It is almost an Eräkeskus-Tradition, that the mushroom-guests are the last of our official summer guests. So also this year: they left yesterday and since today we are officially in autumn-season. 11 hikers and mushroom pickers were here and enjoyed the forests, mushrooms and berries in the last 10 days. Mushrooms were dried here and then taken back home for tasty dishes during coming winter. Almost 7 kg of dried mushrooms they could take back home this year.
The mornings are rather cold by now, 3 - 7 degrees and fog in the forests and on the water. During the last days we still reached almost 20 degrees at midday, what made hiking a very nice thing. But autumn is in the air... we can almost touch it, especially in early mornings when fall-smells and fog make dogwalking an almost mystic thing.
Saskja was here as volonteer during the last 3 weeks and helped us a lot in the kennels. Thanks to her once more and we hope you find an easy way back to your normal life! Next weekend we expect 3 young ladies from Sweden for a practical stay, Hanna, Ronja and Simona will help us in the first training-weeks until end of October.
Still to mention maybe that Alex is back here and trying to learn all dog names once more. It goes faster every time he comes back :-) He will write his part of the team-pages soon and update it there.
What else happens in the next days? Building projects come to an end, summer equipment is stored away, sleds get prepared for winter, harnesses checked, etc. We have 3 weeks without guests in front of us, before the Musher-Workshop starts. We are looking forward to meet Stephan, Sandra, Uli, Eelco and Angelo. Corinna and Konstantin are on holiday for a few more days, Sanne left this morning for another 6-day-hike, but everybody will be back for training start on September 24th. From then on we are busy again in the forests, training 14-dog-teams to get them ready for the snow-season. We are very much looking forward to it!