We are back in Abisko again, the beautiful tiny little village in Northern Sweden, above the polar circle, where we will follow-up on our exciting experiments.

Rhodiola rosea or golden root in early spring

Right before our arrival we arrived, skies started to clear after a period of rain, making way for a nice 13 °C weather that is a big relief after the crazy heat wave that tortures Belgium.

Today, we started slowly by hiking up on one of our steepest mountains to put out some probes. This limited the fieldwork and left some time to finish all important preparations for the next days. Limited fieldwork, but no limits to the beautiful and amazing things we could witness in the mountains.

The lonely white flower of the tasty cloudberry

The northern spring brought us some beautiful plants, and the rains of the last few days made their leaves shiny and green, with delicate colourfull flowers to brighten up the views.

Dryas octopetala or mountain avens

The wildlife was present as well, with a ‘scary’ angry lemming as highlight of our (and probably his) day.

The higher we got in the mountains, the more persistent snowpatches we found. Some of them melted only recently, with the vegetation being in a very early state of spring.

Willow catkin right after snowmelt

Fieldwork went smooth, besides an unfortunate persistent patch of snow right on top of our plots at highest elevations. We waded through the melting water in an effort to get them free, but twenty centimeters of ice cold water on top of a frozen soil made it impossible to put out probes.

Snow on the plots, but very wet and slushy snow

That was one little piece of bad luck, but it is countered by the smooth progress we made in all other parts of the fieldwork, making me very optimistic about the next days of this trip.