AT A GLANCE
Why go?
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.↗↗
What the place is
Officially this is Yttersjön in Hede socken, one of dozens of Swedish lakes with the same name, and the one that matters is the Härjedalen water at 62°11′N 13°13′E in Härjedalen Municipality, Jämtland County. The name simply means something like "the outer lake", and it sits in the upper part of a catchment where water collects in mires and trickles out through one short river, the Rosseln. Swedish water registries give it an area of 0.471 km², a shoreline of 3.92 km and a surface at 785 m above sea level.
