Day 4: Snowshoeing in the woods

When we picked up our equipment from the rental shop yesterday, the man there warned us that today was going to be a cold day. Sure enough, when we got up and ventured outside this morning, we found it was very cold indeed!

Minus 20 was a big change from yesterday, which had felt comparatively mild for Lapland. It was so cold that I could feel my eyelashes starting to freeze.

Our plan for today was to go snowshoeing in the woods behind the village. There's a really good path which we've used in previous years and is perfect for snowshoes. First of all we had to walk along one of the side roads out of the village, just wearing our normal boots.

Then when we got to the start of the path, it was time to put our snowshoes on

Tim might not have felt cold, but we could already see his hair and moustache starting to freeze!

The path leads through the snowy trees and is criss-crossed at different points by ski runs and tracks for snowmobiles.

Most of the time we were just completely alone in the forest though

As always, the hardest part about snowshoeing is getting the straps on the snowshoes attached tightly enough that they don't fall off. It's the sort of thing which is easy to do when you're sitting down inside, but really difficult when you're outside in the snow and your fingers are numb.

We got there in the end though

After a while the path leads down into a snowy valley.

We were surrounded by enormous trees on both sides.

And we could just see the bumps of smaller trees poking up through the snow.

The sky wasn't quite as bright as yesterday, but there were still some beautiful colours in it.

It didn't come out in the pictures, but we could actually see the moon in the distance as well.

After pausing for a while to take some photos, we were off again!

In this part of the forest there were some trees which were really laden down by snow.

Although it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, we knew that we were now only a kilometre or so away from a cafe.

That was good news, because we were now all starting to feel very cold.

It wasn't just Tim's hair that was starting to freeze; mine was as well!

The snow was deeper on this part of the walk, so we were glad that we had our snowshoes.

There was just one final obstacle for us to cross before we could get inside in the warm for a bit 😮

I didn't like the look of that at all! We decided to send Tim across first to see whether it would bear his weight

He got across without any problems, so Alfie went next and then I brought up the rear.

The sign showed that we'd walked 4.8km from the village now.

That meant that finally we were at the cafe and we could relax with a warm drink

It was nice looking out at the snow from indoors for a while.

We couldn't sit still for too long though, because we only had a couple of hours of daylight left to complete the rest of the walk and get back to the village.

The return walk follows a slightly different route, which took us past some trees that were completely bowed over by the snow.

It also required us to climb down quite a steep snowy slope.

From there we rejoined the same path that we'd been on previously...

...and retraced our steps back to the road, where we paused to take off our snowshoes.

It was starting to get dark by this point, so we'd just finished the walk on time.

We found that while we'd been out the temperature had dropped even lower, hitting a very cold minus 23!

All that remained was to get into the warm again for some very well-deserved pizza