Lapland 2014 June 30 - 2014 July 4
Journal written July 4, with the trip still going on.
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As during the last year, I am seeking my cherished experience of midnight sun, a thing that gives the real substance to my summer. My favourite place to visit for the purpose is Inari, a village at about the 69th northern latitude.
Readers are invited to see the photos in my online album http://puti.pp.fi/inari2013/journal.html or the corresponding album on my Facebook profile, as the album of this year leaves out all the photos that would otherwise been mostly repetition of the pictures from the previous year. Accordingly there are only a few photos about Inari and some more of Utsjoki, a place still 126 kilometers further in the north.
The mellow golden but still dayish-bright light of the night sun can be a very pleasing experience, as anyone having witnessing beautiful sunsets know. In Inari the "sunset" lasts several hours and turns then into a new day. This absence of night gives me the feeling that time is standing still for me, that there is no rush to do anything because it is becoming dark.
One of the places I visit every time is this patch of forest which provides a pleasing view over the lake especially during the night hours.
The lakeshore itself looks like this at night.
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Visiting the north for the sun takes a lot of concentrated preparedness, as the clear skies are not guaranteed and growing especially scarce now that the global climate is changing. The time to enjoy the sun starts near the beginning of June and ends after the first week of July. The latter half has warmer temperatures and better chances of good weather as the former one.
This year it took until the very end of June to find good weather among the continuously overcast and rainy conditions of Lapland. The forecast was for varying cloudiness, which is often as good as it gets, and nights are typically less cloudy than days.
It is also easy to see how difficult forecasting the weather can be. The reliable forecasting time window is only about 3 days, and in challenging conditions, like this year, even the 3 days may be too high an expectation. Finding clear skies from the forecast is like shooting at a moving and occasinally hiding target.
It happened that I got two perfect nights in Inari. At the third night the forecast deteriorated, until it was promising clouds and rain. These were caused by a low-pressure center above Finland, with its associated cloud masses, shaped like a circular saw blade, rotating over Finland with its teeth right above Inari. This meant - as the forecast affirmed - that a little bit northwards, in the village of Utsjoki, the weather would be markedly better. So I took one of the two bus connections of the day, conveniently in the evening, and begun my 126-kilometer ride to Utsjoki, to the northern borderline of Finland.
I took photos of the scenery during the bus ride, but it proved to be quite hard to capture the nuances of the mellow, milky light of the thinly clouded summer night, especially with a cell phone camera that has a mind and opinion of its own.
The bus was not exactly crowded while I travelled to Utsjoki.
I got off the bus at Utsjoki center and let it continue its journey over the border to Norway.
Utsjoki is surrounded by high fjelds, so my obvious thought was whether the sun shows at all. My eyes, trying to find a good viewing locations, turned towards Ailigas fjeld which is a few hundred meters high and even has a road leading on top of it. Before climbing on Ailigas I went out to the Utsjoki hotel - a somewhat time-worn wooden single-storey row house - to check the viewing conditions there, and noticed that the northern hills left it in the shadow.
Here is Ailigas seen from the Luossa street leading to the hotel.
The sign for light traffic lane.
The street lights are on? Surely not for the need of more light. Come on, this is an Arctic summer night! Is there a some type of a legal order dictating this?
A typical tree growing in Utsjoki is the dwarf birch (Betula nana) which can be shorter than me.
The Sámi bridge, named after the original folk of northern Finland, leads from Finland to Norway. As both countries belong to the Schengen union, there are no border formalities, except for trucks carrying a large amount of goods with a pending tax duty.
The flags of EU, FInland, and Noray, though not clearly showing.
The river Teno running between Norway and Finland. People like to fish salmon in the river.
The word Teno is allegedly a cognate of Danube, simply meaning "a river" or "a stream".
In the upper image the camera is facing eastwards. The Ailigas fjeld is on the right.
The national border is on the bridge. The lower country names are in Sámic language.
Hills on the Norwegian side.
The northern area of Norway is called Finnmark, and Tana is the Norwegian form of Teno, meaning both the river and the Norwegian district bordering the river.
Both countries have their own roads running along the riverside. This is the Norwegian road. The camera is facing east.
Finland as seen from Norway.
My next destination was Ailigas. I wanted to climb on it to see how high I must rise for a good viewing and midnight sunshine. When I got to the good altitude, it was exactly midnight.
Ailigas fjeld is mostly fenced off from the public, which is surprising to me, as I presume it is neither a military area, nor private property. There are installments like power station and a link tower, but I believe neither warrants a safety zone of kilometers. The road to the top is open to the public to a certain altitude, and after that closed with an iron gate. It happened that the altitude at the gate was just sufficient for an excellent view. There were even stones on the wayside arranged as if they were a seat for the viewers.
Again I had trouble letting the camera focus on the intended parts of the scenery. In the west there are hills that are covered with snow.
As a conclusion for my trip to Utsjoki I would say that the village itself is not suitable for midnight sunbathing, being on the bottom of the valley. Ailigas is good, but getting there requires the viewers to be seasoned outdoors people, especially if the temperature sinks below +10°C, as it did for me.
If you visit the village, come during daytime. All the services, including hotel reception, are closed at night.
Utsjoki is the only county in Finland that has the Sámic people as the majority. This shows in the street name signs where Sámic is on the top and Finnish below it.
Photos on my way back from Ailigas. I was walking the Finnish side road running along the riverside. It is called the Nuorgam road, as it leads to the village of Nuorgam, where there is another place to cross the border of Finland. The upper image shows a side river leading to Teno.
There are one or two buses per day in this corner of the world. After my trip to Ailigas was over at about 2:30 a.m., I had to wait for the bus until 5:30 a.m. The wait felt a bit long, as the temperature was somewhere between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade, there was wind, I was dressed for a summer day, and my metabolism run at its lowest speed as is typical of that time of the day. In spite of my fatigue after 10 kilometers of mountaineering I had to keep exercising myself to avoid hypothermia.
Back to the Inari hotel. Here, too, the reception and main doors are closed during the night, but the fire escape has locks that open with the hotel room keys. The fire escape route is particularly convenient for me, as my room is right next to it.
Keeping up at nights takes its toll. My muscle coordination after returning from the ordeal of Utsjoki was equal to that of a drunken man, and here I fell flat on the top step, getting a number of bleeding bruises. Time to sleep a little bit.
