Our plan for today was to rent snowshoes, so we set off to one of the rental shops in Saariselkä after breakfast. It's really good value; only €20 each so long as we bring the snowshoes back before the shop closes tomorrow. Once we'd acquired the snowshoes and strapped ourselves into them (always the hardest part!), we were ready to go.
The route we were planning to walk on is within the Urho Kekkonen National Park. The first part of the trail is the same as the Aurora walk which we did on Monday, so we started out by making our way through the anti-tobogganing barriers.
We followed the Aurora trail as it led us uphill. The snow was very compacted here so snowshoes weren't really necessary.
After a few minutes the snowshoe path turns off in a different direction.
It led us through the forest...
...and along the side of a small valley.
This part of the walk is quite steep and we soon came to a slope which I dread having to climb down every year!
Once on the other side of that, the route flattens out a bit.
It was quite a bright sunny day today, by January in Lapland standards at least, and the snow was sparkling where it was hit by the sunlight.
It was a really beautiful sunrise
We did have a couple of groups of other people pass us as we snowshoed, but on the whole the path was pretty quiet.
Every so often we had to cross a ski route. You have to be really careful doing it in snowshoes so that you don't accidentally tread on and mess up the tracks that have been carved for the skis.
As we progressed further along, the snow became a bit deeper...
...and the colours in the sky became a bit brighter.
The trees were pretty, but there was definitely nowhere near as much snow on them as there was last year.
I think some of the little trees here were completely buried last year.
While this route is technically a circular walk, we knew in advance that we weren't going to be able to do the full loop.
Not because it's too far - the entire loop is 6.8km - but because there's a part on the opposite side of the loop which requires climbing down a river bank that's just too steep.
We were therefore walking to approximately the halfway point, before turning round and returning the way we'd come.
There was one more ski run to negotiate...
...and then we'd reached the point where we planned to turn back.
It was so beautiful here
But very, very cold - even my eyebrows were freezing
There's a limit to how long you want to stay outside for when the weather is as cold as this, so we were soon on our way back towards Saariselkä.
The most eventful thing to happen on the trek back was that I nearly lost my phone when the cold somehow caused the metal catch on my phone strap to snap. The same thing happened to me in Lapland last year!
Luckily I realised what had happened and was able to find my phone in the snow!
Soon we could see the teepee marking the national park entrance/exit on the opposite side of the valley. Not far to go now!
Overall it was quite a long walk - my Fitbit has tracked 15,000 steps, though I'm not sure it catches all of them when snowshoeing with poles. The sky definitely had sunset vibes as we made our way out of the national park and headed back towards the cabin.
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