The days are getting shorter quickly and the Arctic night seems to become tangible. Currently the day length decreases by ten to eleven minutes every day (The headline, by the way, I stole from todays weather forecast site of the Finnish meteorological institute).
The other information I found on that site, which however also was obvious by looking out of the window, was that today was a clear sky. Since this didn’t happen too often lately and the sun will disappear for more than a month soon, I spontaneously decided to put my work aside, grab my camera and go for a short skiing trip in the surrounding area – or to be more precisely, up on Jyppyrävaara.
First I followed the pretty well maintained tracks, which also thanks to the temperatures were hard and fast. Up on Jyppyrävaara I made a short stop at the laavu and enjoyed the direct sun light: Because the sun stays rather low, a vast part of the trip remained in the shadow. Inspired by the view, I also got interested in how good the deep snow would give buoyancy to the slim cross country skiers, which is why I then left the tracks. As it turned out, forthcoming was rather exhausting, but the beauty of the forest and the landscape kept me going on. Only when hunger appeared, and when the sun finally went down, I thought I should get back home, to eat something and to continue work. Fortunately I then found some snow mobile tracks, that made it much easier and quicker to go back home. All in all, I had a wonderful noon outdoors and also was able to get some images captured with my camera.
