Lapland in Winter
Kiilopää - Suomunruoktu

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16^th of February 2002
Skiing tour, day1: snow storm and exhausting miles

We wake up at 7.30 in order to get at 8 o'clock to the breakfast buffet. The weather is not the best. It's quite warm with only -9°C, but it's cloudy and when we started our tour it began to snow.

The first 6 kilometers are one a groomed trail with marking poles. The weather was getting worse and worse and when we had to leave the trail, we had an absolute whiteout with fog, snow and wind. Under this weather conditions we had to find a pass between two fjells, but we even couldn't guess in which direction the terrain is falling or rising. We took our compass and went blind into the white nothing ... and indeed we found the pass and crossed the hill barrier.

After a long time in the white ocean we saw the first crippled birch trees of the neighbour valley. But our happiness was not very long enduring. Indeed it was not so windy between the trees than on the hills, but the snow was so fluffy that we sank until our knees into the snow ... we didn't know which evil was worst, the bad snow in the forests or the cold temperatures and the storm on the fjells.

Thank God, after some minutes we found an old snowed in ski track, on which we didn't sank so much.

Late afternoon we had a graupel shower and the temperature rose up to +2°C. The Finnish skis were not used to this tropical temperatures and so the snow was cleaving on the downside of our skis. These last kilometers were the most exhausting kilometers of the whole tour.

It was getting already dark when we arrived at the hut. The huts in this national park you will find every 10 to 20 kilometers a small hut with a gas stove, an oven, a table and sleeping places ... and the best thing about this huts is, you can use them for free. This system is only possible, if every hiker and skier is cleaning the hut after themselves and indeed this is working perfectly here. Every hut was clean and we had always already chopped wood.