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

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.

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

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