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.

Few and far between

Nice picture there of Tuesdays classroom, more about that in the next post. It was a bit nippy tho, not sure what the temperature was, but it hasn't been much warmer than -20 for the last few weeks. Still not much snow about, but the weather man said its gonna start coming down proper next week.

Its been busy recently so I've had no time to write these posts. The old dears been moaning at I so I'm gonna put a bit of time aside to get them going again.

Since being back in Kuru after the holidays there has been a lot of classroom business so not too many pictures to show. Lots of trip planning for my professional examination in the spring and started on my business plan, but it's a long way off yet. There was a fish identification test today. I'm pretty confident that I passed, I'll be surprised if I got more than one wrong.

I stayed at the school last weekend and practised a little handy crafts. I whittled a little butter knife out of a piece of Grey Alder. It's a soft wood so very easy to work with and a butter knife is about as simple shape as you can carve so not too difficult.

 Then I found another small block of Grey Alder so started playing around carving a spoon. Sketched it first, then went to it first with an axe for the rough shape then my knife. Oh yeah I have a new toy.

My Hultafors army axe. 15€ brand new from the army surplus shop, proper bargain. Got a few marks on him now cos I let a few trees have some the other day.

 Anyway back to the spoon. I got it down to this shape and thought it was a little chunky, there was a small knot in the handle so it could've gone a bit wrong, but I split it in half with my knife and luckily it went straight through.

I carved the spoon with my hook knife. I don't know if its called a hook knife? but that's what I call it. Finished it off with a little sanding and that's that. Not bad.

Some other things I was messing around with. That fork is the other half of the spoon I split in half.

I also spent a night outside last week to test my new sleeping bag.It was about -20 give or take. No tent or anything, just on a sleeping mat on the floor. Absolutely fine, only wore my long johns and I was totally warm all night. Face got a little cold, but I have a balaclava to where next time. I want it to get a little colder to give it a proper test before our ski trip in a few weeks. We've been told to expect temps of -35 so I need to make sure my kit is up to it.

 I got a some pics of me from when I was on my work placement in Lapland. Thanks to the photographers we took around for a week. Snowmobiling and swimming.

I'm not that keen on having my picture taken normally so I wasn't overly comfortable with having my picture taken naked either.

That's all for now folks. Laters

Still alive

I've been off the radar for a while working, yes it was work! in Lapland for a few weeks. Now I'm back and getting ready to go back to school next week. Here's a little of what I've been up to.

With a lovely hangover on the first of December, I left on a lush 12 hour train ride from Turku to Rovaniemi. Followed by 2 bus journey's to get to Äkäslompolo, in total taking 18 hours 45 min's.

I got to Snow Fun Safaris in the afternoon and wasn’t sure if I was going to get put straight to work or not? luckily the boss took one look at me and said that maybe I should go rest a little then come to work in the morning. I got taken to my accommodation, dropped my bags and went out for a few beers before going to sauna and crashing out.

My temporary home and new house mates

 My first day I got an intro to the company and met a few of the guides, then got straight into some snowmobile training and went out for a ride. I spent the first two day's visiting various places preparing them for the up-coming Christmas season, including Father Christmas's cabin!

Messing around on a frozen swamp, Ylläs fell in the background. One night me and a few lads took snowmobiles after work and rode up to the top. It was steep and I got stuck at one point and lost the others. The top was not nice, 30m/s wind and in seconds visibility was down to zero and I had to find my way down. Eventually I met up with the others on the other side of the fell and we went for a beer in Ylläsjärvi before riding back over the fell it to Äkäslompolo.

From day three onwards I was on the snowmobile safaris with the customers. The basic safari was out to the Kota (a hut with a fire place), where we would stop and prepare coffee, juice, sausages and buns for everyone. Then through the forest dodging reindeer back to the starting point, Taking two to two and a half hours depending how fast they wanted to go.

He was just popping down the shop, last year a reindeer walked into the local supermarket and had a little look around.

The safari size varied from only a few machines to a gert 50 snowmobile safari! The kids would usually ride in a big sleigh and if it was a cold day even though they had all the clothes on and were covered in blankets and reindeer skins by the time they got to the Kota they would all be screaming and crying and I'd have to carry them in to the fire place.

Before starting the safaris everyone got a safety briefing about the snowmobiles and were told a few times to go easy on the accelerator cos they go fast! Apparently not everyone took notice cos there were a few crashes and a few more out of control snowmobiles I had to rescue. Mostly from the restart after a break at the Kota.

This lady crashed into the toilet at the Kota from a standing start less than five metres away and hit it so hard she cracked her safety helmet. you can see she still had her thumb on the accelerator after she hit the toilet cos the tracks have dug into the snow. After some first aid I took her back to town with my snowmobile, half of her face had turned black and looked like she had two heads by the time we got there. Me and another guide came back after to tow the machine to the office.

About eighty percent of the time I was doing different snowmobile safaris. For the rest of the time I did a few different activities. A couple of times me and a few others had to look after groups of British holiday makers for the day while they visited Father Christmas and got attacked by an old Saami witch. My job was to organise snowshoeing/sledging, cook sausages and keep coffee on the go. Oh and we had to do this dressed as elves, I did get a few comments like "arnt you a little big to be an elf?" and "are there many west country elves in the Arctic circle then?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was -39 this day, most people stayed inside so we were on our own outside eating the sausages and drinking coffee to stay warm.

Here are pictures of the main man checking his naughty list.

We also did snowmobile trips to a husky farm, reindeer farm and ice fishing. The dogs were friendly, but crazy. Only quiet when they were running.

Before the run

After

We got a few fish ice fishing, but they were tiny. Then we went to check the nets set the night before.

We also took people to visit the Snow village/Ice hotel. Don't think I'll ever spend the night there,It was a bit pricey and a tad cold. Every year its different, this year it was carved by Russian and Chinese artists.

Health and safety at it again. Don't think this will see much action the place is made out of bloody snow!

Chapel

Ice bar

Only a little creepy

I took part in only a few snowshoeing safaris, one was a snowshoeing northern lights seeing safari. We didn't see the lights on the safari, but as soon as the customers had gone the lights came out and they were pretty decent. I saw the lights a few times while I was there, sometimes they were moving pretty quick and others it was just a green line in the sky. The other few times I went snowshoeing we climbed different fells with the customers.

For a short round up that's about it. I had concerns before I went about dealing with customers, what I would talk to them about and how to deal with difficult holiday makers, but it all went really well. I had a great time at Snow Fun Safaris, really nice people and if I get to work there again I will, and the next time I might be getting paid for it. Looking forward to my next training place in eight weeks time.

Laters.