Change is Coming to Sweden’s Most Stalwart Ski Community. Again.

The first time I met Robert Gustafsson, he hardly fit my vision of an event manager.

It was May 2002, amidst a park-and-pipe revolution that was rocking the ski world. Weaned as I was on Type-A American fireplugs and FIS Euro-tyrants clutching clipboards and shouting into walkie-talkies, I found the lanky, soft-spoken Swede to be the antithesis of a power-brokering, get ’er-done impresario.

But there he was, quietly orchestrating a multi-day end-of-season bash for Red Bull in the international destination resort of Åre (think Sweden’s Whistler) with a litany of contests to organize, staff to marshal, weather to navigate, and athletes to appease. And yet, hours before the fête kicked off, his crisis quotient was low enough to answer my request for a chat with, “OK—let’s go skiing.”

On the ride up, we talked about places we’d skied and people we knew—the universally understood method of divining the type of skier you’re with. We were pleased to discover ourselves kindred in eschewing the bros clustered at the sacrificial table jumps and kinked rails in favor of seeking out the goods—even if those had soured somewhat in a rainy fog.“I’m a hiker,” said Gustafsson, as we swung into a long, sloppy gully after a lengthy traverse. “It’s one of the things I miss around here. The off-piste is much better in Riksgränsen.”

“Right,” I answered, feigning agreement but flummoxed—not for the first time—by a name that wafted through the ski circles I occupied like a leaf blowing just out of reach.

I’d heard of Riksgränsen but knew nothing about it. As a ski magazine editor in the pre-Internet early 1990s, it was just another slide on a light table, a footnote to ridiculous airs by unheralded people, a subtitle for film clips of skiers leaping trains, telemarking improbably steep faces and partying in the midnight sun. The label conjured an exotic frontier of derring-do and growing intrigue—much like Alaska or Chamonix. Yet while most of us could navigate our way to AK or Cham, few knew precisely where—or even what—”Riks” was. A photo editor told me he thought it was “way up north—at the edge of nowhere.” He wasn’t wrong, but based on the imagery, it also seemed at the edge of madness.

Gustafsson filled in some blanks. As a long-time denizen, he’d traced an arc from ski-bum toiling in Riksgränsen’s only hotel to marketing manager of this obscure ski area in Swedish Lapland, some 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle hard against the mountains of Norway. His task seemed Sisyphean: the hill opened only when the sun reappeared in February; it didn’t see appreciable traffic until April; and it was populated by the kind of laissez-faire dreamers, schemers, and runaways such isolation attracts. Far from being a liability, however, it all worked in the mountain’s favor.

Riksgränsen was so far off the beaten path that you couldn’t hold serious alpine races, making it a freeride mecca from the start, a place where racers, mogul-bashers, snowboarders, telemarkers, and ski guides who spent winter in a hundred elsewheres would congregate once those venues melted out. The fact that you could spend a full season somewhere and then log another in Riksgränsen made it a right-of-passage pilgrimage in the heady Swedish snowsport scene of the 1980s and ’90s.

With everyone coming together in Riks every spring to have a good time, friendly competition was inevitable. The Gustafsson-conceived 1992 Nordic Extreme Championships morphed into the Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships (SBMC) as an annual institution and persistent draw that survives to this day.

The SBMC could be the only constant here other than the difficulty of running any machinery- and infrastructure-based business in an Arctic environment. The latter challenge tends to mean everything is perennially for sale for the right price. Although Riksgränsen has changed hands several times over the years, owners were usually invested in the community, with an understanding of, and passion for, the specialness of a hill that anyone who makes the effort to live or journey here feels instantly drawn to.

The current owner, however, is an absentee-landlord resort group, and longtime skiers who’ve noticed a recent deterioration of the ski area have had their concerns redoubled by rumors that it’s “unofficially” up for sale again. At stake is a mountain experience that builds into the bones of your identity as a skier.

After 15 years in this esoteric outpost, Gustafsson had decamped 620 miles south to Åre, a corporate ski town where most of Sweden’s ski-industry players were based and no end of happenings might benefit from his production talents. Chasing event money meant following the energy of the moment, and in the new millennium, with the town pumping out superstar X Game-darlings like Jon Olsson and Henrik Windstedt, it was literally raining kronor in Åre.

Gustafsson liked the work, so his off-piste lament was no cry for help. But it was symbolic for what he really missed: some ineffable, grassroots something that Riksgränsen represented. He was looking forward to refilling that cup after wrapping the Åre event, heading north again to run the 11th annual SBMC.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he’d said. “You should come sometime.”

It’s May 2022, and I’m standing in a snowstorm outside Hotell Riksgränsen,

skis shouldered for the uphill trudge under the railway bridge and along a road to the only lift rumored to be functioning, when the unflappable Gustafsson appears from the maelstrom, eyelashes frosted, having aborted an attempt to inspect the venue for the 31st SBMC—now the world’s longest-running such event.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever buried a snowmobile,” he reports. “Patrollers found me and helped dig it out—you can’t see anything out there.”

It’s a typical Riksgränsen day: a zero-visibility blizzard of swirling winds that leave you unsure whether snow is falling down from the sky or blowing up from the ground. Like skiing in a bowl of the finest Swedish mjölk, or milk.

Now on my third visit and familiar with Riks’ weather (miserable by most standards, though skiers here seem unperturbed), I visualize Gustafsson piloting his sled through a treeless whiteout of treacherous gullies and avalanche debris to Nordals, the fearsome 985-foot face just outside the area boundary on which the contest takes place. It seems crazy he even tried, yet the show must go on and I’ve learned this much of the man: he may not be loud or brash, but he gets things done by sweating details—often by himself.

Still, today is a write-off, and he’ll have to run the 170 entrants in men’s and women’s ski and snowboard categories through a qualifying round tomorrow come what may. “Let’s go skiing,” he says.

Much has transpired for Gustafsson in the 20 years since we first crossed paths in Åre.

He moved back north, survived a nasty avalanche in Norway, had a daughter, helped a friend open Riksgränsen’s first boutique hotel, and even ran the ski area for a while. Now a respected hospitality consultant and entrepreneur, he still enjoys his annual Riks-fix running the SBMC—though he thinks this one’s going to be hard.

“The forecast looks awful,” he says as we lean into the wind. That’s saying something. It always looks awful; regular inoculations of awful are what make the skiing here good through June.

Loading the antiquated double chair, I don’t sit fast enough to avoid it slamming the back of my calves. It always does and I always forget. But I almost enjoy the annoyance—like an old friend who slaps you too hard on the back every time you see them. Rising into the storm, phantom whistles lace the air—wind passing through the lift’s hollow aluminum tubing. And then another whistle—the train—louder, longer, bending up from the valley, a reminder of the singular reason we’re here.

Riksgränsen owes its existence to Kiruna, a town two hours south perched atop an enormous iron deposit.

The need to move ore to tidewater required building a railway north to the ice-free harbor in Narvik, Norway. When the line opened in 1903, a roundhouse and customs post were erected on the frontier, making Riksgränsen the border. While officials dwelling in isolation here awaited their daily train, there was little to do but ski. Eventually, other skiers arrived. Cabins popped up, though lifts were slow to materialize; the lower part of the mountain opened in 1952, and the upper in 1968. Big and bold, with the novelty of snow stretching long into Scandinavia’s cherished fifth season, vårvinter, or spring-winter, Riksgränsen soon became northern Europe’s most important ski area—a vibrant freestyle destination in the 1970s, a snowboarding ground-zero in the 1980s, and a center of freeriding in the 1990s—the latter propelled by Jesper Ronnback’s infamous jump over an iron train.

Amenities were few and the lift system limited, but you could ski 360 degrees off the top and the touring possibilities were endless.

Gustafsson and I offload, the chair behind us depositing another companion, Mattias Fredriksson, who also ski-bummed here, cleaning hotel rooms while starting his photography career under the tutelage of local legend Lars Thulin.

The upper triple was closed when we loaded at the bottom but we can hear it clunking away now, invisible in the tempest, so we ski over and hop on. At the top, squinting into featureless nothing, I’m happy to be with people who know the mountain; I follow like a puppy as we blind-traverse the summit dome, my eyes on the orange beacon of Gustafsson’s jacket. When we finally tip into the fall line the skiing is actually pretty good—boot-deep powder over corduroy. And there is nobody around.

In Riks, I’ve often found myself alone on perfectly groomed pistes of impeccable snow. Not just because the mountain spreads skiers well, but because almost everyone skis off-piste, flipping the script on a European norm, secure in the knowledge that while wind tears the mountain apart in one place, it puts that snow somewhere else. On better days, the acme of this philosophy is to chase the bounty by touring—or jumping in a helicopter, of which there are legions.

Heli skiing here falls somewhere between new-millennium B.C.-organized and ’90s Alaska-cowboy, with weather bottlenecks seeing several operators vie for landings in the same areas and only non-binding verbal agreements on who goes where.

But whether you throw down for a day trip from the helipad below the hotel or a package with operators like Niehku Mountain Villa and Abisko Mountain Lodge, the aerial experience is breathtaking: crabbing across a carpet of dwarf birch-girding and whale-like summits before beating into the wind over a final ridge with views in every direction—north and east to the middle of Arctic nowhere; west to Norway’s snow-limned fjords; and south to the great wilderness of the Kebnekaise Range. Between each compass point, the alabaster backs of geologic belugas school across the land.

We make a couple of white-cane runs then wrap around to the front of the mountain, where the last bit of the traverse passes a scattering of cabins painted in familiar Falu red. The color’s source is the Falun copper mine in central Sweden, which dates to the 9th century. Lest you think this tangential trivia, there is a point: The ubiquity of Falu red on barns and cottages in Sweden speaks to national shared identity in a country that often seems one large community, and places like Riksgränsen important cultural neighborhoods within. If there’s a beating heart to this neighborhood, it’s where we kick off our skis—Hotell Riksgränsen.

The first time I came here, in 2015, I wanted to experience it the way young Swedish freeriders had for decades,

eschewing the easy flight to Kiruna in favor of driving 10 hours with Fredriksson from his home in Åre.

Arriving after dark, delirious from the long haul, lights from the self-contained hotel village blinked on the horizon like a cruise ship afloat on a sea of snow. Inside, the lobby, library, bar, and restaurants were lined with historical photos—the old roundhouse and first mountain station, dignitaries gathered to christen them, skiers from every era, and an indigenous Sami reindeer herder on enormous wooden skis, his charges belly-deep in snow. It was late at night with no one around, and a reverence enveloped me.

Today, with bad weather and transportation challenges, any reverence is obliterated by the seething lobby, a veritable youth hostel of freeriders on phones and computers interspersed with people eating, drinking, and trying to check in or out—a log jam of humanity spread along hallways, staircases, and any space between, surrounded by mounds of the largest pieces of luggage ever assembled outside an Everest expedition.

The ski bags alone resemble a fleet of small vehicles needing valet service. Of course, the internet is also down so the app to order food isn’t working; ditto card machines, meaning no one can pay for anything anyway. But even this lobbykatastrof says something good about Riksgränsen. The crowd is a cross-section of both Swedish society and the ski world, conjoining caravan-park dirtbags with private-heli Russian oligarchs, executives with dreadlocked teens, lawyers, and doctors with pro athletes, all chatting and sharing amiably.

In North America, entitlement would inevitably bubble up and cause some to lose their shit in such a mess, but not a single person here is upset. No raised voice on either side of any counter. Just a pervasive sense of, “Well—it’s Riks.”

With Fredriksson and Gustafsson peeling off to deal with other matters, Niklaus Mattsson is the first person I bump into as I navigate the lobby. He knows this scene well. Riksgränsen is special to him—even if the lifts are old and creaky and often break down. “When they don’t work you just deal with it,” he says.

“Of course, it’s not as easy if you have kids because there’s not much else to do. So when my wife and I take our young boys skiing we go somewhere where everything works. But I like skiing here on my own—for the adventure.”

Before I crossed the room, I see Anders Norin, former SBMC competitor and film star, here to support the athletes; David Kantermo, one-time mogul coach who’s judged the SBMC for years; and also judging, Pia and Max Palm, a mother and son whose story is Riks in a nutshell.

Pia met Stefan Palm when they were ski instructors here in 1990. Romance and travel ensued—summers in New Zealand, a telemark expedition to China’s 4.5-mile Muztagh Ata with fellow local adventurers, a long stint running La Grave’s famous La Chaumine ski lodge, a few years in Serre Chevalier, then their current address near Chamonix. No matter what winter brought, each spring saw their return to Lapland, starting the first heli skiing here through the Riks ski school, and now running their own Heliski Guides Sweden, with Stefan as lead guide and Pia as coordinator.

In 2015, Fredriksson and I watched as their 12-year-old son Max, skiing in a rat pack behind visiting hero Henrik Windstedt, threw a casual backflip off a wind-lip under the chair. This kid is on it, we agreed. Returning in 2019, we’d watched the now 16-year-old star of the Freeride Junior World Tour lay down an outrageous run to win the SBMC, not only the youngest ever to do so but the first second-generation winner, since Pia, who’d helped organize the original 1992 contest with Robert Gustafsson, was a two-time winner.

When Gustafsson presented the trophy to Max it was a full-circle moment for him and Pia, a testament to the global family Riksgränsen has engendered and maintained.

There’s partial clearing overnight, but with more bad weather expected, the qualifier is underway early.

When Fredriksson and I head up we’re greeted by hallelujah skies, revealing the enormity of the landscape. It feels like a diorama from the Pleistocene, an era not long gone from this sweep of glacier-scoured mountains, where meltwater lakes are so large they run to the horizon and beds of massive drainage channels braid valley floors.

Approaching Nordals, clouds are already descending and the familiar “Rider ready? Three, two, one… go!” arrives in vertical stereo—from a broadcast tent at the base as well as the start area above. Bands of snow erupt, feeling warmish, like flakes formed fresh from the spray of the North Atlantic, which, at only 25 miles away, is possibly true. Hundreds of spectators line the gully wall opposite the face. The demographic is broad, with literally everyone on the mountain here, most creatively dug in with benches and tables made from snow. It’s a party—weather be damned.

Churning through men’s and women’s ski and snowboard categories, bodies appear from the murk at regular intervals, as if from a comic conveyor belt. Most are on snow, some in the air, a few already tumbling toward disaster from unseen errors above. The music blaring between runs—Beastie Boys, AC/DC, Finnish death metal—seems both appropriate and anachronistic, little changed from the days when the telemark category alone—which Gustafsson himself competed in for years—had 80 entrants.

The course is on a steep, open shoulder, but with the usual run-defining cliff band reduced to a roll by deep snow, it’ll be hard to throw any airs. No worry, Gustafsson told me, technical ability will dominate because the snow is terrible. Indeed, it has morphed in 24 hours to the worst windblown maritime mank imaginable, a Scandinavian springtime specialty. Just as visibility descends to discerning that you are probably on a hill, the last rider finishes and the crowd disperses.

Frontside, above the hotel, I stop to watch kids cycle a jump they’ve cut into a large cornice. The treeless alpine terrain here is a little bit Arctic, a little bit Alps, and always fun, its natural wind-lips and halfpipes inspiring skiers and boarders to build their own hits. This brings me to the Riksgränsen quarterpipe and the legend of Janne Aikio.

Aikio grew up freestyle skiing at the local hill in Kiruna, but once a road to Riksgränsen opened in the mid-1980s, spent every minute he could here until he simply stopped going home. In May 1996, Gustafsson organized a wide-ranging snowboard competition and Aikio was asked to forerun the quarterpipe event on skis—just for fun. Arriving late from his job cleaning rooms, Aikio found snowboard legend Ingemar Backman and other pros had already warmed up on the feature it took two weeks to dig by hand from a massive wind lip. Without knowing how high they’d jumped, he did his own calculations and dropped in 50 meters above the snowboard start. It would be a jump seen around the world.

Boosting 23 feet aloft, Aikio set the bar so high it took Backman six tries and a longer snowboard to even come close. Numerous photographers were in attendance, but it was German shooter Richard Walch’s image of Aikio at his high point that became the clarion call to freeriders everywhere. A world away, in the California offices of POWDER Magazine where I worked, Walch’s shot moved swiftly to the cover of the November 1996 issue, in which the magazine was launching an unrelated series about skiing’s “Next Big Thing,” unknowingly guaranteeing people would forever associate Aikio’s feat with that headline.

The effect was almost instantaneous. Riksgränsen was already an auspicious name to aspiring Åre freeskier Henrik Windstedt when he made his first trip as a 12-year-old vacationing with family, and it would inspire a career. “I knew it was a holy place, and my idols Janne Aikio and Jesper Ronnback were there the same week. I watched them do these huge gaps and flips and was blown away,” he recalls. “One day I came across them breaking down a kicker they’d used to jump an iron train the night before. I stood in their bomb holes—I was so stoked.”

He eventually returned for a week-long stint as a ski patroller and was hooked. “I did the King of the Hill here in 1999 when I was 16,” he says. “Winning that was my breakthrough. All the big names were here—Jon Olsson, Candide Thovex, the New Canadian Air Force guys—all just shredding together. I did my first freeride comp the next year, and won my first Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships in 2001.”

The SBMC was by then the benchmark for Scandinavian skiers. “To be top-10 you had to ski the best you’d ever skied and take chances,” says Windstedt, who would take top honors seven times while also becoming two-time World Freeride Champion. “If you wanted to be part of the ski scene in Sweden you almost had to be here. You could read magazines to try and figure out what it was all about, but if you came to Riks you were in it.”

For the finals, the weather is in and out.

The surface has improved but the face is riddled with wind lips erased by flat light, riders’ only salvation is the occasional slivers of sun strafing the course like bursts of heavenly gunfire.

The female skiers and boarders, as a group more focused than the men on a solid overall run than one heroic hit, put on a display of control so masterful they seem transported from another dimension. In any event, everyone is having trouble finding rocks to trick off. A skier without poles raises a cheer with a ragged 720 off an invisible snow feature; ditto a 17-year-old’s improbable front flip over a series of rocks. The judges don’t even have to score some riders—the wind-lips do it for them. Tumbles. Lost gear. But no one was hurt. When multiple Freeride World Tour winner Kristofer Turdell takes the course, the chattering crowd, clearly packed with freeride cognoscenti, goes silent.

Having a pre-dinner drink at Niehku two nights before, we’d met Turdell. Niehku (”dream” in Sami) is a symbol of Riksgränsen’s rebirth and innovation created by Gustafsson ski-bum buddies Patrik Strumpen (twice voted Sweden’s best sommelier) and Jossi Lindblom, a ski guide, who used to rock-climb the ruins of the old roundhouse they’ve now converted into one of the world’s most exclusive heli lodges with a Michelin-level eatery.

True to egalitarian Riks tradition, après at Niehku sees its rarified clientele mix with everyone from ski instructors to those dwelling in the infamous staff-and-ski-bum parking lot at the mountain’s base. When Turdell—with no weak points in a style that perfectly melds a racing background with park acrobatics—shows at a comp, he’s always the one to beat, and in conversation seemed unfazed by the poor conditions or potentially worse prospects.

Tobias Liljeroth, longtime editor-in-chief of Sweden’s national ski magazine Åka Skidor, figures Turdell’s superpower as “Massive composure, even in hairy situations. No other top-level big-mountain skier makes such difficult runs look so easy.” Gustafsson agrees but also sees an edge. “He’s tactical. While everyone tries to outdo each other on the same lines, he picks his own, then delivers. I think judges appreciate that.”

True to form, this day Turdell flashes his line in a way that leaves everyone thinking, “Did that just happen?” I watch from far enough back to take in the whole Nordals picture, including the 20-minute bootpack that gets riders to the top.“I counted 1,392 steps one year,” says Windstedt of the infamous frozen Stairmaster.

I’ve done it when the snow has been good enough to catch a powdery ride down the shoulder. One time, scrambling to the top in the late evening with Stefan and Pia Palm, we were washed in alpenglow at the top. “You have to feel something from this light,” Stefan said, gazing at the coppered landscape, a momentary soft yang to its otherwise harsh yin. Like anywhere Arctic, Riksgränsen remains a difficult land with fragile qualities.

The light here will never change, but the human world is always shifting. Like the pending sale of Riksgränsen—whether official or not. “I’m not sure they even know what they’re selling,” says Gustafsson, who appears to have become the default lodestar of a storied locale. A stylized metal statue of the man himself in a telemark stance was hauled to the top of the Nordals venue in 2016 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the SBMC—an icon every rider who climbs past it now pays homage to.

Out on the course, they’re into the men’s finals that Turdell will take handily. The wind rises. The chairlifts whistle. The line of hikers struggling up Nordals remains constant.