| Distance | 30.1 km |
| Average Speed | 16.3 km/h |
| Maximum Speed | 29.5 km/h |
The start of my trip to Saija and Timo had an interesting plan. We would take the dogs in the trailer and then leave it parked at Saija for them to sleep in. This meant a reduction to five dogs as the trailer only has five compartments but with a light sledge and fast trails we agreed that this would be adequate. So, Nome and Clyde were dropped and replaced by Stitch.
The drive over was uneventful and we met up with Asko on arrival. Timo set out the chain for the dogs whilst I got my room key. The plan was that the dogs would stay on the chain most of the time and that I would put them in the trailer at about 22:00 and get them back out at about 07:30.
Asko’s suggestion was that I followed his trail which heads east up beside the river and then curves round to join the snowmobile trail back down to Jokijarvi.
I dropped in for lunch to the Turpeinen lavu shelter. According to my GPS I had been there before but I didn’t remember it. The view of the river is delightful and fortunately someone had recently visited so I was able to use the embers of their fire to start mine.
The biggest problem was firewood. There was plenty of this stacked in the wood store (unlike Tilsa) but it was all basically sawn up tree trunks. It may well be that a beefy expert can split these huge logs with an axe, but they were completely beyond my ability. Timo uses a mechanical log splitter to reduce the size of his firewood to something more practical. Perhaps the Finnish forest government doesn’t posses such a thing!! I managed to extract a few useable lumps from a log which someone else had already attacked and then just used two of the smaller logs to construct a rather ungainly looking fire.
The rest of the circuit ran without incident and I got back to Saija at a reasonable time. Feeding the dogs and putting them into the their trailer was also straightforward.