The Lainioälven runs some two hundred and forty-five kilometres through pure Lapland wilderness, fully unregulated, before it gives its water to the great Torne. It is the most important tributary in that system — more than half the Torne's salmon turn up it to spawn — and a genuinely wild river, threading forest and mire with no dam or settlement to check it. For all its size it is a kindly river to fish: broad and gravel-bedded, easy to wade, with the salmon's resting lies laid out along long even runs over hard shield rock. These are Baltic salmon, big-shouldered fish for which a metre-long specimen is good but not remarkable, sharing the water with grayling and trout. The character is open northern water on a gentle gradient. Wading is unusually secure for a river of this scale, the firm gravel letting an angler cover the long runs in comfort.

Wading: Scale of the open runs