Short news in the middle of the season... because we are all rather busy here at the moment with full house and always new challenges coming up.
To make it clear right from the start: the winter-season is safe until at least end of April, as we probably never had that much of snow. A lot of bad things would need to happen, to stop our tours before the official ending of the season - most probably we can still drive in May...
40 cm new snow within 36 hours, combined with strong winds, made our trail-crew sweating again... The 2nd GoWest-Tour had to be done with scooter-company, as the trail-situation was too unsure. After that we really had a few days with hard, nice, fast trails. until the next load of massive new snow arrived and put us back to level zero again. No more trails visible in open areas, massivly windblown parts, causing the forest goverment to re-open their roads which we cross on certain parts, having now there huge snowwalls and frozen blocks on our trail-crossings, that have to be shoveled away, most lake-parts again with a lot of overflow, slow, deep and exhausting trails for our dogs; but thez all are still really motivated and go and go and go! Yes, it is a hard life for our trail-makers, as in these conditons it happens that a machine is digging itself in a deep snow part and it has to be digged out again by pure muscle-power. On top of that, sadly both our scooters are in repair-stations actually. One replacing machine we got from Jarkko in Ruunaa, one other (at the moment also dead outside the lodge) from our almost-neighbour.
The access-road to our Aittokoski-cabin is not plowed regularly anymore, looks like the border guards have no more need of that road. This means, that we have to bring material and snowshoe-guides to the cabin by dogteam from the Kuhmo-road on. Ok, this looks funny, something different for once, but easier would be to have car-access again until very close to the cabin, how we were used to have it so far.
Differences in temperatures of 20 - 30 degrees C get more and more "regular". While most mornings during last week were in the freeking cold levels, later then in afternoon it gets more "normal" again and sunny. And at the moment we have to prepare ourselves again for a few days with even plusdegrees during daytime. Every morning we ask oruselves, how to dress... and most of the days it is too much or too less anyhow...
Despite all those challenges, we have managed all the programs of the last weeks. A few adaptions were made, because of "too cold, too far, too exhausting" (wished by clients) were made, this is the flexibility which we are known for. So it happened that some guests came back to the lodge with a different guide/group than which they started with. Snowshoetours can be made earlier to have better trails and conditions for dogs and sledtours the next day. And who knows, maybe the coming week will be a "very normal one" and the complete trailnet can be re-opened again.
Never give up on a dream...