Walking in Lapland Iisakkiipää

 

The top map with the red star in the north of Finland is the location of Saariselkä, our base in Lapland.

The first walk was with Michael, Katia and me to Iisakkiipää. Each walk in Finland will just have one name to distinguish it from the others but there are often more than one place visited. 

From the cabin base Michael steps out into the forest. We follow but pretty soon hit a damp patch so revert to the man made track.

    

On the way to Laanila we have a couple of close encounters with the docile reindeer. I was absolutely elated, what a treat, reindeer within the first couple of hundred yards..beautiful.

We went into the cafe at Laanila and had coffee and cakes. Not a bad start to the walk, we had only been going about 40 minutes. The wooden furniture in the cabin at the cafe was good and chunky. 

The views along the trail were gorgeous and the smell of the clean air was refreshing. Katia and Michael told me all about cross country skiing along this very route in their winter visit. Not for me but I love the walking.

We soon reached the sausage grilling hut known as Piispanojan grillipaikka. The hut was empty but the fire lit so we stoked it fed it logs and began grilling sausages. These are cooked smoked sausage very tasty but definitely not healthy.

Pretty soon others started arriving including 3 ladies with whom Michael discussed various hiking areas around Saariselkä and Finland along with their lives, families and life histories. A chap on his own arrived and although he did not speak much English he was friendly and reappeared in many of our future walks. A pair of middle aged gentlemen came in and it turned out one of them was part of the company that produced our sausages. He told us how many sausages they produced each year but our collective memories are all too unreliable to state it here. The hut filled and the grill filled with more and more sausages. It was great. It was a shame to leave but we needed to move on.

We followed the track through the forest past many old dead trees including the beauty Katia and Michael are stood next to. This was an easy trail and though the view is pretty much the same from location to location we did start to see the fell as the trail rose and the trees thinned.

The wide landscape of the higher ground with gently rolling hills and single trees and granite lichen covered rocks contrasted starkly with the close forest environment lower down.

From the cairn on the hill top of Iisakkiipää we could look over the forests to the east and the ski lifts at Kaunispää and on the hill top going down we could see the resort of Saariselkä laid out below us. The view of the forest to the east towards Russia of millions of trees was classic Taiga or Boreal and definitely brought out my inner geographer as I remembered the teaching of Hunt and Ellery from my grammar school days. This forest stretches all around the world and covers most of northern Eurasia.

Down the steep wooded valley to the top of the gorge opposite the Aurora Day Hut. I suffered a fall at this time as I consulted the phone map instead of watching my feet. A parachute drop onto my right side avoided serious injury but I still banged my ribs. 

We walked along the top of the gorge southward with a drop off on our right hand side. The rocky path required care when crossing but was ok. 

Crossing the base of the gorge we climbed up the other side back to the Aurora platform where we had further views of the gorge and Saariselkä.

We visited the info centre wigwam and I got my first sight of a brown bear, wooden of course.

Back to the cabin and our first walk was over, 9 miles with a relatively easy hill and lots of stops for food and chat. The main tracks were a little busy with bikes but it was not a problem.