Outside Magazine

We left Mora at 2 A.M. with snow falling, headed for the Arctic Circle. Mora was Mora, Sweden, the small town that’s famous as the end point of the 90-kilometer Vasaloppet, the oldest and largest race in cross-country skiing. I first completed it back in the 1980s, when I was making a film with National Geographic about doing, in a single year, all the races in the European series known as the Worldloppet. One of the sponsors was Karhu skis, which also sponsored the Swedish marathon team that dominated the race circuit that year. Out of pity for my sad skiing ability, Karhu asked the team’s coach, Kjell Kratz, to help me out, and we’ve been close friends ever since. Over the decades, Kjell’s red house, which is a short walk from the finish line of the Vasaloppet, has become a second home for me.

The week before, I’d skied the 2019 Vasaloppet and a crazy new event, the Nattvasan, which involves negotiating the same course at night, helped along by torches, headlamps, and moonlight. After the race, I walked back to Kjell’s house through a sleeping neighborhood, thinking how lucky I’d been to stumble into this world of skiing, snow, and Scandinavia. It had sustained me in dark times and was always there for me—waiting, never disappointing. In previous years after the Vasa, I’d felt a mix of relief that I’d made it to the finish tinged with a melancholy that this signaled the beginning of the end of winter. It made me long for an endless ski season where the snow was always fresh and the tracks stretched forever beyond the horizon.

A few years ago, I heard about an event in Finland called Border to Border. The idea seemed irresistibly loony: a 420-kilometer cross-country ski all the way across Finland, from the Russian line to the Swedish line. Border to Border had been held every March for more than 30 years, run by volunteers, never advertised or commercialized, just one of those wild challenges that attracts a self-selecting group of ski nuts. I signed up and was trying to figure out the best way to get there from Mora when Kjell, who was then 76, announced that he was going, too, and that we would drive.