... we are driving sleds, to satisfy our 4-legged athlets. Never in all the previous years, our workers could drive dogteams so often, as they can in this season. So Covid has positive side-effects as well... But despite all the trainings and fit dogs, we are still and also for all the coming weeks without European guests. Starting from 27th January the Finnish Government is again tightening the entry-restrictions for travellers. This makes it basically impossible for all our guests to entry the country and arrive here. Our guesthouse remains empty for at least 5 more weeks, except a few Finnish visitors once in a while. And yes, sadly the group of 6 that was supposed to arrive here yesterday and to which we looked so much forward, also cancelled their trip.
But - keep heads up! We have now opened the trail north to our cabin Aittokoski and, starting from Wednesday, will drive there by ourselves, to give us and our dogs the pleasure of overnight-trips. Right now we "suffer" a bit from a warm-wave with temperatures around 0 degrees C and snow-rain. But on Wednesday it will be more wintry again. During the last 48 hours we got about 50 cm fresh snow, we were shoveling for hours, got the roofs free of heavy snow again. And this fresh snow gets now very compact and heavy. As soon as we get minus-degrees again, we will have fast, nice trails again.
Our trail-crew around Frank, Caro and Noah was out for long hours by scooter during the last days, to complete and optimise our trails. As some parts of the trailnet are not allowed to be opened by scooter anymore (funny...), some routes - like the "Small Swamp" had to be re-opened ,manually by hardworking dogteams. A really tough job for those teams with all that fresh snow and windblown open areas from the last 2 days. "Huts off" for the "world-best" lead-dogs! That is life and work here! We have no boring roadrunner-trips here, but our trips are offered on much more technical trails. And that makes the difference also in the trail-works. One day we have a fallen tree on the trails, then we have to deal with overflow on the lakes, or the Finnish Forest Goverment decides to open a very small forest-path because of some planned logging. And if nothing of that is keeping us busy, then we get too much snow in too little time! Never a trip is completely predictable, but always exciting and diversified!
During this Covid-winter we planned to take part in a few races, as so many dogs are now available for special trainings. And we were just good in time with our preparations for a few sprint-races in 6- or 8-dog-class. But sadly the interesting races are also cancelled, one after the other, because of Covid. So we now have the idea to organise a team-challenge and maybe invite also a few Finnish mushers. You see, our heads are full of ideas to make the best out of this winter, we just have to channel and implement them.
Stay healthy - one day we will see you again here in our Eastern corner of Finland!