Towards the summer, finally.

As I'm writing this, the summer is already here. But just a few days ago the daytime temperatures were only few degrees above zero celcius. Tall forests were mostly without snow, but when you got around 300 meter contour, there was a knee-high layer of wet snow covering most of the ground. Now temperatures has been like it should in the summer, and with the constant sunlight of polar day trees are quickly turning green. I guess it's pretty boring to post only knives for sale, so below is few pics from a hiking trip I did last week in Lemmenjoki national park.

It's again the time of the year when dogs are leashed when walking in the forests. Leashes are attached to the belt of my backpack. Fair or not, the older one is carrying food for both dogs.

Here you can see the reason for the dogs to be leashed. It's breeding time for birds. Many of them make their nest on the ground level, so dogs could easily destroy the eggs, even if they stay near the master. This nest belongs to Anas Penelope I believe.

Rivers are free of ice. Lakes were still mostly frozen. Nature is about 3 weeks or so behind it's normal schedule.

I walked partly on the hiking trails, partly off. When the trail crosses Lemmenjoki, there's a boat attached to a wire, so you can cross the river by pulling the boat by the ropes.

Fatbikes seem to be getting fairly common in Finland. There was two guys staying overnight at this open hut. On the way back I saw few more bikers on the trail.

Easy to see what the dogs are thinking.... " It's nice of you to put up this mattress for us. But we were just thinking where are you gonna sleep? "

First trip for the titanium stove I bought. Just 1,4kg of weight. Worked fine, easy to cook on, saves a lot of firewood compared to an open fire.

No need for a head torch for reading in the constant daylight of arctic summer. This time I had a book about Olavi Alakulppi, a Finnish II world war veteran, who had to leave from Finland after the war, finally moved to USA and served in US army to his retirement.

One morning this moose was having a breakfast on the other side of a small marsh.

It was like this in the upper parts of tall forest. A bit higher in birch forests it got too annoying to walk, as there was much more snow covered ground than open areas. You can see that Pyry is already here looking at me like "what is this, it's supposed to be a summer!"

Towards the end of the trip it started turning to a summer. Daytime temps went almost to +25 celcius. First mosquitoes appeared immediately You can see the lake in the background still being mostly covered with ice.

Yes, it's snow. But it also served as a fridge behind my tipi, keeping the butter cold.

Plenty of water running in the rivers. Still a lot of snow on the fells, so supposedly water level is still getting higher.  Just in one day the level got 20cm higher in one small river I was camping by. These to pictures are of river Ravadasjoki just before it runs to river Lemmenjoki.

Second last day of the trip. When I passed this place a few days earlier, the lake was fully covered with ice. I guess when the warm weather finally arrives, the mother nature has to hurry as the summer is rather short here.