Sweden · SE

Yttersjön

Yttersjön is a small, clear lake sitting at 785 metres in the forested highlands of Härjedalen, roughly ten kilometres of gravel and gate-protected road out of the village of Hede. It is barely a kilometre across — about 47 hectares with four kilometres of shoreline — and it is exactly the kind of water the inland Norwegian-border mountains are made of: bog-rimmed, pine-shaded, ringed by fells and drained by a thin river called the Rosseln that makes its long way down to the Ljusnan and, eventually, the Gulf of Bothnia. Almost everyone who comes here comes to fish. Yttersjön is managed as part of the Råndalen conservation waters and is known locally as a winter char lake, as well as a summer spot for wild brown trout, perch and whitefish from a hired rowing boat. There is no resort on the shore and no queue: a parking area, a wind shelter, a couple of boats and a hut you can book. Come for the water and the silence rather than the facilities — and come in midsummer for the light, or on frozen ice from late winter.