For I am the keeper of the zoo

House

Stump

Bent

Fallen

Snow

Bow

Water

Ball

Yesterday I got an idea which I should have noted earlier. Namely, one of the good points about Meiko is the quietness, as few people seem to know of the forests and paths there. But the problem during winter is that the paths don't stay open after a snowfall as there aren't enough people to walk there, making tracks.

But then Nuuksio wilderness area has the opposite problem: too many people so that it is not quiet any more, and it doesn't feel like wilderness. However, during this time of the year there are much less people, enough to keep the paths open for walking but not too much to disturb the silence.

So I decided to see whether this hypothesis is true, that is, would it be possible to walk around my favorite route in Nuuksio: Korpinkierros, which is 8 km long. And it turned out the paths were mostly quite ok, narrow but passable. And it was also quiet.

In fact, I have never experienced such silence in Nuuksio, it seemed that even the aircraft were avoiding the airspace above. It was probably the thick snow cover which silenced the sounds, to such a degree that the shutter sound of my LX5 felt loud, and it is a very tiny sound indeed.

However, the silence lasted only for a while, as the birds are getting eager, probably because the sun is giving them ideas about spring approaching. At one spot a woodpecker got anxious and made quite a racket, making the ”kji-krä-krä-krä-krä” sound again and again.

I met only a few people. An older man greeted me while I was taking photographs and then said: "A nature photographer in residence." I had to laugh.

I started from the west side of Nuuksio, at Siikajärvi, where there is less people. When coming near the main site of Nuuksio there were more people walking the paths. At a fireplace a group of people were talking rather loud, it almost seemed as if they tried to compensate for the silence of the wilderness.

It took two hours to walk the Korpinkierros route. I made a couple of small detours, and took almost 500 photographs. It was rather bright despite the cloud cover, a great day to be walking outdoors.

(Posting title is from the poem Wilderness by Carl Sandburg.)