It’s been quite cold in the north for couple weeks. And people are getting into problems in the wilderness.

The title of this post is a direct translation of the title of this news article: https://yle.fi/a/74-20203926 released by Yle, our national broadcasting and news company. Article itself is in Finnish, but should be quite convenient to translate with online/in-browser tools.

It has been very cold couple weeks in the Lapland. – It’s not uncommon to have -30 – -40°C temperatures in the Lapland. But it is somewhat uncommon for those temperatures to last over 10 days at one time.

The cold hit the Lapland just after the Christmas and lasted for two weeks or so. There were even some news about flights canceled and planes not flying to the northern airports, as it was too cold to do the deicing of the air-crafts on ground, so the companies were worried that they could not get their planes back up into the air safely if they landed into the airports in Lapland.

As I’m not (yet?) an arctic explorer, nor have the proper pro-gear (yet?) to be one, I decided to spent another weekend in the Central-Finland and postpone again my travels to the Lapland. – My comfort limit is somewhere around -20°C to sleep outside for now and I’m not pushing that in the wilderness of the north when there’s a possibility for some -40°C temperatures in the night times.

But to compensate the loss, it was another fun weekend, good food eaten, having a warm sauna to enjoy and a night spent sleeping outdoors again.

As there isn’t much snow yet at around here, the snow stakes had to be driven to the frozen ground with brute force (I used the flat edge of an axe) and as you can see the aluminum bends quite easily. Should have gone for the regular steel stakes and not to try to use the snow stakes, but didn’t pack them with me for some reasons unbeknown to anyone.

Weather was nice, around -12°C in the night and very light snow fall. There were some gusts of wind, but the place for the tent was surrounded by trees so didn’t even really notice the wind, but occasionally when hearing the sound of wind on top of the trees around.

For now the north and the Lapland needs to wait for a while as the next trip will towards the south…