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

Border zone ski trip

My second week of working at Upitrek and with my silky smooth skiing skills, myself and another guide took a group of nine Dutch customers on a seven day cross country skiing tour of about 120km's along the Russian border zone. The border zone is a no-mans land some distance from the actual border patrolled by the border guards. Don't go there unless you want a nice fine and investigation.

The unusually warm winter was in full swing, I was glad we weren't going to have too many lake crossings on this trip with the ice starting to melt.

Our accommodation for the first night was an famous bear hunters cabin. No running water or electricity so back to basics. The snowmobile was packed up and ready to go in the morning. It went out in front to make our ski tracks and the driver Markku prepared our lunch at the camp fires.

Great accommodation and food at Arola. It didn't really feel like work this week. Skiing all day with the customers telling them a little something about the nature and arriving at a place like this where there was tea and fresh home made blueberry pie waiting for us and after taking a sauna all kinds of reindeer, moose meat and freshly caught fish being cooked for us. Not too bad.

We came across a lot of animal tracks on our way, but unfortunately didn't see any animals.The Lynx tracks above were everywhere. It was good practise identifying the tracks for the customers with another exam on mammals coming up this week.

A lunch spot at one of the wilderness huts that are all over the country and free for anyone to use and stay overnight.

Wolf tracks

After our final dinner and two nights at Martinselkonen wilderness centre I had completed my work experience at Upitrek and the course requirements of 240 hours. The work experience was really good, I enjoyed it and learnt a lot, but next time I'm gonna want to be getting paid!

Laters.

2nd work placement

I'm back in school after some time off after my latest work placement. I suppose its about time I posted something about it, so i'll quickly tell about the first week.

On the last night of our ski trip we stayed in cabins so we could wash after a week of skiing and living in the forest and be relativly fresh for the long drive back. However, I wasnt going anywhere. Me and Heidi were going straight to our work training placement at Upitrek, which was handily enough in the same area we had been for the last week.

The details were a little sketchy tho, we wernt sure exactly where to go or at what time we were supposed be there? We didnt have to wait long to find out cos the next thing we knew there was a knock at the door. It was only our new boss telling us we were 2 hours late and needed to head straight to the nature centre. Good start. The nature centre was the hub of operations for the Hossa area, and the only shop in about 100km's.

We were put straight to work. Although my customers wernt arriving until the next night, I helped set up for Heidi's group of customers arriving that evening. We both had groups of 15-16 year old school kids from the UK on a multiactivity holiday week, so doing a little bit of everything.
Heidi's team were short on guides so instead of setting up for my group I helped them out for a few hours on they're first day of orienteering, fire making, ice fishing and snow cave building. It was good practise because I would be doing the same thing with my group the following day.

One of the games I organised was the fire making. The kids had to chop wood, make feather sticks, get a fire burning and keep it going to boil up some snow and make a cup of tea. The guys at the nature centre were doing all the catering for these groups and for the first time. They learnt straight away how much tea Brits drink after having to do a 200km round trip to get more tea from the nearest supermarket.

The next day my group of customers had arrived. Twenty, sixteen year old lads from a boys school in royal tumbridge wells. Me, Janne the other guide and Paul who came out with the group ran all the activities throughout the week. Day one was as with the other group, and after that we did days cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, visiting the local reindeer farm and more skiing and snowshoeing.

After giving a quick intro to skiing we went on a short ski route, and it was nice, some of the kids were so bad it actually made me look like a professional skier. In the afternoon we continued on a longer track and tackled a few hills.

We took them snowshoeing down some good hills and across a few lakes to get to our lunch spot on our way to our next accommodation where we had a winter olympics with more fire making sledge pulling our own version of biathlon and a load of other stuff.

The week passed pretty quickly, I was expecting it to be a nightmare, but it was actually a lot of fun.

Ive got no time to write anymore right now I have school work coming out of my ears, I'll carry on with the following week shortly.

Laters

Building a snow shelter "Quinzee"

During the skiing trip we took a day off from skiing to build snow shelters also called "quinzee" or "quinzhee" the name comes from the Athabascan Indians. Yeah, I've never heard of them either, but apparently they built some mighty fine snow shelters!

Me and Andy at it again. We paired up cos we're about the same size and we needed a big shelter and we don't fuck around. There are probably many ways to build snow shelters, but we did it our way.
First off we marked out a five metre diameter circle for our shelter and Andy tamped the area flat using his ski's. As we soon realised, tamping the snow flat was a complete waste of time, but for some reason it seemed like a good idea and necessary at the time??

We started shovelling the snow into a nice pile and some huskies came to check out what we were up to. We continued to pile up the snow and tap it down now and then to bond the snow crystals. After a couple of hours of shovelling our pile it was almost head height. It could've been a little higher, but we'd had enough.

The next step was to collect, cut or chop a load of wooden stakes about thirty cm's long and hammer them in all around the shelter.The reason for this is so that when we started to dig the shelter out, you keep going until you find the ends of the all stakes. You then know that the walls of the shelter are about thirty cm's thick and plenty strong enough (hopefully).

After leaving your pile of snow for an hour or more to allow the moisture in the different levels of snow to spread among the crystals and the snow crystals to bond it's ready to start digging out. Yes, almost all of that snow you just spent hours piling up now has to be dug out.
Start with a small entrance just big enough to fit through and the opposite direction from any wind, work your way in and up to try and make a space inside that you can sit up in to continue digging just because its easier than lying down. Then with one person inside shovelling snow to the entrance and your mate shovelling snow from the entrance back out to wherever it came from, the inside soon starts to take shape.

The idea is that you build or carve the sleeping areas up from the floor so the cold air sinks into the space below and leaves the rest of the shelter as warm as can be. We shaped the roof as smooth as we could be bothered, so that during the night any melting snow would run down the sides of the shelter instead of drip onto our heads. To finish off we poked a small air vent in the roof to let some air circulate, after all that digging it got ridiculously steam in there.

It might not look like it, but there was loads of room inside. We reckon there could've easily slept three or four people.

In the end I think we counted that it took us about six and a half hours to build start to finish so not exactly a quick shelter, but it was the first time we had built one and there are a few things I'd do differently next time to knock a good bit of time off.

Laters

Forest ski trip

I'm back from a few weeks spent in Kainuu so I have a few things to post, but first things first. The forest skiing trip.

I was on a week long skiing trip with the course in a place called Hossa in Kainuu. Really nice area I'll definitely be going there again. The trip was basically a practise run for the solo ski trip in four weeks time. Apart from a short training day in Kuru this was the first time most of us had any sort of real skiing time using the forest ski's. They are like cross country ski's, but bigger. Almost three metres long and twice as wide as track ski's. They are go anywhere ski's, the size of them keeps you nicely on top of the snow, much better than snowshoes! No need to keep to the maintained tracks, with these ski's you make your own tracks.

Obviously to start with I have to make my camp.This was the first time I had set up the shelter in snow so it was a little different than usual, but after a little messing around and a little more digging I had something that was going to have to do cos it was getting late. I had to dig my fireplace down to the ground or else it would've disappeared into the snow after a few minutes. I got a fire on the go and made a cup of tea before bed and had a really good nights sleep.

After two nights the original camp wasn't working too well, the shelter was sagging, the sleeping place was icy and uncomfortable. Instead of just fixing it I moved to a new location. I pitched the shelter alot higher giving me much more room inside and even tho it was snowing a fair bit not much came inside the shelter. My fire going at night was further away from the tree than it looks, but still I wouldnt make it that close in summer. The ground was nice and frozen and I only had a small fire so the tree was quite safe.
We have been told that in summer time you have to be careful that you are far enough from trees so that there are no big roots under your fire as they are full of resin and if too hot can start a fire underground spreading to the tree and the tree will almost burst into flames and good luck putting that one out.

We had breakfast at the lean-to every morning prepared by the daily cooking group and set off for skiing over the lake at around eight lead by the daily guides orienteering to various locations. Some people pulled the sledges, we rotated the sledge pulling after lunch to make sure everyone had a go because on the solo ski we're gonna be pulling these bad boys loaded right up for 9 days. We had a few different types of sledge, I don't know which I'm gonna get for the solo ski trip? its going to be a lottery, but I hope its one of the bigger ones.

Even tho it had been quite warm and there was some water on top of the ice in some places, there was still about half a metre of solid ice underneath us so no danger of falling in, but we practised a few saftey measures. Like using local knowledge, we could see that snowmobiles had recently been on the ice and had avoided the middle of the lake, so it was wise for us to do the same and we followed their tracks around narrow areas of the lake. Also unclipping our ski bindings, back packs and sledges so that if the ice did give way we could easily shake off the extra weight and hopefully pull ourselves out.

Water at river mouths, under bridges and areasof strong current often stay open and wont freeze over unless it gets very cold or there is a long spell of cold weather, to be on the safe side its best to avoid those areas anyway.

We wern't always on the water tho. We had to ski and pull the sledges through the forest and up hills, it was not always easy. Especially for those at the front making new tracks in deep snow.

We carried all pots n' pans, water butts, food and everything for cooking lunch with us in the sledges. On this trip all main meals were communal and cooked by the daily cooking group. I dont remember who did the food plan for the week? but the meals were really good.

 

What goes up must come down and sometimes we came down hard! There are no pictures of my falls, but I had more than my fair share of crashes. Actually, at the bottom of the picture above of Seishi coming down a hill with a sledge you can see one of my landing spots.

It was a good week in all, even tho I fell over way too much, but I learnt alot about skiing and what I need to do before the solo trip.

Before I go, here are some more pics of Andy. He seems to get into a lot of my pictures. It was his birthday a while ago and he started some weird tradition in his village in Belarus some years ago that on your birthday you have to go outside and pour a bucket of cold water on yourself. I dont know why??

If the video works I'll put more on in the future.

Laters