Finland Wilderness Training, Monday Day 2, part 1

It’s not quite light when I wake and so I turn over and settle down into what I have now made into a warm and comfortable little nest in my tiny wooden-clad cabin.  After a while I poke my nose over the top of the covers and notice the light still hasn’t changed.  Something tells me that I shouldn’t just be lying there in the warmth and I need to make a move and so I reach out a hand and locate my phone and draw it close to my face so that I can make out the time.  It’s half past eight in the morning.  And kit collection is at nine.  Sending up a brief prayer that says thank-you for last night’s instruction that told us to jettison our morning personal hygiene routine I stick on as many layers as I can find close to hand, brush my teeth, wonder for a moment if that’s actually allowed, pull on my hat and gloves and head out across the short space to the reception and dining room.  The light is soft and flat and the snow compacts and creaks in a very satisfactorily fashion beneath my feet.  It’s like walking across a landscape colour-washed in Farrow and Ball’s Mizzle. 

Breakfast due to my tardiness is quick though I am surprised by how much I manage to pack away as everyone else is already gathering up their things and heading down to the kit room.   Tagging onto the end of the line I stand as I am slowly loaded up with stuff that will, I hope, keep me warm and dry over the week.  Stepping back and eyeing me critically, our instructor for the day nods sagely and handed me my base, mid and shell layers.  Extra-large he says, smiling.

Extra-large? I do not intend to take this slur lying down though by now I am so loaded up that I am beginning to think I had stumbled into a Nordic version of Crackerjack though luckily minus the cabbage.  Along with the clothes we are supplied with boots, a rucksack, a thermos flask and a friendly but stern warning to remember to return everything before we leave but  I decide I’ll return everything now.  Extra-large my foot.  I am persuaded out of it though and later on, half-way across the frozen lake with an absolutely necessary four layers between me and the elements(this goes up to seven layers on the full-day dog sledding)  I am absolutely fine with going up two dress sizes on my photos.  Luckily I have pulled my hat down so low and my scarf up so high, that nobody would recognize me anyway.    

Down on the lake which is mostly frozen at this time of year, we get used to our snow shoes and have the sort of childish fun that only comes from having been brought up and living in a country that rarely has snow but when it does grinds everything to an absolute halt and quickly turns to the kind of gray hue that Farrow and Ball don’t stock.  Walking in snow shoes on the flat is easy, child’s play I would say, and even uphill is fairly straight forward as long as you give the snow a good old boot with the prongs at the front to get some kind of purchase.  But downhill is tricky and to test our new skills we are taken to what is a very steep and wooded slope and told to find our own way down.  This, I realize, is not going to be as easy as it looks.

I consider for a moment the best approach.  It is to take the steepest route with the most trees on the basis that if I slip or fall I will have something to grab onto, or, perhaps ricochet off to break my fall?  Or should I take the slightly less steep route with less foliage with which to stop my acceleration should I lose control?   Route two mights mean I get down quicker, but probably on my head.  Raising myself out of the state of procrastination I notice that everyone is nearly halfway down already.  What the hell, I think.  And step off the edge.

Thirty minutes later we are standing on top of a snow covered cliff, overlooking a mill on the River Friction.  At this point on the river the water never freezes and it is ink-black.  A continuous flow of semi-frozen ice slowly rotates around the eddy at the bank.  I wonder what it would feel like to be in there, in the dark freezing water.  This part of the Oulanka national park was one of the locations for the 2011 film called ‘Hanna’  which as well as a very talented young female protagonist called Saoirse Ronan also starred Cate Blanchett and Tom Hollander http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0993842/.  As I stand and look at the scene (see photo 8 on the Finland gallery) I feel the clean, pure air finding its way deep into my lungs.  I find a tree and leaning my back against it I slowly slip to the ground.  Closing my eyes I listen to the rushing of the water and feel I have been transported to a better, happier place.

Finland Wilderness Training, Sunday Day 1 - Part 2

Sitting in the warmth of the minibus a couple of hours later with my head resting against the glass and having fun spotting the Christmas lights in the windows of the houses we pass, I think about the week ahead.  The last time I got involved with winter training activities it resulted in a slipped disk having been dropped (on purpose) down a steep slope on Ben Nevis with only a couple of ice axes which I was supposed to use to stop my fall.   This time though, the activities agenda was intended to be a little gentler with a bit of cross country skiing, some dog sledding and an afternoon of ice-climbing planned.  It’s a long drive to Basecamp from Oulu, three and a half hours, and by the time we get there I am desperate for the loo (again) and am feeling a rising wave of travel sickness from sitting in the back of the bus.   It is very dark and very snowy and having passed the local-to-Base camp metropolis (I josh) that is Ruka I hope we are close. If there is anything worse than being desperate for the loo for the second time in a day, it is being desperate for the loo at the same time as being desperate not to vomit.  Just as I rise from my seat ready to tap the driver on the shoulder and somehow communicate to him that I need to find a nice patch of Finnish snow to sully with the remains of that morning’s sandwich I see the welcoming sign of some lights through the trees and we turn at last into camp.  My apologies at this point to the very friendly camp staff who saw only the fleeting shape of an English who ignored their warm welcome and headed for the bathroom.  That was me.

When at last I appear, slightly more composed, I find everyone in the dining room tucking into supper.  It is the start of a regular appearance on the menu by Mr. Elk and just to make sure I like it as much as I think I do, I have seconds.   The warmth of the fire in the dining room, some good food and a glass of Loganberry squash significantly help with the return of my power of speech.

There is a small team of staff at Basecamp, usually only three or four, and who are mostly young and smile a lot.  After supper and when it is clear that the nightmare of our journey is beginning to recede, we are introduced to the itinerary for the morning which involves picking up our arctic kit and equipment before the first activity which is to head out onto the frozen lake and then up to the mill.  We are given some clear directions on things that are different when you are out for any length of time in what can be quite extreme conditions.  We are told not to shower in the mornings, not to put on face cream or even to wash our face, and not to shave (if you are a man, that is) as any moisture on exposed skin can lead to frostbite patches.  I decide being dirty but frostbite-free definitely gets my vote.  After the talk and a few minutes later, in my tiny wooden-clad cabin room, I lay in bed with the quilt up to my chin with my socks still on, yet shivering.  I put a second quilt on the bed and then get up again and pile my coat on top of it and hope to God I’m not going down with something.

See the Finland photos on the gallery.

Finland Wilderness Training, Sunday - Day 1

As I am running for my connection in Stockholm Arlanda desperate for the loo, I fleetingly cast my mind back to the 4 am start and the relative cheer I had felt as I ate the last of my Christmas Day roast beef in a sandwich coasting down the M1 and looking forward to my week away.  Now, having stressed as our flight in Heathrow was delayed, and in Stockholm being corralled by some clipboard-toting-Swedish-female-Commandant who has held the flight to Oulu especially for us, I am judging how long I can restrain myself from veering off into the most available toilets (ladies, men’s toilets, at this stage I would not be fussy) when I find myself on one side of a revolving door with my fellow Exodus companions stranded on the other side.  As I stand, legs crossed ( literally) jigging about in a temperature of minus nine desperate not to embarrass myself, the Commandant spends ten minutes with her swipe card, trying to work out what the problem is.  Me, I am stand with my nose against the floor to ceiling glass panel adjacent to the non-complying revolving door staring fixedly at the sign for the toilets just beyond it.  I wonder for a moment if I have to pee, whether it will just freeze in my knickers.  Having arrived at last upon the aeroplane  - a very intimate affair of only sixty seats -  and to the clear disgruntlement of passengers already upon it I settle in, legs crossed ever more tightly, praying for takeoff.  Normally I hate this part and over the years I have created a ‘take-off mantra’ which I habitually mutter to myself as the heap of metal hurls itself down the runway gaining sufficient velocity to take off, but today, I am desperate for it to get going.  The captain took us through his flight checks, got us ready for take-off, I had my mantra at the ready and then…. all the lights went out.  I was sitting on a plane that was ready for take-off and which, all of a sudden had been plummeted (probably poor use of verb) into darkness.  I clutched my crucifix more tightly, glad we were not off the ground and marvelled at the strength of the female pelvic platform.

More on Finland, tomorrow.

See the pictures on the gallery.

Daily Telegraph - 'Just back' article

It was like someone had cut a thousand tiny holes in a gown of midnight blue and set it with diamonds that glittered and pulsed in white and blue and gold.  The night sky I am looking at deep in Northern Finland arcs across the frozen lake on which I stand and envelops me every bit as keenly as the sleeping bag pulled close around my shoulders.

It is bitterly cold.  Daylight had creaked in mid-morning and left again before the afternoon was through.  Outside lights on the few buildings at base camp stayed permanently on and the sky remained deadlocked in a soft gentle greyness typical of the mid-months of winter up at the Arctic Circle.  The snow was deep and soft and lay in drifts like mounds of icy sugar into which our boots and then our legs sank and disappeared.  We worked hard to build the snow shelter in which we planned to sleep that night.  It was a week’s wilderness skills training over New Year, the eve of which we toasted with Tar Schnapps as we stood looking beyond the bank of pine-trees in which the camp is nestled and up into the night sky, searching for a glimpse of the Northern Lights. 

Now, though, I am standing alone outside the shelter having struggled to sleep.  It was not the cold:  inside the shelter it keeps a steady minus four or minus five degrees and it was not the comfort: but Midnight came and went and the minutes ground around to one a.m. and onto two a.m. and at three o’clock I knew that sleep that night if I stayed, wound into a ball there in the snowy womb, would pass me by. And so I slid down the tunnel quietly and gently so as not to wake my companions, intent on making at some haste my way back across the lake and up through the trees to my cabin.  It wasn’t the cold that froze me as I emerged but rather the stillness and the silence as I raised my face to a monochrome world hung with stars upon stars upon stars.  Stood Orion with his overbearing astral presence as he pulled back his bow and lifted his shield; the Seven Sisters were joined by half a dozen more and the Milky Way had become a strip of speckled beauty pinned onto the velvet darkness clear from one horizon to the next.

I felt the cold assaulting my face and begin the long creep up through my boots and into my bones and I knew I would have to move soon. I began to walk slowly back across the ice and through the snow, feeling it creak and give as it compacted beneath my feet.  Before I disappeared into the trees I turned and took one final look and caught the fleeting trail of a shooting star.

Seeking the Aurora Borealis in Northern Finland - Part 1

When the organising company told me that our direct flights to Kuusamo had been cancelled by mistake and that we would be flying via Stockholm and what’s more there would be a four hour minibus transfer to Oulanka at the other end, I thought seriously about cancelling the trip.   It was expensive, it was over New Year, and I had booked it rather on a whim on coming back from Cuba in September and discovering that the disruption in my life continued.  Being away at New Year, a long way away, somewhere where the physical demands of the trip would force me to think of nothing else than dealing with the extreme environment I was in, seemed a sensible if slightly uncompromising option.  It also, as a by-product, fulfilled a couple of my never-too-late objectives: to step inside the Arctic Circle and to see a proper display of the Northern Lights.  I’d seen them once before, in Iceland in 2006 when I’d managed to drive for an hour down a motorway in the wrong direction and having turned around arrived at my hotel on the Snaefellsnes peninsula with just minutes to spare before the restaurant closed.   Having shared a bottle of (very expensive) wine with my travelling companion which we finished very quickly (note, expensive anywhere in Scandinavia does not necessarily correlate with ‘good’) and having spent about 6 hours in one position in a very small car, post dinner we were keen to stretch our legs and play about in the snow.  Stepping outside the triple-glazed warmth of the hotel and into the razor-sharp cold of the night we were joshing around until I looked up and said, “hang on a minute, why does the sky look so weird?”

We both stopped and in the quiet stillness turned our gaze upwards and realised, in a slightly dim fashion, that we were seeing the Northern Lights.  It was not a fabulous or momentous display, just a mild glow of green and yellow bands tripping across the sky but it drew us in and kept us there until our hands and feet could take the cold no more.

This New Year, in Finland, far further north, with solar activity more pronounced, I hope to see the Northern  Lights skipping and shimmering across the Arctic sky in a far longer and more intense display.  I have my fingers crossed.