🇸🇪 Kiruna Aurora-Chasing Experience Share 🌌

Kiruna is Sweden’s 🇸🇪 second most popular aurora-viewing city north of the Arctic Circle, right after Abisko Sky Station. When planning the trip, I looked into guided tours—like those from Guide Your Tour and Camp Ripan hotel—but ultimately skipped them. Instead, I decided to hike to the top of Luossavaara, the mine at Kiruna’s northernmost edge, to watch the auroras. 🥾 How We Got to the Top Before heading out, I asked the hotel guide for directions from the hotel to the mountain top. We set off around 5 PM, hiked through the snow for about 50 minutes to reach the mountain base parking lot, then started climbing up. For those with better preparations: You can rent a snowmobile or hire a snow guide to take you up. Our situation: The cable car was closed early for Christmas, so we had to climb up along the ski slope. Warning: The slope is steep and dangerous—if you want to try, ice cleats are highly recommended! 🧤 Key Tip: Stay Warm! Once you’re on the mountain, bundle up as much as possible (hand warmers are a must!). You never know how long you’ll have to wait for the auroras—you might even stay all night with no luck. ✨ Our Result All the effort paid off! We only saw faint auroras that lasted less than 2 minutes, but the next day, when we told the hotel guide, he said: “You guys are probably the only people who saw the aurora yesterday!” That filled us with pride! The hotel guide leads aurora-chasing tours by car almost every night—compared to them, they didn’t see it, but we did (maybe because the auroras lasted too short for them to catch). Aurora-chasing itself is a meaningful and challenging process. So even if you don’t see perfect auroras (maybe due to a full moon), there’s no regret at all. #KirunaSwedenArctic #AuroraChasingTrip