Friday, 30 May 2014

Wanha Witonen paddling trip


In case anyone is wondering, Nokia Lumia phones sink pretty fast when they jump into a lake. I have a new one now, but I wasn't going to risk it trying to escape as well while canoeing and kayaking. I kept it in a waterproof case and only took it out on dry land so I don't have many pictures from the paddling trip so this is going to be short.


It was a few weeks ago and I only now have time to post it up. We paddled the Wanha Witonen route from Petäjävesi to Jämsänkoski about 52km's. Not too far, but ok for a few days paddling.





















I was on the planning team for this trip so I was one of the people responsible for making sure everything went as planned. Despite certain people moaning about getting up early we actually managed to get our kit loaded up and be on the road by 7am.





















The week was broken up into 3 days of paddling and 2 days hiking. I had made a paddling rotation so that everyone got to paddle front and back of a canoe and in a kayak. First day I was paddling with Seishi and as you can see our canoe was full. On each paddling day there was at least one set of rapids to go down. Nothing crazy, but ok for the first time hitting rapids in a canoe. It was all good and we before the fist set of rapids we pulled up on the shore to check out the situation. I thought Seishi was going to be a good partner and we'd handle the rapid no problem.
Hmm... It started well. We passed the first obstacle and back paddled to line ourselves up to shoot between two rocks to go under a bridge where we had to immediately back paddle again and ferry ourselves to the left side of the rapids and continue dodging another set of rocks. So we passed the first two rocks came to the bridge and I started to back paddle. Seishi was paddling like a maniac, but FORWARDS! I shouted, but it was too late the current took us and we turned sideways and got stuck on two rocks. The water was trying to pull the canoe under, but we managed to keep it upright and push ourselves off of the rocks and going down the rest of the rapid backwards like a pair of nutters.




The weather was unreal. The week before we had been practising on a small river close to the school and it had been snowing. This week I got sun burnt on the first day of paddling, a few of the days the temperature hit 27 degrees!!

Iso Hiekka was our 2nd camp site, a nice place with a kitchen platform or whatever it is? and a little beach. It was a long day of paddling from the previous campsite to here and the sun finally went down at about 11pm.




On our second hiking day we visited an old growth forest a few km's from camp and came across a spring fed lake with ridiculously clear water which was handy cos I was in desperate need to refill my water bottle.

Yes still in Finland! Last day of paddling and surprisingly no one had capsized the entire trip. Like all of our previous trips the weather was perfect for the activity, but unlike the previous trips, this was like a real holiday! No stress, no fighting with the cold, no carrying heavy back packs or having to drive for days to get the location. The only disappointing thing is that we no longer get any sort of paddling proficiency on this course. Oh well.  





















On another note. This never happens in Bristol. Just hanging out at home watching an idiot abroad when a message appears across the screen saying that there's a bear down town and police are warning people to stay away. On the screen 'karhu' is the word for bear. One of over 200 words in Finnish for bear, another joy of the Finnish Language.

Laters.

Monday, 12 May 2014

Survival night

Only 5 weeks left!! The end of this course is hectic. Ive been real busy with school stuff and had no time to mess around on here. I got my business plan and ski trip plan done and sent off on time and the last few weeks I've been busy planning next weeks paddling trip and done a few things in between.

Two weeks ago we had a kind of mini survival test. Nothing too serious, we just headed out to the forest in the morning and had a short session on how to go about make an emergency shelter using only what we could find around us. Then we got sent off alone to build a shelter and stay in it overnight with only what we had with us which wasn't a lot.




















I chose my spot, which was a flat-ish area where I could lay down, not close to an ants nest and not under any dead standing trees to fall on me during the night. There is no right or wrong way to build an emergency shelter, as long as it protects you from wind and rain as much as possible and gives a little insulation from the cold ground your good. I wasn't sure what kind of shelter I was going to build, but I started by wedging a small fallen tree trunk against a spruce tree that was going to be the main roof support.

Then I got more of the same logs to make cross pieces for the roof and carved some small wedges to help them stay in place. To make this task a little more realistic, even though it was far from a true survival situation. The only tools we were allowed to use were whatever we would normally have with us on a day hike in the forest, so I had my knife. That was also the case with our clothing and food situation. I had my regular clothes for a hike in the forest and just a bottle of water and afternoon snack of two bananas. No sleeping bags or food to cook.







I also used birch twigs to tie the cross pieces on to make everything a little more stable. A little unnecessary, maybe I wouldn't do it in a real survival situation if I had no time, but I knew it wasn't getting dark until 22:00 then so I was in no rush.



















I weaved branches of rowan between my roof supports so I would have something to build the actual roof on. Something was starting to take shape and I began collecting spruce branches to build the roof. I was going to need a lot if I wanted it to be even slightly water proof. This took some time, I don't know how long I was doing it, but I had a proper sweat on when I finished.




















Home sweet home. I made myself a bed of more spruce branches and put a log in front to try and stop me from rolling out during the night. I had my bag with me. It only had the water and binoculars inside, I'd eaten the bananas and it didn't end up making a very comfortable pillow. I still had a few hours of daylight left so I went on a bit of a mission because the mosquito's had started to come out and were already doing my head in when I was sitting around my camp. There was a forest fire warning so we couldn't light fires, so no warming up by a fire either.
When it finally got dark I tried to sleep a little, but no luck there. With my hood done up as tight as possible and my bag wrapped around my face to keep the mossies out, I could still hear them buzzing around my head. Eventually they disappeared when the temperature dropped. I was OK for a while, the spruce branches actually did quite a good job. I had maybe an hour or two of sleep then the cold crept in and just after 03:00 it started to get light and the bloody birds started singing. We had to orienteer to a meeting point by 07:00 to get picked up and taken back to school. At 03:30 I gave up trying to sleep so got up and went hiking to warm up and start to make my way back.

Alright I was a little hungry, tired and cold, but it was a pretty good experience and I'm confident enough that if it happened for real it would be fine.

Laters

Monday, 14 April 2014

Bear ski



I'm back from sunny Lapland once again, still in one piece more or less and have unfortunately left the winter behind me for the last time this year.
I have done quite a lot in the last ten days, but it feels like yesterday when I was packing my ski's to the trailer in winter less Kuru to drive 1000km north to Hammastunturi wilderness area to begin the solo ski trip which was one of the reasons I applied for the course in the first place. Although I still have many weeks left and a lot to do to pass the course, the Bear ski is what the program has been building up to from the beginning.

After the long drive all day and half the night, we arrived in Kuttura village, a very small Saami reindeer herder village of twenty one people in the middle of no-where at about 02.30. everyone tried to get a little sleep before the sun came up which for some of us was no sleep. That morning was bloody cold! coming from plus degrees and no snow in Kuru to about a metre of snow and I don't know how many minus degrees in Kuttura. With numb hands and feet we changed our clothes, packed our sledges and headed off to find the starting point where we would part ways for the next eight days.

Finding our starting location was easy, we ate a little breakfast and as we were ready said goodbye. It was cold, but perfect skiing conditions.
With a blue sky and the sun shining. I left in search of my first camp.



That was pretty much my route. We each planned our own routes before the trip and any changes we made along the way were to be messaged to our teachers. The red circles were my camp sites with what nights I stayed there. The green circles were our check points where on the third and sixth days and our teachers stayed the entire time. Kuttura village in the top right corner was where the cars were left. In total I skied about 65km which isn't far, but I had a heavy sledge to pull behind me and the exercise wasn't about skiing as far as you can. It was about being on your own in the wilderness for eight days.

A few twists and turns aside, I got to my planned camp location and had a nightmare setting up my shelter. It was really windy and every time I pegged one point of my shelter out the wind would rip it out of the snow. After almost two hours and a lot of swear words I got it together, got a fire going, cooked some warm food  and went to bed.






Up at 07:00, packed up and skiing by 09:00 turned out to be the norm. I was expecting an easy second day skiing over a nice flat bog to my next camp and it started well, but the wind had other ideas by blowing a bloody gale. I had to find some shelter in the forest to eat lunch before battling on to my camp. 




















Look how clean my jacket looked. It does not look like that now!
The wind had dropped by the next morning and after breakfast it was time to find the first checkpoint and go for a day trip up Jyppyrämaa hill.

Every time I left my camp I took a day pack and wrapped everything else up and stowed my food to try and prevent any raiders, but if a wolverine decided to visit it would have just dragged the stuff away to some hiding place. I would have had to hunt it down and see if there was anything left.



































A spot of lunch on top the hill before skiing down back to my camp. I had so much fun this day I decided to change my route to be able to take more day trips without my sledge. So on my way back I skied through the check point again to inform of my route changes.


With the sun setting around 21:30 and rising around 05:30 I didn't see much of the night.


I woke a few times the previous night thinking someone was shining a torch into my shelter, but it was just a ridiculously bright moon. On my way to the next camp as well as the usual I found wolverine tracks and these otter tracks going into and back out of the bog.





















When I got to my planned camp sites I would usually spend a little time skiing around to search for a half decent place to set up before putting up my shelter and digging out a fire pit. Doing everything with ski's on until you had dug a trench to move around in took a bit of getting used to. It was easy to forget that even though the ski's would keep you on top of the snow, as soon as you step off them you would sometimes sink almost up to your waist.

This was about the half way point and everything had gone well up till now. The next day was a trip up to Karhupalo.



Despite the noise my ski's were making I managed to get pretty close to a female Capercaillie on my way up the hill. When I got to the top I didn't have the views I got from the top of Jyppyrämaa through the trees, so I climbed a tree at the top of the hill to have a look around and get some pics. In the distance you can see Jyppyrämaa with the white top.

The following day was the second checkpoint day. As I went to leave my camp to find the checkpoint location the pocket I kept my compass in was open and there was no compass inside. Luckily I had a spare compass and I had a pretty good guess as to where I lost the other one. 
After finding the checkpoint and having a little chat with Mikko teacher I headed back up Karhupalo to the tree in search of the missing compass. I followed my tracks from the previous day that were the only tracks on the hill. I saw the Caperciallie in the same spot and got all the way to the tree without finding the compass, but at the base of the tree under a branch I had been swinging upside down on, just sticking out of the ground was some red string and the compass. Tidy, saved €30 there.

Popped out to get some water from the stream for breakfast before it got dark. I filled my kettle and pots straight away and it didn't matter that the water would freeze in them over night because I could just bang it on the cooker in the morning to melt and boil up. I preferred that than sleeping with water bottles in my sleeping bag not to freeze and wondering if they would leak or not? I only melted snow for drinking water once. I didn't want to waste my cooker fuel, so heated it over a fire and I got disgusting smokey water that the taste took ages to get rid of.

Crossing another big bog on my way to find the next camp, it looked like the weather had turned with a little snow in the air, but it wasn't long before the sun came out again and I hung my mittens over the frame of the sledge attached to my belt.
It took me a little over two hours to pull my sledge seven km's and I was at my camp by 11:10. The skiing conditions had been so good the entire trip I was covering ground a lot faster than I thought I would. Especially hearing the horror stories of last years student barely making two km's in a whole day! I messaged Mikko to tell him I was moving further on and went to grab my mittens from behind me, but the buggers wernt there. 
I thought about leaving them behind, but decided that I had found my compass the day before so I'd just ski back to find my mittens. I dumped my sledge at the river and headed back. three and a half km's later I found my mittens sitting in the snow. They added seven km's to my day, but I was still at my intended camp site in time for lunch and in the end set up camp and stayed there.

I'm glad I went back for the mittens cos that night the temperature went down to -18c, the previous nights had been between -12 and -15. I didn't feel the cold in my sleeping bag it was just when I had to get up and out of my sleeping bag did the cold hit me.

Picture quality is rubbish, but a little visitor from the previous evening. I'm pretty sure its a Short-eared owl, so a medium sized owl. I just saw it from the corner of my eye as it flew into the tree. It didn't make a sound and sat there for about twenty minutes, it only flew away when I tried to ski closer to it to get a better picture. When I got too close it dive bombed out of the tree and only opened its wings a few metres from the ground and disappeared in a second.

F-ing freezing morning. I got my stuff packed up as quickly as I could and headed off for the last day of skiing on my own in search of the common camp for the last night. Just over a kilometre into my day as I was thinking about the next river crossing I realised that I had left my rope hanging in the bloody tree's I was camped at. So down with the sledge again and back to the camp to get my rope.


I'm glad I stopped for water before pulling my sledge up that hill. It wasn't very high, but it was steep!! I had sweat pouring off me trying to side step my way up the icy slope, I almost got dragged back down it a few times.

I had no problems orienteering to the common camp and setting up for the last time. I found a few friends already there and most turned up eventually. I found out that one girl had been taken to hospital with frost bite on her cheeks the day before and two others had the beginning of frost bite, but were OK, and one lad had hurt his back on the very first day and didn't move the entire trip, but he is in the full of shit club so who knows?
That night was the coldest of the trip -22, but someone said it was -25 so we'll go with that. Either way it was cold enough and in the morning we skied our freezing bodies back to the cars and started the drive home.


The best experience of the course so far and one of the best things I have done!!

Laters.

Tuesday, 25 March 2014

Hole in the ice

We had a bit of fun today. Because next week is the bear ski where we will all be skiing solo in Lapland for 10 days facing hazardus situations on our own. In the morning we had a little chat about the hazards of being out on the ice of frozen lakes and rivers during spring, reasons for being on the ice and then went over techniques for crossing the ice. After we moved to the workshop to make a set of ice picks that we got to test in the afternoon.




















Nothing fancy, but they do the job. Just chopped up a broom handle drilled holes in the ends and screwed a bolt in each one then chopped off the heads and sharpened them. Two more holes to attach the rope and there you are.




















Having made our ice picks we wanted to test them out. Unfortunately even though it has been very warm for this time of year the ice on the lake was too strong for us to fall through and get a true experience of going through the ice so we had to cut a hole.




















After drilling a load of holes, sawing the gaps in between and pulling out the ice blocks it was time for a swim.

Even though I had a rope tied to me and Mikko has his dry suit on in case he had to jump in after me, I tried to keep it as real a situation as possible. Like our discussion in the morning, before attempting to cross the lake I had decided that I had no other choice. I had gathered fire making materials and placed them by the shore, so that if I did fall in and could get out I would be able to quickly get a fire going and start to get warm and dry off providing my fire making kit in my pocket didn't get wet.


Don't let the sunshine fool you. That water was cold!! I stayed in for a while, long enough to control my breathing and for the water to properly soak my clothes and fill my rubber boots before getting out and going to light my fire. I got the fire going pretty quickly the first few matches did get wet. Not from the swim, but from me dripping water everywhere. I stripped off to squeeze most of the water out of my clothes and warmed up. Not a true test as if I was in the wilderness alone, hopefully that doesn't happen, but a fun practise anyhow.

Laters