Cold cold…
It is 9 pm in the evening and after a day spent figuring out many technical problems which should improve our work with building this website, fastening up the process of editing photos, posting, writing text, and so on, we are finally starting driving from Sør Lenangen to Svensby to the start of our today’s evening run here in Lyngen Alps. It’s really, really windy and completely foggy. It’s raining, it’s only +7°C, and it’s the 18th of July. Where’s the summer? What the heck?
Stina is not very motivated tonight, although yesterday she said she we were going to be “fast and light” (or maybe she thought “always last and always fight?”). Right now, though, this is just misery. The weather is far from inviting. We can’t see the peaks at all — only the lower parts of the mountains — so I guess it’s going to be a pretty rough experience.
We want to make it at least to Trollhytta. I also wanted to go to Bárheia, but I don’t think I will persuade Stina to reach the summit in this wind.
Arriving at the Svensby Turistsenter parking lot, it’s raining even harder. Totally desperate. Stina doesn’t want to get out of the car, but Čenda enthusiastically does. And she’s not exactly thrilled about that either 🙂
Many questions…
We force ourselves out of the car anyway. Walking towards the trailhead, we end up talking — a lot — about the direction of our Arctic in Motion project which we decided to improve or build into something bigger and sustainable. About livelihood. About how to actually make money doing this. It’s not just about doing things anymore; it needs a complete change of mindset. We’re seriously considering becoming full-time content creators around purely these outdoor topics, and the honest truth is: it’s brutal. So many people want to live this way. Making it actually happen is really, really hard. I keep trying to persuade Stina to take it more seriously, and it doesn’t exactly make for the best atmosphere as we walk. Because I really mean it.
But the further we get from the car, the more the nature takes over — in the best way. Spruce trees everywhere, which isn’t common this far north. It feels more like the south, somewhere in Valdres in central Norway. Then the landscape shifts again into soft birch forest, and it reminds me of Kungsleden — a trail I want to run later this summer, if my knee heals.
Knee knee…
My knee is a big thing. It’s still a problem, since I hurt it in June in Slovakia during the Koruna Slovenska (Crown of Slovakia) project. It still hurts, it feels wrong in a way I can’t quite understand – simply not the same as the “old” MCL issue, something else. It worries me more than almost anything else right now, because it’s not just about Kungsleden. It’s about the whole Arctic in Motion project. If you want to be a content creator documenting hard expeditions in wild nature, you need to be genuinely fit. There’s no faking that.
As we get closer to Trollhytta, the landscape changes again — open marshlands, absolutely mind-blowing, like we’ve stepped into complete wilderness. Not a couple of kilometers from civilization, but somewhere deep in Lapland, deep in the Swedish-Norwegian borderland. It’s only six degrees and raining, and it feels like late summer already — like the second half of September, not the middle of July. The atmosphere is strange and special.
Serious cabin talk…
Then we reach the Troll Hytta cabin. Beautifully maintained, completely empty — nobody’s stayed there in the last five days, despite it being peak holiday season. I want to sleep there immediately. We need to come back soon, spend a night, and properly explore the area.
At the cabin, Stina and I have a deeper talk. I’m honest with her: it’s not acceptable how much time we’re still wasting not giving “all we have” to this project. We need to be far more efficient about what needs to happen for Arctic in Motion.
Here’s the thing. Arctic in Motion was so far only our website, which was full of content but basically it was just our portfolio but we actually never used it to get any project or work. We simply always had enough work by just doing our work or our job well and the work always came withou any website or social media. And it could obviously work this way from now on and on but we really want to start building our outdoor sports brand or name and for this we need a really solid engaging platform.
New vision – And time is flying
So now we have new vision. The goal isn’t just another outdoor content channel. We are outdoor sports freaks — I’m a trail runner, a skier, a dedicated Arctic explorer, someone who spent years pushing myself to the edge. I’ve spent over fifteen years as a outdoor sports filmmaker. I worked closely with legends like Adam Ondra for many years, documenting the best of climbing achievements in History. I ran across Norway alone — three thousand kilometers through the wilderness, the first and only person to ever do it in a clean style. I have three hundred hours of unique filmed material from that alone.
But here’s the problem: after years away from the outdoor sports scene (which I left when corona nonsense came and I escaped the vaccination madness into northern Norway, where I started to fully commit to my Norge På Langs project (NPL was my brutal but amazing run across Norway – 3,000 kilometers through the vast wilderness, off the asphalt roads) and also got involved in so many projects and jobs with tourist destinations and with destination marketing), after focusing on commercial work and tourism content, we’ve lost our position. We lost the visibility in outdoor scene, because I was building, through my work, brands of other people or companies and I never posted my real professional work anywhere except on this website, which I then never shared anywhere. So “nobody” knows about what I’ve actually accomplished or what we are capable of, because we didn’t build the brand around it at all the last 6 years.
Stina is a creative mind and an athlete in her own right. But she’s coming into this from a very different world. She didn’t grow up in the outdoor sports lifestyle. And right now, at this critical moment, she’s still thinking like someone with a comfortable life — hesitant, easily distracted, waiting to see what happens. That’s not going to work anymore!
Time to wake up fully…
This isn’t about just being more efficient at editing videos or posting faster. It’s deeper than that. It’s about mindset. It’s about her truly embracing this lifestyle – the cold, the wet, the discomfort, going beyond her comfort zone every single day. Because that’s where the stories come from. That’s where authenticity lives. You can’t film real outdoor sports content from a comfortable chair.
And I need her thinking creatively and independently, not just supporting my vision. I need her to be as dedicated, as obsessed, as willing to suffer as I am. Because she has all the talents that you need for something like this and it would be a really pity to not use it fully!!! Also because the clock is running. We have maybe six to eight weeks of summer left here. Then winter comes — hard, fast, and early. Short days, brutal cold, bad weather. Creating anything outdoors becomes exponentially harder once autumn hits, and up here autumn doesn’t wait politely for its turn. So this is the window. This is it.
We need to wire the whole process — smooth out the workflow so we can post good videos and articles consistently, not sporadically. We need to refine our editing pipeline, our posting strategy, our creative process across mobile and desktop. We need to learn from the mistakes we’ve made so far and actually execute.
We’re not just trying to get views. We’re trying to position ourselves as serious outdoor sports filmmakers again — the kind of creators that sponsors and partners want to invest in, the kind that can eventually do just this, nothing else, just the projects we love. Because we are freaking good at this….
So now We’ve put everything on one card. There’s no more room to circle the idea, refine the plan, think about it. We need to act — now, not someday, not “soon.” Now, with real results to show for it.
Rainy runs always clear the head
It’s a strange evening, in the best way. On one hand, it’s soul-freeing — full of that Norge på Langs atmosphere. On the other hand, there’s this pull to get back to the computer, back to building the website, back to preparing everything for the next stage of creating.
On the way back, we talk about how to turn all of this, this enormous knowledge of beautiful, remote places and decades of skill, into a new way of livelihood. We don’t want to become a tour operator or guides. that is and easy task, compared to doing what we do, but I feel this is not our way. Maybe next life. Arctic in Motion is for me first and foremost an outdoor sports filmmaking brand, that’s the priority. But we’re also thinking about opening up, occasionally and very selectively, to a few people who really want something special. Wealthy individuals who crave that individual experience, that high-profile, bespoke adventure. Busy, wealthy people – the kind who run hectic businesses and occasionally need to disappear completely into the wilderness, far from the noise and clutter of the stressed-out Western world. this way we can help financing our main adventure goals. We will see…
With that, we head back to the car. There’s a lot ahead of us in the days, weeks, and rest of the summer to come. If the knee allows in the morning, then already tomorrow…
