Sorry Oly–We'll just have to come back.

Our third and final day, we packed up our gear, cleaned up the cabin, treated the dogs with various left over meats, and headed out for a final run around before returning to the main base.

The cool part of today's route was the hill! We struck out across the bog where we had seen the three moose the day before (fortunately we didn't encounter them again), and proceeded to run behind our sleds and up a shallow hill.

This is hard to do in snow gear.

Imagine it like this:

You're freeeeezing. It's -28˚C outside. Your fingers are numb, your eyelashes are frozen, you can't feel your toes anymore because they are deep in the ice blocks that are your boots.

I was a bit frozen...

But Oly had the worst of it. ;)

Here comes a hill!! You've got to give the poor pups a break–they're hauling ass up that hill and carrying all the gear we originally took with us to the cabin. They really don't need to pull you too.

Oly

So you hop off and run between the skis of the sled. Swish-swish-swish-swish-swish-swish-swish. Snow suits are really big. As a track and field veteran, I really wouldn't recommend them for your next sprinting race.

After a while, you're out of breath–possibly a bit warmer, but mostly out of breath. At least you can feel your fingers a bit again. But, after a minute or so back on the sled, you're cold again.

Swish-swish-swish-swish-swish-swish-HOP.

Back on the sled! Here comes the crest of the hill. This is much steeper than the incline you just ran up. You're going to go much faster than you have the past few days.

After giving the sled in front of you a big head start (upsetting the dogs in the process, who just want to run and keep up with their pack), you hurtle down the hill! Ok- it's not as steep as you might be thinking... but it is steep enough that the line between you and the dogs can go loose, so watch out that they aren't getting tangled up!

Somebody is excited to get going!

On the last 20 meters of the hill, your sled rockets onto a sharp upturn of the track and you're briefly airborne! Woohoo!!!

Let's do it again!

We did the hill route twice before striking off for the home base to put our sleds and the dogs away.

Our timing was pretty good–we slid back into the dog yard just as the light left us, so we put things away in the dark afternoon. All of the dogs got a treat for finishing their weekend warrior challenge, and were taken back to their doghouses, where most of them immediately curled up to sleep–tired puppies!

On our way back

Sunset!

Reindeer Burgers

We defrosted ourselves in a Sami-style hut with a big central fire and some reindeer burgers. Seriously, that is a rich and tasty meat. We had plenty to defrost as well– my hair had some seriously big ice chunks in it and my hands were definitely in pain from the cold. Erg.

Fed and thawed out, we did the rounds around the dog yard to meet all of the other dogs we didn't spend the weekend with. This included the growing puppies in the puppy cage... They were still small enough to fairly easily fit in our arms, but only just! Dina also lives in the puppy cage–she's a bit of a Houdini so she can't stay in the dog yard.

After saying goodbye we went in to take off the heavy duty snow gear and get set to go back to our Kirkenes hotel.

One last doggy on our way out! Such a beautiful dog.

Not a sled dog, but so pretty!

Driving back to Kirkenes, we (and especially Oly) were a little put out that we hadn't seen any Northern lights. Most of the weekend the sky had been overcast with some late night snowfall, but during the drive back, the sky was mostly clear. Sam, who was driving us, stopped by the side of the road to let us look for the lights for a bit. He reckoned the little white wispy bits up in the sky were the first, weakest stages of the lights, but Oly and I remain unconvinced. This is why you go up to the north to do dogsledding, not to see northern lights. The lights are only a bonus.

Late-night Kirkenes didn't have much for us to do besides work an ATM for Norwegian Kronor and look out across the frozen lake (probably brackish water) by which our hotel was perched. Breakfast time gave us a really nice view of the surrounding lake and mountains.

Off the balcony of our hotel. We saw ice-breaking boats go out in the morning.

We said goodbye to Kirkenes on one of the few flights out. London seemed positively warm when we got back.

Last view of Kirkenes

My final thoughts on the trip are these:

• Dogs are fluffy and I love them.
• That kid on the bus to the Kirkenes airport is super lucky–I want to try reindeer sledding too!
• Never put a hardboiled egg in your pocket and forget about it. Especially when it's actually a soft boiled egg and you're about to get on an airplane. 
• And finally: This was an amazing adventure and I am so, so lucky to have gone.

I SAW A HERD OF MEESEN

*Meesen: the plural noun for moose. At least, according to the comedian Brian Regan.

DAY 2: THE MOOSE INCIDENT. Or the MEESEN INCIDENT.

I never thought -8˚C weather would feel WARM. 

After a breakfast of pålegg [Pålleg (n). Literally anything and everything you can put on or between a slice of bread] for us and soupy dog food/meatblock stew for the huskies, we harnessed up the dogs to sled off into the sunrise/sunset (we couldn't tell, even at 11am-ish).

Stew for the huskies!

11am sunrise

Dina! (Dee-na)

Other wildlife!

Oly's prepared.

Let's Go!

OH MAN was it BEAUTIFUL.

We switched around some dogs today, partially because my dogs had been lagging behind the afternoon prior and partly because some of the girls were starting to come on heat. I got Berk (happy dance!!). Even with our rearranging, stopping was a risk– at one point the dogs on the lead sled got so tangled up going after one of the girls that we had to rearrange again on the trail... I ended up with two girls in heat on my sled. So... I was on the horny sled. 

 

Posing!

In the video, I'm saying something that sounds like "Clara," "Bra," and "Blinka"... These are Norwegian dog sledding terms of encouragement for the dogs. I should point out, however, that I totally misheard the last one and it should have been "Flinka" not "Blinka". "Clara" is supposed to mean "go faster", "Bra" is supposed to mean "good job", and "Flinka" means "good dog, good job"... Or something like that. I could have been cooing cuss words at them and I would have no idea. One last command I recall Evie using was "Redfren", which meant "front", something the dogs needed reminding of quite a bit whenever we stopped the sleds. *I have no idea how to spell any of this, it's all phonetic.

Both of us!

What are you doing Birk?

There you are!

We saw FIVE MOOSE that day. None of the guides at Berk Husky had seen ANY moose that season before prior to this outing.

Oly made the first spot– we were sledding through a close enclosure of trees, about to come around and out onto the frozen bog, when Oly came around the corner crouched down on his sled, looking a bit silly (it did nothing, he reflected in retrospect), and gesturing to the left. Through the trees, I just caught a glimpse of a female moose before she was obscured by trees again. Not far along, we came out of the trees and around to the bog, where we could see there were actually two moose, probably a mother and daughter, now behind us at the tree line. We booked it out of there. Moose look cuddly, but Evie had just been telling us of a friend who had been chased around a tree for 3 hours by an angry moose determined on running him over. 

We had been seeing day-old moose tracks, rounded by the night's snowfall but still present, but we hadn't expected to encounter any today. I counted myself lucky that we got to see moose and escape.

Moose tracks!

So of course, what happens but we see three more moosen in the woodsen! Again, we were pretty sure it was a mother and two calves, but this time they were up ahead of us and we were traveling across the bog, so we stopped a ways out, maybe half a mile to a mile. They were barely dots, but there really wasn't much we could do to get away from them besides wait for them to leave or be scared off by the barking dogs, who were going crazy because we'd stopped sledding and the moosen were likely within smelling range.

There are tiny black dots to Evie's left, just on the edge of the trees: MOOSEN.

See them now?

If we needed to, we could have turn the dogsleds around, but that would have been a laborious process of wading through snow, avoiding allowing the teams to get distracted by each other, and generally being a cumbersome mess. This would also have run the risk of running into the two other moose we had spotted previously... An ambush!

We hung out with the distant moose for quite a while, and while they did briefly run away from us, they got spooked by something else and came running back towards us again! Eventually, they went off into the line of trees on the right and we again booked it out of there, off the bog and onto the trail to the left. 

Fortunately at this point we weren't far away from the cabin, and although Randi (one of the dogs on my sled) lost some skin off her paw because of the icy cold snow, we managed to make it back alright. Don't worry–Randi is going to be fine. She had to wear a boot the next day, but apparently this happens fairly frequently and the dogs are never terribly perturbed by it. They favor that foot, but don't yelp or display other signs of pain.

Sunrise or Sunset? Can't quite tell.

That's our guide, Evie, and her team.

 

Check out that moon!

Our official moose story is that we had a standoff with all five moosen at once, and that they charged us, but Evie single handedly wrestled the moose into submission. Moosen cowed, we called the trolls with our copper lingonberry troll stick and they, quite numerous, carried the sleds back to the cabin while Evie carried all 14 huskies. 

Some other thoughts: 

I was thinking about our velocity... Because we're now closer to the axis of the Earth, we're traveling at a slower velocity...

Part of our adventure out into the wilderness took our dogsleds across some frozen rivers. You've got to be cautious of the banks because they are steep and can tip you over. The ice itself was covered in snow from last nights snow fall, but we still had an icy-water mush under our paws and went much faster without the encumbering snowbanks. 

The afternoon sky was clearing up such that we were able to see Orion and several other constellations. The length of the night gives you the impression that the constellations are moving faster than normal... They travel a great distance in the sky from first dark to late into the night, and because your sense of time has been thrown off, it seems as though they've moved way too much. 

SAUNA TIME!

Evie used a really intense wood stove to get the temperature in the little sauna room to 60˚C before we made it in. In the sauna, we had a bucket of cold river water for dumping onto the hot stones on the top of the furnace. The sauna house itself consisted of an ante-room with a door leading into the steam room. 

As soon as you pour on the water, you feel a wave of heat hit you and it becomes hard to breath. It feels like your lungs are going to burn or be suffocated by heat. If you stand on the benches in the steam room, it is clearly much warmer at the top of the room and cooler near the floor, where there's a gap under the door leading to the ante-room. Lying down on the benches gets you a more moderate and even temperature across your entire body. 

Once we were dripping in sweat and sick of the heat, we followed Evie's recommendation and tried jumping into the snow bank outside the sauna and the fire pit.

WHOA.

Imagine it like this, complete with sound effects.

The snow is still a fine powder, so jumping in feels weird. You're cushioned in light, grainy, fine, powdery crystals and it's COLD.

I did it three times. 

Essentially what happens is you end up running the fuck back inside the sauna, nearly slipping on the floor of the ante-room, and bursting back into the now reasonable steam room. 

This is where it gets interesting: everywhere starts tingling–a very nice tingle, kind of like the snow crystals still clinging to your body are suddenly and instantly turning to gas, or lifting off and flying away, leaving an energized feeling. 

We managed to get the temperature in the steam room up to 70˚C, nicely contrasting with the subzero temperatures outside. 

Having most definitely earned our dinner, we went back inside for reindeer stew, which was really, really tasty. I'm definitely trying more meats than I thought I would, what with the wild boar in Sienna and the reindeer here in Norway. 

Here's a special Norwegian thing: for dessert we ate cloudberries and cream. 

Cloudberries only grow in the arctic–all attempts to grow them elsewhere, even when people bring the soil with them, fail. In Norway, they grow in the frozen bogs we were sledding on today. Apparently, each bush produces only one berry, a berry you are only allowed to pick f you are Norwegian and have a special permit. 

It felt quite special to be able to eat them for desert. 

They're quite tangy. Each berry looks like a small, orange blackberry. They're really good with cream.

Me and the dogs and the sunset

You've got some snow on your face darlin'

Oly and the dogs and the sunset!

Next: Day 3! Sheesh. For a short weekend trip these are really long posts.