We got 15 cm of new snow today, and I went for a two-hour walk in the Nuuksio National Park, starting from the parking place near lake Siikajärvi. There was quite a lot of snow on the path, and part of the route I was the first to be walking on the path since snowfall, so going was heavier than normally. It was quiet and white and cold.
(Posting title is from the poem The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel.)
On May 30th I walked for three hours in Nuuksio, northwest of lake Siikajärvi. It was quiet, I didn't see any other people except one man riding a bicycle near the parking place at Siikaranta. I followed paths only a little part of the way, mostly I just looked up a direction in the map and followed the compass.
(Posting title is from the poem Cock by Albert Goldbarth.)
I managed to do what I have been planning to do for some time: I walked for 4 1/2 hours in the swamps and forests in Nuuksio.
I started from the parking lot at Siikaranta, and walked to the east end of Soidinsuo swamp, the biggest swamp in Nuuksio. I explored Soidinsuo from east to west, and started then to walk north, to lake Iso-Holmajärvi, visiting lakes Poro-Kolmoislampi, Ympyrkäinenlampi and Pitkä Saarijärvi on the way. I returned via another route, circling via lakes Ahvenisto, Mustalampi, Vähä-Romlampi, Kolmoislammit and Siikajärvi. All in all I walked about 20 km, maybe a bit more, going slow in the beginning, and faster when returning to Siikaranta.
It was great to be outdoors, and the weather was perfect for walking, about +1 °C in the morning, and +6 °C around noon. During the night the temperature had dropped below freezing, and there were frozen cranberries at Soidinsuo swamp. However, almost all of the frost had disappeared by the time I was walking there.
The photographs were taken a week ago in Vaakkoi.
(Posting title is from the poem The Atrophy of Private Life by Jennifer Moxley.)
Here is yet another set of photographs taken during my walk in Nuuksio on Wednesday. A great day to be outdoors, and fine for taking photographs as well.
I'm having problems with the LX5, as the click wheel doesn't work any more, which makes it impossible to change the aperture which is now stuck at f/2.0. And when it is such a bright day, overexposure is near, even at ISO 80.
(Posting title is from the poem Three Persons by Vijay Seshadri.)
Here are more photographs which I took in Nuuksio wilderness area yesterday. I'm getting more and more behind in processing my photographs, I have a set from Tuesday to be looked into, and photographs from today. But that is ok, as there will surely be days when there is little time to be outside taking photographs.
(Posting title is from the poem Wind on the Hill by A. A. Milne.)
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.)
I went for a walk in the Nuuksio forests today, with two oldest daughters, starting from Siikajärvi side, westside of Nuuksio. It was sunny and warm, and windy enough so that it wasn't too hot.
(Posting title is from the poem In Eden by David Ferry.)
Sometimes I got the feeling that the world has gotten much weirder than science fiction. Namely, I ran into a story titled "Physical assault by McDonald's for wearing Digital Eye Glass", telling of Steve Mann, who has digital eye glasses fixed to his head - "permanently attached and does not come off my skull without special tools". McDonald's employees (in Paris, France) assaulted Mann and broke the glasses.
Thinking about a future where each of us might have surgically implanted cameras (not to speak of other stuff) gives me shivers. But I also find loathsome how McDonalds handled the situation. Is there any human being in the corporation?
Today I went picking blueberries with my oldest daughter to the Nuuksio forests, starting from the west side at Siikajärvi. Today was a fine sunny day, it wasn't too hot (about 21 °C) and there was wind which kept the mosquitoes almost completely away, at least in the Nuuksio forests up on the rocky hills where there is space between the trees.
This is also an excellent place for blueberries, which were very tasty and - thanks to the rainy days - rather big. We ate a lot of them in the forest, and also brought some with us to eat this evening.
Picking berries is for me a rather nice experience, there is something almost meditative about it. When I was younger I did quite a lot of picking berries, blueberries and cloudberries especially.
There was one year (maybe it was 1985 when I had started my studies in the university) when I picked a lot of cloudberries. It happened that the price for the berries was rather high, and I sold quite a lot of them. Selling berries you have picked in the forest is tax-free, and so this was rather nice extra income for a student.
I spent hours and hours picking berries, and during that time I got into a strange kind of mental state in which there didn't seem to exist time or thinking as one usually experiences them, one was just picking berries.
(Posting title is from the poem After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost.)
We went for a walk at the Nuuksio forests, starting from the west side, at Siikajärvi. My daughter was interested in tasting blueberries, and plenty of them we had, although only the first batch of them are yet ripe. But they tasted very, very good. This place is one of the best for blueberries, another good place is in the east side of Nuuksio, at Pirttimäki, where we did a lot of blueberry-picking last year.
We didn't get as much thunder and rain during the night as was predicted, but still the forest was a bit wet when we walked there. The good thing was the strong wind, which kept mosquitoes away in the open forests at Nuuksio.
(Posting title is from the poem Beech Forest by Stephen Sandy.)
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