Korpijaakko

– my personal views on all walks of outdoor life

Tag Archives: Kummaeno

Photos from the North now online!

3 Comments Posted by on 25/09/2012

I finally got all the photos from the recent “Hiking North” trips sorted out and a selection of them is available in my online gallery!

The trip report from Sarek National Park is still a-work-in-progress and won’t be online at least for the next week or so because… I’m going hiking instead. 😉 As I’ll be going to Lapland anyway I thought I might do some hiking aswell. This time I’ll be heading either to Pyhä-Luosto National Park or to Urho Kekkonen National Park for a little four-day trip. The trip is cut a bit short to my liking (I prefer week+ long trips while hiking) but there is a good reason for that: The Banff Mountain Film Festival in Helsinki on October 3rd where I’ll be meeting Hendrik from Hiking in Finland and hopefully some other cool dudes. It’s an open invitation so feel free to join us and enjoy the festival!

But now back to the topic!

The first bunch of pictures is from a fast packing trip in Norway and Sweden on the Western side of lake Kilpisjärvi. The trip included also some packrafting along the Kummaeno river with very low water. Here is a trip report from the trip and here would be more photies.

The second set is from the hiking and packrafting trip from Kilpisjärvi in Finland to Reisadalen in Norway. We didn’t get to do as much packrafting as planned because of too tight schedule but it was still a great trip and the float down the Reisaelva river was great. I wrote a trip report on it and from here you can find more photos.

The trip to Sarek was a nine-day round-trip from the Suorva dam without any strict plans. We ended up hiking over Skårki massive along a glacier and scrambling down to Rapadalen and hiking back to Suorva via Låddebákte. Nice relaxed trip with awesome scenery and varying weather. For me Sarek represents a real mountain wilderness, maybe the best we have in the Nordic countries, and I will definitely be returning there again. But before getting back, here are the photos!


And as a bonus there are also a few photos from a day trip to Saana fjell (1029m) next to the village of Kilpisjärvi. If you happen to be on the area and the weather is nice pay a visit to the top. Nice views with little walking.

Have a nice autumn and remember to enjoy the outdoors!

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Racing Style – The Moskkugaisi Traverse

12 Comments Posted by on 27/08/2012

The first part of the “Hiking North” trip series (the Moskkugaisi Traverse) is done and after two days of pizzas, burgers and beer at friend’s place in Kilpisjärvi I’m feeling ready for the next trip (the Poroeno-Reisaelva packrafting). And before the next trip it might be good idea to share some initial thoughts from the first trip.

I have to say that the trip turned out being a bit harder than I expected but it was doable anyway and gave me an idea about the type II fun the Alaskan racers often talk about…

After some five hours of sleep we started the trip from Signaldalen at Thursday morning 09:30 a.m. and finished it to the roadside South of Kilpisjärvi at about 03:15 a.m. on Saturday morning. According to the Social Hiking map based on our Yellowbrick beacons we covered 119km and gained 3274 vertical meters of altitude. For me that feels like quite a bit too much as measured from a paper map the distance should be more like 90km, though the height gain seems right. But on the other hand the beacons seem to be on right places and GPS shouldn’t lie. So who knows, maybe we covered 119km in 41,75 hours?

We started from the parking area at the bottom of the valleys and started to walk up the trail to the peak of Bárrás.

After visiting the peak we ascended back to our backpacks and started the walk towards the rest of the peaks hauling our backpacks up to a pass at 1063m and visiting the Pältsan from there.

After summiting the Pältsan it was very clear that we had underestimated the time needed for hiking over 3000 vertical meters (of which well over 2000 meters with 15 kg backpacks). This meant that we couldn’t start the high route traverse of the Moskkugáisi during that day as it wouldn’t be wise to do it in the dark and camp sites are hard to find up on the ridge. So we camped on the fjell side: two man under a small one-man tarp… I also had a summer weight sleeping bag and as the temps were below zero had a bit cold night.

We left the camp at 07:00 a.m. and headed up to the Moskkugáisi followed by a spectacularly scenic high traverse to the ridge leading to Juoksvátnjunni.

The last peak to visit was the Juoksvátnjunni with cool sharpish rocky ridgeline leading to the summit.

After the last summit we walked to the trail leading from Pältsastugan to Kummavuopio, walked a bit along the trail and then inflated our packrafts and started the float down along the Kummaeno river.

To our surprise the Kummaeno offered quite poor packrafting. It was fun for a while but soon we got frustrated with the very rocky rapids and several sections too shallow for packrafting. The going was also slow and we were again running out of daylight. And we were also miserably wet and cold. We took out at the edge of Oaggujeaggi bog, made a quick fire using a gas stove as a lighter and had a proper one-hour break with hot food (the first and only proper break excluding the camp).

After the break we packed the rafts and started walking along the trail to the abandoned farm of Kummavuopio. From Kummavuopio we headed towards the road on the Finnish side of the border following very wet snow mobile trail and doing two river crossing with packrafts in the dark and enjoying a section of quite bad brush between the rivers. This was then followed with a  few kilometers of forested uphill to the road where a friend picked as up at 03:15 a.m. (Sorry, no photos from this sections as it was dark and I was tired and too busy to get the trip finished.)

I have to admit that I was quite tired after the trip but I did enjoy it in a twisted way. I don’t really recommed doing the trip this way but as it’s a spectacular route in my opinion I’ll be writing later about better ways to do it…

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The Social Hiking map gives you a good idea about the trip but I forgot to use the #HikingNorth hashtag on some tweets so it’s missing some tweets but the missing ones are available from the Yellowbrick YBlog page. Pictures linked to the map are coming later when I get the two other trips done…

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Social Hiking in the North

5 Comments Posted by on 23/08/2012

Seems that way too many of my posts start with the words ”it’s been silent here lately”. But… Well, it’s the truth. During the last two months I haven’t had motivation for bloggin, instead I’ve been working a bit and foraging quite a lot but haven’t done any hiking or similar outdoor activities (goes hand in hand with the blogging motivation). I’ve also spent quite some time figuring how to spend the next year or so. I had few cool plans and worked hard to carry them out but they got crashed…

But that’s not a reason to be depressed as it also means that I have time to do something else instead… Go hiking! And I guess hiking is also better topic for a blog post than writing about crashed future plans. (Though I might mention them in the future related to other topics.)

So, this post is about the plans and how you can follow things online.

Plans, plans, plans

The plan (named Hiking North) is to do three separate trips in the Northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland:

– Moskkugáisi Traverse: A fast & light style peak bagging and packrafting traverse from Signaldalen (Norway) to Kilpisjärvi (Finland).
– Poroeno-Reisaelva: A packraftring trip including some lakes and sections of Poroeno and Reisaelva rivers from Kilpisjärvi (Finland) to Saraelv (Norway).
– Sarek National Park: A week+ roundtrip hiking in Sarek National Park (Sweden) starting from Suorva.

MoskkugáisiTtraverse

Pältsan in July 2011.

The first trip, the Moskkugáisi traverse, is named after the highest peak on the route. I’ll be doing the trip with my good friend Tuomas (Who is working at Kilpisjärvi as a Wilderness guide for the autumn). The general plan is to:

– start from the valley of Signaldalen in Norway on Thursday 22.8.
– hike/climb to Bárrás (1419m)
– traverse the mountainous peaks of Pältsan (1442m), Moskkugáisi (1516m) and Juoksavátnjunni (1450m) in Sweden
– camp somewhere near Pältsastugan
– hike to Kummaeno and float it with packrafts to Finland
– hike along the road to Kilpisjärvi for cold beers.

This means some 60+km of hiking with decent elevation gain and about 30km of packrafting and we’ll try to complete it in two days. Have to see how it goes. The route should provide a bit of challenge, great views (weather permitting) and a nice gentle float with occasional sections of class II white water.

I tried to pack light but have to also take the autumn weather and temps into account. And my packraft and paddle are also quite heavy. As is my camera. Full skin-out weight in the start will be around 15 kg. For those interested, a pdf gear list of my planned kit for this trip is available here: Moskkugaisi-Traverse

Poroeno-Reisaelva packrafting

In camp while packrafting the Poroeno in July 2011.

The second trip is a packrafting trip with my girlfriend N. The plan is to:

– start from Kilpisjärvi probably on Sunday 26.8.
– hike along the Kalottireitti (Nordkalottleden) trail to Meekojärvi
– packraft the lakes to Poroeno river
– packraft along the Poroeno to the Norwegian border
– hike from ??? to Reisadalen
– packraft the Reisaelva as far as we can

We’ve planned it as a six-day trip with roughly 60:40 ratio of hiking and packrafting. Hiking along the trail is very easy but when in Norway we’ll hike completely off-trail in remote wild area but the terrain should be quite easy. The Poroeno section will have some challenging class IV rapids that we will portage as N doesn’t have any white water experience. But she’s a quick learner and we can probably get away with only few portages as the water level should be low. The lower part of Reisaelva that we’ll packraft should be easy, wide river with decent flow so there shouldn’t be any problems. The highlights of the trip will include the Meeko valley, the incredibly beautiful Reisadalen valley, covering some terrain completely new to me and hopefully some good packrafting.

For this trip I’ll be taking a bit more gear than for the Moskkugáisi Traverse bringing the full skin-out weight in the start to 20 kg mark. The core of the kit will remain about the same but if you’re interested in the details, take a look at the gear list: Poroeno-Reisaelva

Sarek National Park

Sarek in March 2010.

The third trip will be again with N. We will head to Sarek National Park in Sweden for a week+ roundtrip. The only solid plan we have is to start from Suorva dam on the North-East border of the National Park and do a roundtrip in the central part of the park. We will be packing food for about nine days and will be taking crampons for glacier travel but probably no packrafts. If weather permits we will try to bag some peaks and enjoy the views but time will tell how it goes…

Sarek is awesome in winter and should be equally awesome also in autumn. There are high alpine peaks, glaciers, big beautiful valleys, rich wildlife (including lynx, wolf, wolverine and bear!) and so on but very few visitors and no trails in the central parts of the park. Sounds great!

Again most of the kit for the Sarek trip will be the same but there are few minor adjustments and I’ll change the packrafting kit for crampons and hiking poles. And again, here’s a gear list for the details: Sarek-National-Park

Following the trips

As most of the trips will take place far away from cell phone reception I will be using a Yellowbrick satellite messaging device so I can share my position, progress and other information.

The Yellowbrick is state-of-the-art piece of kit that I’m testing for them and I will be using it at least to:
– send tracking signal every now and then so you can follow me on my YBlog page http://my.yb.tl/Vatnajokull2012
(The url is a relic from the ski expedition across Vatnajökull glacier earlier this year.)
– send tweets if there is something cool to share or the plans change
– maybe send a blog post or two from the wild using Yellowbrick App on my Samsung Galaxy Xcover

The coolest thing is that Yellowbrick is compatible with Social Hiking! I’ve just started using the Social Hiking service and I’m still only learning but it enables creating interactive maps showing my progress and the related (social) media. During the trips it will mostly mean plotting my tweets and blog posts on the map with my route. After the trips I’ll be also adding pics and maybe some other media too…

You can see all my maps on the Social Hiking site: http://www.shareyouradventure.com/user/maps/korpijaakko

In addition I’m planning also writing a short post to my blog after each trip.

Enjoy the rest of the summer! I’m quite sure I will…

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And a little reminder: Remember also to enjoy the free berries, mushrooms and other delicacies of the season! At least in Finland there’s plenty of ripe blueberries, lingon berries are soon ripe and there’s a lot of delicious mushrooms. And according to Joe’s post, it’s the same thing in Norway.

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Gear for the upcoming packrafting trips

12 Comments Posted by on 02/07/2011

At this time next week I will be walking into my first serious packrafting trip, the FPE2011. Starting with a 45km walk in followed by likely the most remote and wild rivers in Finland: Valtijoki, Poroeno and Lätäseno totalling over 140km of packrafting. The Valtijoki sounds quite intimidating with its big drops, class IV rapids and stuff but, well, man has to do what man has to do. Because of mundane concerns we had to squeeze the trip into eight days meaning that we will likely skip the Halti fell and Govddajohka…

"Last minute" trip planning and trying to get a better understanding about the various challenges of the Valtijoki.

This post deals about my gear choises for the trip with a quick look on the menu and little information about another packrafting trip following immediately after this one…

The gear

First, here (FPE2011_gear) is a detailed pdf gearlist for you to inspect and criticize. The weights followed with question mark are estimates as I haven’t yet weighted that stuff. There will be an updated list later with exact weights.

As usual, the list comes in a little late for me to do any major changes to it, but all feedback is very welcome, so please leave a comment if something comes into your mind.

There is some new stuff in the clothing section. Instead of my normal synthetic long sleeve I’ll be hiking in a buttoned Haglöfs shirt as it seems like a perfect hiking shirt: cool, quick drying, wind resistant and mosquito proof! The other major change is that inspired by Joe’s Death to Rainpants I decided to take only Montane Featherlight pants (new to me but seem good). So I’ll leave my usual hiking pants (very old Haglöfs Mid Fjell) and shell pants home. This saves me a lot of weight and has relatively low impact as I’ll spent six days out of eight paddling in a dry suit instead of hiking. There’s quite a lot of warm clothing as the night time temperatures have been occasionally around +4C and freezing temps are not especially rare even though it’s July. In July 2009 we had temps near 0C, accompanied by some snow and freezing winds from the Arctic Sea. That’s the summer in the North. But it might as well be +25C with sun and horrible hordes of mosquitoes…

The forecast makes me reconcider the rainpants... At least there should be enough water in the rivers.

For footwear I’ll be taking my trusworthy La Sportiva Wild Cats with Inov8 socks (very nice socks but not too durable) and Inov8 debris gaiters. And as the primary mean of travel we will naturally have packrafts. I’ll be riding my new 2011 model Alpacka Denali Llama and Tuomas will be having an older model Alpacka Yokun Yak. Both of the boats have spray decks. As a paddle I have 215cm long 2-piece aluminum one from Finnish Welhonpesä. It’s a bit on the heavy side but it’s sturdy and cheap.

Unrelated picture of my Llama at the near by island this weekend.

As we will be rafting for about 75% of the time and the river is very challenging to us, we wanted to have good boating kit. We decided to go for full dry suits, the Finnish made Ursuit AWS 4-Tex suit. Jörgen is using a lighter Ursuit MPS for his trip to Nahanni, but we wanted a bit beefier suits to suite also other uses because a drysuit is quite an investment. In addition we’ll be having helmets, foam PFDs, throw lines and the whole usual white water kit. This weight while hiking in might save our asses later when boating, so for us the it is very acceptable.

Carrying and packing stuff is quite the usual: Golite Pinnacle and Ortlieb Aqua-Zoom for my EOS 550D. But I decided to take a bit heavier 100% waterproof Ortlieb PS 17 dry sack to line my rucksack with as the light ones from Tatonka that I would normally use do leak a bit under pressure. The Ortlieb should keep my gear dry even if capsizing.

In camp we will share a light propane stove and 1,4 liter pot in addition to Golite Shangri La 3 tent with MYOG inner tent to protect us from bugs. We will use a paddle as a center pole to save some weight.

Quite horrible picture of my Golite Shangri La 3 with the MYOG inner. Pic from last summer's trip to Käsivarsi where I drowned my camera on the first day.

I had plans about making all the kind of cool new stuff for this trip but the reality is that I haven’t found any time to spent with the sewing machine so instead of a new cool Pertex Endurance & Primaloft quilt I’ll be taking my old and weary summer sleeping bag. I might even take my girlfriends Haglöfs Zensor bag which is a bit heavier but a lot warmer as the forecast show night-time lows around +5 Celcius.

We will take an Iridium sat phone for extra safety. This is something that I don’t usually carry with me but now it feels appropriate. It also helps communicating with a group of Tuomas’ friends who we plan to meet along the way. They will be rafting down the river in a big white water raft (flown in to the beginning of Poroeno).

As for camera gear, I decided to take only one lens for my EOS 550D and that is naturally the magnificent EF 24-105 4 L IS. And as we will spent a lot of time in the water I’ll take waterproof Olympus Though 3000 point&shoot and a Gorillapod to attach the camera to the packraft or to myself.

Then there is a big bunsh of small stuff pushing the total skin out baseweight to 16,7 kilo! It’s not especially nice but there is a big pile of boating equipment in that weight. Top that with consumables and the full skin out weight will be around 23 kilos meaning a heavy rucksack in the beginning. It might be a bit uncomfortable with the Pinnacle… When we start packrafting at the source of Valtijoki my pack atatched to the bow of my Alpack should weight around 14 kilo which should be tolerable bow load for white water. We will likely portage a lot of the harder stuff (there are some class IV and V rapids on the river) but might occasionally try to run a harder rapid or drop without the extra load if we think it’s safe enough. Most of the class II and III should be doable with the planned load. Or at least we really hope so!

Any ideas or criticism? Feel free to drop a comment!

The food

I didn’t bother to pay too much attention on the food for this trip, i.e. I didn’t too a comprehensive spreadsheet. I think I have enough experience with one-week-long summer trips and on trip this short the nutritional aspects are not as important as on very long trips. But I hate to be hungry so I ended up to about 850 grams of food per day meaning maybe 3500-4000kcal per day. Less would have been likely sufficient but I decided to play it safe. I could have also gone with only two different dinner options but my mate Tuomas wanted a bit more variation so now we have four different types of dinners. The weight/day figures are somewhat questimated average figures.

I did some shopping this week. The stuff just needs to be re-packed.

The menu includes the following:

– breakfast: oat meal with sweet blueberry soup OR muesli with powdered whole milk (total 150g/day)
– lunch: tortillas with chocolate spread and home-dried bananas OR flapjack bar and mini salami (total 150g/day)
– dinner: a delicious home-dried cook-in-one-pot candle light dinner (175g/day)
– snacks: M&Ms, a small chocolate bar per day, beef jerky, chilli nuts and some chocolate chip cookies (200g/day)
– drinks: one cup of tea, coffee and hot chocolate for each day and some sports drink stuff if it gets really warm (50g/day)
– and in addition: butter, oil, hard rye bread and some more salami (around 125g/day, mostly fats)

Oh, and a bottle of Scoths for the evenings… It’s worth it, especially if it’s rainy and cold. 😉

The follow-up trip to Sweden

After ending the FPE2011 trip to Markkina on Saturday, Tuomas will head to South with his friends and I will take a bus back to Kilpisjärvi where I will meet my girlfriend. I’ll spent the Saturday at Kilpisjärvi resupplying, washing clothes, etc. and on Sunday morning we’ll be heading for a 6-7 days long hike to the Swedish side of the lake Kilpisjärvi.

Skiing the Kummaeno in April 2010. Now we plan to packraft it down to the Finnish border.

We will take a boat ride (a boat named Malla makes threertrips a day in the summertime) to Koltaluokta on the western side of lake Kilpisjärvi. Instead we could follow a 15km trail thru the Malla National Park North of Kilpisjärvi but we will save little time when taking the boat. From Koltaluokta we will walk West to the Pältsan and Moskugaisi fells. If the weather is nice we might climb to admire the views from the top but the main idea is to traverse the fells via the Isldalen valley. The travers will take us near Pältsastugan hut and the upper part of Kummaeno river which floats all the way to the Finnish border to the Southern end of Kilpisjärvi. The plan is to float down the river in one packraft. We have tried it on a lake and despite being very cramped, it works. With the new 2011 model Llama both rucksacks go on top of the new big butt and we sit on our sleeping pads in the “honeymooner position” recommended in the Roman Dials book Packrafting! The river is very easy with only couple of harder white water sections that I might ride down alone with Nina walking past them. The trip should end to the road side at Keinovuopio some 10km South from the Kilpisjärvi. After that we’ll try our luck in hitch hiking or take a little run along the road with out the gear. I’ve done it earlier. A nice way to stretch you legs…

For the second trip I’ll do some changes in the gear: I’ll ditch most of the white water kit and instead take rain pants and neoprene socks (neoprene shorts would be cool but I didn’t come up with the idea early enough). I will also strip the Llama down by removing the spray deck, seat and backrest to save some weight. I will probably also leave the satphone behind as unnecessary weight.

PS. Does anyone of you know a good online map service for Sweden? If I’d find one, I could put the planned route online.

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