SSSS weekend

Sun with visible sunspots

Skiing, snow, stars and space were some of the themes at the weekend at Rovaniemi. During the 4 days we were studying and learning lots of interesting skills and things: like navigation, winter hiking, different knots, stars and space and personal protective equipments.

Our camp

One of the most crucial skills, when travelling in the wilderness is capability to know exactly the location. With the help of compass and map you need to be able to navigate your planned route and be aware of your current position all the time. In addition you might have a GPS to help to locate yourself in extreme conditions like in a thick fog or heavy snowfall.

Friday morning was the coldest moment of this winter so far (temperature dropped below -41 at Salla, which was the record of this winter. Even at Rovaniemi temperature was somewhere at -35 degrees). Despite of the coldness we put our skis, took our backpacks with tents and cookers and headed into the forest. During the day we practiced navigation and locating ourselves with maps, compass and GPS. We pitched our tents in the middle of beautiful snowy scenery and started cooking.

Cooking moment

At Saturday we were studying personal protective equipments like PFDs, gloves, helmets, boots, jackets, and so forth. Stars and space was one of the things on Saturday as well. I managed to take a photo of the sun through the telescope and currently there are sunspots on the surface of the sun due to the high activity of the sun. The sunspots were easily identifiable on the photo.

Four days session ended on Sunday by practicing different knots, like bowline, alpine butterfly, killick hitch, highwayman's hitch, reef knot, sheetbend, zeppelin bend and figure eight loop just to mention few.