Mustavuori – also known as Majavuori – is a place near Lievestuore, just next to the highway 9 / E63 from Jyväskylä to Kuopio. It’s about half an hour drive from Jyväskylä to Lievestuore.

The Mustavuori itself is located next to the old Lipeälampi, infamous pond / small lake that was so badly polluted by a local cellulose factory, so that it was completely dried out, cleaned up and filled with land. The factory closed down in the ’80s and there were many attempts to clean up and save the pond in the ’90s and ’00s, but finally they had to fill up the pond.

Now days there’s a outdoor center around the old Lipeälampi, there’s a skiing track and small stadium in the area and it’s used as running track on summer times. Also a local RC model airplane and drone association uses the flat area as flying zone.

The red dot is the parking place and the service building of the area. Green dot is the old Lipeälampi, that is basically an open field nowdays. And the bluish dot is the kota at the 3 km loop. The picture is taken from a small obresvation tower build on a hill next to the Lipeälampi and can be seen on the map at the east side labeled as “näköt.”.

(Two pics above were taken on the next day when I was coming back from the kota to the car park.)

I arrived to the car park around 21:00 in the evening and it was already dark. There were lights on the path about half of the way (the dotted purple track on the map – the solid purples does not have lights), rest of the journey I walked in the dark.

Even thou it was late evening it wasn’t completely dark and I actually walked the whole way without using my headlamp to the kota and laavu. It was about 3,5 km walk per direction.

The kota was dark and I was all alone in there. I did spot one walker / runner person passing by at the evening, but no one bothered me during the evening or night. Many of these places are popular during the day hours, when people ski and do sports, but during the night there’s usually no one around. Near towns or so, there might be some local youngsters hanging around, with or without the mandatory beer bottles and mopeds and boom boxes. There were actually some people at the first kota that I passed by, but this was far enough from the civilization that I had the place all by myself.

Temperature was around 0°C (~30°F) when I arrived, but the fireplace kept the temp around +5°C (40°F), thou it dropped quite fast as the fire burned out when I slept.

So as always, some food did happen and much of noms was had…

Some bacon and veggies with BBQ seasoning.

Also my trusty thermos bottle with some hot green tea was keeping me company.

Also about the other “company”… These popular places like this have a small critter hazard that one needs to take in consideration. As these are popular places and many people use these places to eat their picnic lunch or grill the sausages and other veggies and parts of a dead animal, it tends to draw in these little forest critters known as mice.

…and in here, their presence was clear.

(…yes that’s some mice poop in these pictures.)

Forest mice love to come into places like these to search food and can be a nasty surprise if one does not hide their food somewhere they can’t get to while sleeping in a place like this or in a laavu. There are no rats out here in the wilderness as they are about 100% city dwellers but the mice have caused some surprises to the people.

I did manage to get few hours of sleep, even thou I heard the mice couple times roaming around, but that was just a “excuse” to get up couple times and get some more wood to the firepit to keep the fire goin, as the rumble of a person walking around scares the mice out hiding.

Talking about the firewood, they had plenty of them in here just as I would expect.

They even had a nice brand new Fiskars axe here to split the firewood. I usually always carry my own axe with me when out like this, but a larger one with a sharp blade was a nice surprise.

At the morning after the sun came up and there was some light, maybe around 10 o’clock or so I did walk around the premises to take few pics more…

Overall a nice overnighter with some walking and testing my gear for the winter. I slept quite ok in the kota and the temperature wasn’t that much below +0°C at any point during the night.

On my way back I did walk by the observation tower to take a look around. Nice walk with no hurry, about an hour per direction and some gear on my backpack to get the feeling of winter hiking.

Back at the car park and ready to drive back to the city…

Some pics in this post are from my camera that I use to shoot stills and the rest are from my action camera, as I shot some clips at 720p/60. Still don’t know if I ever want to start to do vlogs, but at least I have that option and I get to test out my gear how it handles different conditions.

Till next time. 🙂