2013-01-19 61 23

Location

Pirkkala, west of Tampere-Pirkkala airport

Participants

TeukkaM

Plans

Expedition

TeukkaM's retro expedition on 2013-01-21

This was an example of a perfect hash on an imperfect day. The hashpoint was in Pirkkala, where I drive trough daily on my commute to work. Sadly, this wasn't a working day and secondly, my car was rented out for the weekend. So I decided to recreate the expedition on the next working day like it would have happened on a weekday. A closer study of the hashpoint on National Land Survey topo maps showed a non-driveable track of some kind going straight through the hashpoint, so this seemed too good to miss entirely. Also, the track was not in OpenStreetMap, so an OSM survey would be another good excuse for a retro expedition.

Everything clicked to place still when approaching the site. Though the main road was not plowed and impossible to park along, there happened to be a turning place just where the trail was supposedly starting. An abandoned junk refrigerator and the absence of footprints or tyre tracks gave away that this wasn't a place where people visit regularly either. I found the start of the trail, though at first look it was heavily snowed in. What's more, small trees were bent down to almost conceal that there ever was a road. A little further down the contours of the snow indicated that the trail was probably a forestry vehicle track. There were also plenty of animal tracks going along the trail, so this was clearly the easiest route through the forest. I stopped to take the below photographs when I reached the hashpoint within three decimal accuracy, and decided this was enough proof required for a retro expedition. Should someone wander here before the next snowfall, I scribbled the standard greeting in the snow. I continued on the trail as long as it was somehow visible in the snow to get as long a trace as possible for OSM. As I turned around, there were some F/A-18 Hornet fighters scrambling into the air with great noise from the nearby air base.