillow, and sleeping bag were comfortable enough, though the sleeping bag was too warm so I unzipped it a fair amount. I tried to get to sleep about 9:15pm. I think I managed it, but then I woke up at 10 :30pm for a while, then again at 12:33am – at which point the sleeping bag needed zipped back up as the outside temperature had cooled sufficiently. At that point I needed the loo, but didn’t want to get dressed, find the headtorch and make the trip there and back in the dark. I eventually got back to sleep, had a dream about trying to order food in Italian (it didn’t go well, probably because I only went to one Italian evening class), with a couple of other awakenings. I was worried that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep again after waking up just after 4:30am, but luckily managed to drift off again until about 6:15am. I have a sleep mask and it is invaluable for camping in long summer days. I also used A Soft Murmur to get white noise to help with sleeping. This is also great, but resulted in me getting a data usage warning. I should probably have downloaded something to listen to, or just used regular earplugs.
Initially I thought my food and toiletry bags had been removed, but it was just that I didn’t remember exactly where I had hung them. I just had a Clif bar for breakfast and decided not to brush my teeth (I had done so the previous night, but was wary of using too much water and figured I could brush them in the early evening as soon as I got home). It didn’t take too long to take down and pack up the tent, but it took two attempts to roll up the air mattress as it had a surprising amount of air still in it for something that looked completely flat, and I had stupidly rolled it up from the valve side. I took everything out and aired it for a day when I returned home even though there had been no rain, as just breathing inside a tent is enough for it to need a bit of airing out. The German couple emerged from their tent whilst I was in the process of taking mine down, and I wished them well before heading off.
