Tuesday, 4. January 2005: Snellmanninmaja - Jyrkkävaara (6 km)
10:30
My first word at that day is "Mitä?!?" (what the f...?!?) as somebody next to me says "puoli ykstoista" (half past ten). Through this little window I can see that it's already quite bright outside. Damn. Now we're in a hurry. But the cottage is simply too small for so many people. It takes forever until we get our stuff done.
14:30
Finally we're on our way again. It already starts getting dim. We've changed our route and head for another cottage than planned. The new destinatin is only 6 km away. I've transfered all the food out of my backpack into the akio. In addition to that I put one of Heikki's general purpose straps between the bag's braces. Now the backback is carried incomparably easier.17:00
Again it's pitch-black. We have a little food brake with sandwiches and soup out of the thermos flasks. Besides I defeat a bar of nice German "Milka" chocolate. Again nobody really seems to know where we are, except for "somewhere in the middle of the forest".18:00
We reach a frozen swamp. That should be mentioned in the map. We send off some people in several directions for the sake of position determination. It takes forever. Then we continue through the forest.
I take over the akio and again it's almost impossible to pull the damn thing uphill with my skis. It would work quite well if the skis weren't so slippery in the first place and not so long secondly. Stomping up the hill I sink into the snow quite deeply with every step and then it's a huge effort to pull the battens out again. Not at all rarely this process is interconnected with a nice loss of balance, slipping away and intimate contact with the snow. Sami and Anne are way in front of us. At some point we can't even see their lights any more, just their tracks in the snow.
19:00
Sami's and Anne's lights become visible again and don't seem to move any more. The cottage is found. It's only a couple of hundred meters and new energy is mobilized. But still the akio is hanging at my back. Not so infrequently the thing get's stuck to a some tree in the forest, some branch or tree stump. Especially overthorn trees on the ground are fun. As I tree to get it free with force one more time, one of the two ropes brakes. So Silja and I pull the akio up the remaining meters together. Well, at least we got there.
The cottage is pretty big. In addition to that there is a hole in the clouds for a short moment through which one can see northern lights. But until I finished unloading my stuff it's gone. The first priority is now to get something to eat: chocolate biscuits. Having thorougly discussed the menu for this evening, Silja and I cook dried minced meat with noodles and this instant Mexico stuff. It's quite ok and I'm really hungry now. Later in the evening I try to fix my skiing stick with electric tape. This bamboo stick has got some cracks and make some unsettling sounds when exposed to heavier loads. Elina carves a new stick tip out of a piece of firewood. Her skiing stick has suffered too.