Four days into the Pilgrim Brevet, I ate cloudberries for the first time in more than three decades.
The amber-coloured berries had been a regular feature during my parents’ four-week camping trips through Sweden and Norway in the late 1980s, but they’re rarely available in Germany. At a control close to the Norwegian border, they were served as a compote alongside cake and cream.
“I could tell you exactly where they were picked,” one of the volunteers told me. She had collected them near the summer cabin her husband’s family, after asking her father-in-law where the best cloudberry patches were.
That encounter captures the spirit of the Pilgrim Brevet, a 1,580km ride also known as Uppsala-Trondheim-Uppsala (UTU). It is also linked to something that made this ride particularly personal for me. I spent many childhood summers in Sweden and Norway, and in 1992 attempted my first big solo bike tour there. Parts of UTU would take me back to roads I had ridden 34 years ago.
Organised by Stockholm Randonneurs every four years, the Pilgrim Brevet’s 2026 edition in late July was the third since 2018.
It takes its name from the Helgonleden (“Saints’ Trail”), a historic pilgrimage route from Uppsala Cathedral to Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, one of medieval Europe’s major pilgrimage destinations.
The six-day event attracted just 114 starters but offered much of the infrastructure of far larger brevets: staffed controls, sleeping facilities, bag drops and plentiful homemade food.
Yet it felt entirely different. If Paris-Brest-Paris is Oktoberfest, the Pilgrim Brevet is a family gathering where friends of friends are welcomed as if they’d always belonged.
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