During the Easter holiday in 2016, I traveled for the first time to Swedish Lapland to work on an audiovisual project about the life of the Sami, the reindeer herders of northern Europe. During our tour, we filmed in a valley where Áhkká, the sacred mountain of the Sami, is located. I was surprised to see a good number of frozen waterfalls between 50m and 300m high in this valley. The Sami herders told me the waterfalls freeze every winter and they had seen almost no one climbing them. On a map, they showed me adjacent valleys with icefalls, and I took note of the names Nieras and Kungsfallen.

With an ice climbing trip in mind, I looked for a place to stay during winter in this valley, which is only reached by a very long dead-end road. There is a small lodge in Ritsem, but it is normally closed in winter. I managed to contact the person in charge, who offered to open it for a minimum group of 15 people. The following winter, I was able to form a group large enough to get the shelter opened.

In February 2017, our group climbed the classic icefalls in the area, and I set out one day to explore the waterfalls on the northeast face of Nieras that the Sami had told me about. I rented some traditional Sami skis: two meters long and made of solid wood. Such skis are fun for tourists, but they were a nightmare for a long cross-country trek, although I managed to get close enough to Nieras to take photos of the wall. It was about 300m high, with eight or nine frozen waterfalls. It was clear to me that I would return to climb.

I later described the wall to my friend Marco Gianola, who works as the international sales manager for CAMP. Marco was excited by the idea of a trip to Lapland, and in the winter of 2019 we traveled there accompanied by four Italian friends, all of them good climbers who were motivated to explore the Nieras wall.

On February 28, 2019, we woke early and set off from Ritsem in our car, but there had been a blizzard the night before, and on a curve we stuck the car in the snow. Far away, on a frozen lake, we saw some fishermen with snowmobiles. Marco ran over to them, and one of the guys took pity on us and, by tying the car to his snowmobile, managed to drag us out.

We had  lost a lot of time, but we were still motivated. We parked the car at the dam northeast of Vietas and began the long approach with snowshoes toward the Nieras wall. After four hours of walking, we reached the base of the waterfalls. Although it was already noon, we started up an obvious long line in two teams of three climbers: Marco Becalli, Francesco Milani, and me, and behind us Marco Gianola with Giorgio Benedusi and Luigi Drago.

Night was near as we finished the five-pitch climb, and we quickly started rigging Abalakov anchors to descend. We did the last rappel in total darkness. As we gathered up our gear, Marco asked if I had a name for the route in mind. He said he would like to dedicate this waterfall to his best friend, Tio Charli, who had died the previous winter, and so that’s what we called it: Tio Charli (300m, WI4).

[In March 2021, Swedish climbers Krister Jonsson and Johan Lindfors climbed several big lines on Nieras, reported in AAJ 2022. One day, they repeated most of Tio Charli and, finding more ice on the line that season, they continued up a steep new finish to the right. Believing they had climbed a completely new route, they called it Ghost (6 pitches, WI5).]

In the winter of 2021, despite the Covid pandemic, I managed to return to Lapland with my good friends David Graells, Jordi Vigatà, and Pere Montasell, and we set off again for the four-hour walk to the wall. David and Jordi decided to climb to the left of Tio Charli following an imposing line of ice columns that delicately connected. They call this route Magic Hole (330m, WI5+) because of a surprising passage that allowed them to connect the line in the central part of the waterfall. They rappelled the entire route at night, using Abalakovs. [In March 2022, Jonsson and Lindfors returned to Nieras and climbed a separate line up the same general area climbed by Magic Hole—again finding quite different ice formation than the Spanish did. The Swedes linked ice and mixed terrain up the headwall to the right of Magic Hole and called their line Nattsud (7 pitches, WI6 M4).]

Pere and I decided climb a beautiful vertical icefall of 180m to the right of Tio Charli, which we named Magic Lluc (WI5), dedicated to Pere's son. We descended with three V-thread rappels. The long return trek was especially hard in an intense blizzard.

Also in the winter of 2021, we explored another wall with about 15 waterfalls measuring 100m on average. This cliff is up a remote valley to the south of the Saltoloukta mountain lodge. We managed to get a ride to the base of the wall in sledges pulled by snowmobiles, and we camped for three days near its base. Here, we did the first ascents of 10 routes. This wall has a great risk of avalanches from ledges above the climbs, and we did not attempt the lines that seemed most risky, after an avalanche had passed near us. We this wall Kungsfallen.

We also climbed several smaller waterfalls in an area we called Naturum Wall due to its proximity to the Sami interpretation center that has that name. (This area is also known as Gasska Gierkav.)

— Rafa Vadillo, Spain

Earlier Climbs at Stora Sjöfallet: Ice climbing at Stora Sjöfallet National Park dates back to the late 1980s, with the main protagonists being Rafael Jenssen, P-E Lidström, and T. Krainer. The first climb on the northeast face of Nieras was Fjärilslätt usteg (120m, WI5), put up by Per Hallander and Rafael Jensen. A guidebook to the climbs in this area and elsewhere in Sweden has been produced by Anton Levein (who, in 2022, climbed a first ascent on Nieras with an even longer approach, along with Ivar Svartholm: In i Värmen (400m, WI5). The guide can be downloaded here (donation requested).