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

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I have a few minutes spare so thought I'd write a little about my professional examination a few weeks ago. The pics in this post are not from the actual examination, but when we went to visit the site a few months earlier and I was messing around with my camera. Theres not many, but they're a little random.

Four of us had a group of customers for an overnight stay at Kortesalo house in Seitseminen national park the whole time we were watched by two examiners.
The customers had a day of activities planned out by us including all meals.
In the morning the customers were picked up from Tampere and dropped off at Kortesalo House, we greeted them with Glögi (a warm berry like drink served with sliced almonds and raisins), gave an introduction to Seitseminen national park and got straight into a few team building activities. Fire lighting, tree identification, orienteering and hunting.

We miscalculated how long the games would take and ended up finishing about an hour and a half earlier than scheduled so had to come up with some extra activities to fill the time trying not to look like idiots in front of the examiners. After lunch was the big snowshoeing guiding and nature knowledge. Each of us took a section of the nine kilometre route to lead and give short talks on various subjects along the way. I chose to go first even though I had never been on that part of the route so didn't know exactly where I was going or what there might be to talk about on the way.

I lead the group from Kortesalo paying special attention to my speed because I usually get my stride on and leave most people behind struggling to keep up. One of the customers looked like she was going to pass out so I took it nice and slow. Later on in the day she did collapse three times before getting picked up by the minibus, not my fault and nothing to do with me mind! she had her own problems. As we snowshoed I was hoping to spot some animal tracks or something clever to talk about so of course there were no animal tracks or anything I thought was suitable to tell the group. I stopped a few times along the way to explain a little about snowshoeing through the forest, told some interesting information about pine tree's and eventually found some squirrel tracks in the snow.
At the end of my route was Kovero farm. I gave a talk about the history of the farm and its current state before handing the guiding over to Irina.

When we got back to Kortesalo the sauna was ready so the customers got to relax while dinner was getting prepared.The examiners didn't hang around for too long, but left happy enough. We were all hoping that after sauna and eating that the customers would just go to sleep, but we weren't so lucky. Instead they wanted to go for a night hike. No-one else seemed keen on taking them so I said I would, I took them for a 3km walk around multiharju, a protected area inside the national park. The big old trees look a little different under torch light and and we heard a few strange noises coming from the depths of the forest. The customers were loving it.

At the end of the week I met with the examiners to hear their report on how the day went as a whole and also about my personal guiding and nature knowledge.
No joke, I don't think I have ever heard so many nice things said about me. I don't need to go into it, but I passed with flying colours. Bring on the next test!

Right now I'm working at Upitrek. This week I have been working with a school group from the UK taking them skiing, snowshoeing and doing multiple activities. Next week I'm taking a group of dutch customers for a week long ski trip along the Russian border before I get to go home to see my beautiful fiance.

Laters