Day 38 – to Inari

I mentioned yesterday about the gold rush of the 1870s here in Finnish Lapland. Today I found out a bit more about a more recent one, 10 days ago to be specific.

I put together a small hiking circuit, but after just 800 metres met a Finnish guy, Albert, who had camped the previous night and was sat drinking coffee around his campfire, enjoying the tranquility of the still lake.. until Roja belly-flopped into it.

We chatted for a while. He is a political scientist on a break from University, at the end of a three week solo hike though a Wilderness Area to the east, close to the Russian border, just finishing here. Though he is a wilderness guide, this has been his first major solo hike.

Rather like the character in a Finnish book I have just finished, The Year of the Hare, in which a journalist on vacation injures a hare in this area, and decides to not return to his city job, but to take a year to nurse the hare back to full health, Albert seems reluctant to return south. He is taking two or three days to sit and watch lakes, and drink coffee.

I told him of Gorbachev’s death, though unlike me he is not old enough for personal memories.

He told me of his stop yesterday at a cafe for the first time for more than three weeks, during which he has only cooked dehydrated food over the fire. The cafe was run and attended by Sámi people, who were largely drunk. Especially a group of gold prospectors that had come in.

I stopped him here, as I had been reading about the 1870s finds just the day before.

In 1945 there had been quite a significant unearthing of gold here on the Lemmenjoki river.

Last week it hit the Finnish news headlines that a nugget the size of a fist had been found here in the river. There are about 20 full time prospectors and 50 claims in the National Park, with about 20 kilograms found each year. Controversially, all mechanical digging was banned in 2021, so what remains legal is just panning.

By the time a heavy shower of rain moved me on, I’d spent an hour chatting with Albert, enjoyable for both of us. The only people he had come across for 20 odd days had been the drunken miners.

A good part of the route was on a ridge elevated only about 50 metres above the forest floor, caused by the Ice Age. It’s a route that has been used by wild reindeer many hundreds of years ago, and local people for much of that also. I walked on a part of it yesterday. It’s a strange sensation, the ridge continues for 15 kilometres or so. It’s much drier than the lower ground of course, and it gives views pretty much all the time.

I drove on up to Inari, low on fresh food, with the supermarket the first stop. By this time heavier rain had set in.

Late in the afternoon I took the van a couple of kilometres out of town to the trailhead of a footpath I want to walk tomorrow. I started a new book, and after an hour or so the rain cleared for a fine evening.

Allow me a podcast recommendation from BBC Radio Four, something very easy to listen to with gentle humour, Alexei Sayle’s Strangers On A Train.

Sayle is something of favourite of mine, and has been since the 1980s, the days of the Young Ones and the Comic Strip. I’ve always admired him in particular. Though at 70 his humour, and indeed politics, has mellowed, he is well suited to these journeys.