The Story

Everything began,

with an Interrail trip sometime in the 90s...

Not all of our tour group of wild sixteen-year-old boys and girls got back home at the agreed time. My best friend and I decided to stay longer and try a leg of the famous Kungsleden long-distance hiking trail in northern Sweden.

Those days in the wild and breathtaking Swedish countryside changed me. With only a few exceptions, I've been coming back every year for 15 years now, exploring the national parks of the far north. At first as a couple, at some point I began to undertake longer long-distance hikes on my own and learned more and more to appreciate the challenge of hiking alone and the feeling of being on my own in the face of great expanses. Above all, the hikes in the Sarek National Park, whose originality and desolation always means a great adventure, have had a big impact on me.

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The Wish

also living in Lapland for a longer time and, above all, experiencing the change of seasons, became bigger and so in 2009 I spent the whole year in Jokkmokk and various other places in the area (Jokkmokk is right on the Arctic Circle and is the cultural center of the Sami natives of Northern Scandinavia). I lived in a small cabin, worked on a farm, for the Swedish Tourist Association and took care of a small herd of cows in Europe's northernmost cheese factory.

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After

I returned to my old life in the big city of Berlin, more than a decade passed, in which I devoted myself entirely to my main job as a jazz musician. I moved my travel activities more to the south of Europe and intensified my rock climbing activities, especially in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains of Saxon Switzerland.

When the Corona Pandemic surprised us all in 2020, life as an artist became increasingly difficult for me. In addition, there was a personal borderline experience that showed me how fragile and unpredictable life is. I decided to give my life a new direction and focus on what is really important to me. I began to "professionalize" my enthusiasm for being outdoors and my experiences as a hiker and completed the training to become a state-authorized mountain hiking guide in Austria.

​The founding of Stick & Stone
is now a milestone on my very personal journey through life. On behalf of all the guides and fellow campaigners at Stick & Stone, I invite you to rediscover the world with us over and over again.

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