This wardenship was the result of a somewhat tangled series of events involving misplaced documents and changes of heart. Somewhere along the line a vacancy in Vistas sailed up as a solution, and I decided to go for it. Vistas is a very nice place, and it was sufficiently removed in time from my Nallo period to be fully interesting; I also had some thoughts of doing some telemarking on the surrounding slopes, remembering a semi-recent article in an outdoor magazine detailing just such an activity.

Something that was a bit worrying, though, was the reported lack of snow in the Kiruna fjelds, but it seemed as though more had come during the last few weeks. Visttasvággi is known to grow bare early, even after severe winters, so being the closing spring warden in Vistas can be a bit of a gamble when it comes to the return journey in May. Should snowmobile transport prove impossible, I had been entertaining the idea of going over the mountains to Kebnekaise, and then take the high route to Nikkaluokta, which I have done before. As for snowmobile transport to Vistas, however, I would be ferried out from Abisko (rather than Nikkaluokta), where I would be going by train as usual.

Note:
At some point a bit of dirt got stuck to the camera lens, which I never noticed, and the viewscreen is much too small for such a thing to be visible in either shooting or playback mode. Upon transferring the images to the computer, however, it became painfully apparent that quite a few of them show a noticeable blemish in the lower left part. I have done my best to suppress it in post-processing, but have not been able to get rid of it entirely where it appears.

Here, then, follows an abridged account of the events during the month I spent in and around Vistas, illustrated by the usual range of pictures. Day tours have been placed in their own reports, which are linked to from the relevant pages.