2015-07-11 63 28

Location

In Halmejärvi, Valtimo. The point lies in the forest.

Participants

Pastori
The Wife
Päivi
Tilley
Mrs. Tilley
Tilley's daughter

Expedition

A huge hole in the road.

For today's hash, we had quite a big expedition team. Tilley and his family were visiting Pastori and The Wife, and Pastori's daughter was also spending her summer holiday in the lovely country scenery of Valtimo. That made up for 6 participants.

Today the whole bunch was on the move mainly for another occasion: The annual Valtimo Summer Festival. There are some smaller events during the whole week, but on Saturday, almost all the 2379 inhabitants swarm the streets of Valtimo churchtown to stroll around in the market atmosphere, to see friends and to eat the tasty snacks served in the market stalls. After spending few hours at the festival, eating farm ice cream, big Finnish pancakes, Finnish liqourice and some Thai food(!), we were ready to leave. We had a plan to visit today's hashpoint on the way back home.

Necessary equipment.

The hashpoint was near. It was quite close to the forest road that goes alongside Halmejärventie. In the past couple of years, there has already been two hashpoints along the same road, and this was the third. The approach was thus unsurprising, apart from a huge hole in the road. Unsurprising was also the horde of mosquitoes that greeted us the moment we exited our cars. But we were not unprepared. We had some mosquito hats and deer fly jackets with us. After putting those on and changing our city shoes to more suitable ones for forest trekking, we entered the forest. The distance to the hashpoint was about 250 meters.

Tilley w/ daughter.

We followed a logging machine trail for half the distance, and then turned into the pathless forest. Over the rocks, twigs and tree stumps we went, and reached the hashpoint in moderately thick and bushy forest. A typical forest around here with a seemingly very moist, almost swampy forest bed.

With Tilley's GPS device, we got a really good lock on the point. We set ourselves up for a group photo, only the photographer (The Wife) had little trouble getting in the position in the 10 seconds provided by the self-timer because of the difficult terrain. Also Pastori had trouble getting out of the pose, he fell flat on his back amongst the moss-covered rocks. The youngest member of our expedition team was kind enough to help him get up.

Tilley's daughter helping Pastori get up.

All the mosquitoes within few hundred meters had now sensed us and followed by an ever-thickening cloud of them we retreated back towards our cars. Then quickly back to Pastori's place for some wood-fired sauna and a dip in the 13°C river. Oh boy, this is Finnish summer living!

Trip statistics: extra driving required 6 km. Walking 600 meters.