Hiking Sweden: I ditched my phone and backpacked through the wilderness

The seemingly endless drizzle continues. I’m sitting in a valley in the shadow of the mighty Kebnekaise mountain in Lapland, somewhere (I’m not entirely sure where) along the Kungsleden Trail. My feet are throbbing inside my hiking boots, my back aches from the 15kg I’ve been hauling along the rocky landscape, and the cold is steadily seeping through my layers.

But more striking than any discomfort is the tranquility. The mist sits gently over the valley in the early evening light, while long-tailed skua swoop low past our camp. Just minutes before a herd of wild reindeer ambled along the ridge.

Perhaps this quiet content comes from the rugged beauty of the Scandinavian wilderness. Perhaps it comes from being 50km from the nearest road. Or perhaps it’s because I haven’t so much as glanced at my phone in the last 72 hours.

My trek into the wilderness couldn’t have come at a better time. Mid-Zoom meeting the Monday before I flew to Sweden, an iPhone alert flashed up to inform me that my screen usage had increased another 25 per cent. With one eye following the meeting on my MacBook screen and one eye on my mobile, I learnt that for the past seven days I had been averaging a total of six hours and 25 minutes.

I had been fairly certain I didn’t have a problem. TikTok confuses me, my Facebook account has been locked since circa 2017, and I still haven’t worked out how to use Apple Pay. But I was starting to get the creeping sense that I had fallen prey to the phone addiction we keep being warned about – chasing the dopamine hit of Instagram likes, anxiously checking my Slack and mindlessly scrolling news apps.

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So that was it; I decided I would go cold turkey. I was facing five days backpacking and I would do it without my phone.

The stretch of the trail I hiked actually had no phone service for the vast majority of the way, so whether I liked it or not I knew I’d be on an enforced digital detox. It’s one of the few places in Europe where there’s no access by road; once you start on the trail there’s no bailing out – you either go forward to Abisko or back to the start at Nikkaluokta (unless you fancy being hauled out by helicopter).

So I put on my ‘out of…