2019-06-23 68 21

Location

Enontekiö, Iitto, on the side of the road, at the joining point of the Könkämäeno and Iitojoki rivers.

Participants

Pastori
The Wife

Expedition

The road is long.

Pastori and Wife are on their traditional beginning of the summer trip to Lapland. It's been a week and they've had no luck with hashpoints, even though there's been sunlight day and night. The terrain is full of challenges from wilderness and fells to roadless forests and swamps. The graticules that Pastori has not yet conquered are mostly in the north of Finland and Lapland and can be considered impossible in terms of the resources Pastori and Wife have at their disposal.

But today they finally found a good point, only about 200 km away from their lodgings, which by Lapland's standards is quite close. Pastori and Wife, being the keen geohashers that they are, told each other that they should definitely go for it. And go they did. The journey to the point by and large uneventful, besides it raining more or less the whole time. The rain did make the journey a little faster since they decided to leave the natural and historical sights for another time. After all, their main objective was to conquer another graticule. This particular graticule is considered to be a part of Sweden though it's Northern part is in the ”arm” of Finland.

The point was very easy to reach. Pastori found it at the side of the road, right before a wet thicket with an accuracy of 0.765 meters. A Swedish cuckoo called out kungen, kungen (kukkuu, kukkuu in Finnish). Pastori gave a sigh of relief and after taking a screen capture as proof, ran back to the car and away from the rain. The road ran next to Könkämäeno, which is a river that runs on the border of Finland and Sweden.

The drive back was nearly as uneventful, though they did make one stop at a palsa bog. Palsa is a kind of a bog mound that's been formed on top of permafrost, the highest are nearly 5 m tall. Even in the summer there is only about half a meter of melted ground on top of the mound. And of course they had to make a little make a tiny detour to the Swedish side of the border. Pastori and Wife made the shortest trip abroad in their lives. They drove over the border river bridge to Sweden and came straight back, about 3 minutes total. And then back to their lodgings to enjoy the sauna and relax and wait for new challenges. Cross your fingers, they're on this particular trip until the end of June!

Driving 419 km, accuracy 0.765 m, temperature +8 Celsius, 2 realms, 1 wood grouse, 1 golden eagle.