Korpijaakko

– my personal views on all walks of outdoor life

Recommended read: Skiing and Packafting

3 Comments Posted by Korpi-Jaakko on 28/01/2012

During the internship period I didn’t have that much time to read blogs and enjoy the great articles and videos of other people but few things caught my eye. This time all the stuff is related to either winter travel on skis or to packrafting. Enjoy!

Winter Travel in Fast and Light Style

I don’t do fast & light winter trips as I don’t yet feel confident going very lightweight style in winter and I haven’t yet had a good enough reason to go “racing style” in winter. On the other hand Luc Mehl has both the experience and reasons and he has written a great article about Fast and Light in Winter Travel and it’s now available for everyone on his blog! It’s the most highly recommended read of this post if you are interested in such things.

What I do and like to do is a bit lower pace and heavier winter expeditions. In 2010 an expedition of four Finns (website in Finnish only) did a Greenland crossing along the standard route in a faster-than-standard time covering over 600km in 21 days. In expedition standards they also went relatively light and thus fast. There is a ten episode web documentary about the expedition. The first seven short episodes are already available in the Finnish UlkonaTV and I believe that the rest will follow shortly. The documentary is available only in Finnish but at least everyone can enjoy the scenery.

Packrafting!

The number one spokesman of modern packrafting Roman Dial wrote a post about defining packrafting which is a nice read: What is packrafting anyway? I tend to go with Roman in this one and I’d say it’s everything done with a lightweight man-portable inflatable boat.

Roman, Luc and few others left Alaska for a moment to do a very cool packrafting trip to Southeast US and there are several posts about it in Roman’s blog and also one in Luc’s blog. There are also several videos on those posts and in addition there is Timmy’s video linked right here:

Psst, I also just discovered that Forrest McCarthy has a blog! Very much worth a read and includes also things related to skiing and packrafting. It’s all epic. Things like the Antarctic Ski Odyssey:

3 responses to “Recommended read: Skiing and Packafting”

Peter Nylund 28/01/2012 at 09:15
Thanks for the links. I had totally missed that Greenland documentary.
Mikkel Bølstad 28/01/2012 at 09:16
Skiing and packrafting is definitely on the list – got snow, just need some open water 😉

Cheers, Mikkel
korpijaakko 29/01/2012 at 13:47
Peter: You’re welcome! Did uou allready see Andrew’s fatbike + packraft project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/77zero/fatbikerafting-the-arctic

Mikkel: I’d also like to combine some packrafting and skiing but it seems that I won’t have chance to do that this spring (and at least not in this winter). Though I’d be interested to go run small overflow rivers in the Käsivarsi/Kilpisjärvi region in Finland in early June. Altai Hoks might be good tool for accessing the rivers: http://twitpic.com/8cfduj Company needed!