Spring has arrived to Finland with it’s colorful touch. It was time to get together and spend a night outside.

Suomen Latu Ry (Finnish Ski Trail Association) decided a date for Finns to spend a night outside. 17. September will be a day that thousands of Finns will be heading to the forests for overnighter or they will camp on their own backyard etc.

So i ask if someone from our Finnish hammock group wish to get together and go hanging somewhere. Soon we had a destination and that will be the Riuttaskorpi recreational forest .

Riuttaskorpi is 16 sq km area in the north side of Ylöjärvi, near Kuru. It locates between 2 big national parks, Seitseminen and Helvetinjärvi.
This area haven’t got much of population even in the history, mostly it is known for log floating and some of it’s white waters have been used for mills.
Many of the Finland’s long trails go through this area. There is few lean-to’s and fireplaces, also one sightseening tower, which is closed now because of it’s poor rotten condition.
There is one sauna, which can be rented.

Our day started from my home, where 3 of us meet at 10 am. Unfortunately, one had to cancel, because his child got really sick and they had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night.

Took about an hour to get in the Myllykoski (Mill white water) parking and there was two more waiting for us.

Our first destination was only 500 meters away, Suutarilankoski lean-to and it’s white waters.

Suutarilankoski is a beautiful place. There is still some signs left from the old mills from 1920’s. There wasn’t much of water running as usually does. This small river is also used by canoes and kayaks.

We had a moment in the lean’to and our next stop will be the sightseeing tower.

It was a bit shame that we couldn’t use the sightseeing tower. Part of the stairs have been removed so people won’t use this anymore. But there was quite nice view to the lake even we couldn’t go up.

We also got few moose flies on our way…i hate those. Hard to kill because they have strong armour. Crawling under the shirts and in the hair…nasty suckers.

It didn’t took long that we arrived to the Haukikalliot (Pike rocks) and talked if this will be our place for tonight. We had some snacks and soon decided to check the last place in the Haukijärvi (Pike lake) and if it isn’t good place, we will come back here. We had lot’s of time, since it was only 12.30 pm.

Most of the logs in the trail we in bad shape. Also one table have been collapsed because the wood was too soft and rotten. But trails were mostly allright, luckily.

I hope these will be fixed soon, but because of Finland’s poor economy situation now, i doubt it won’t happen in near future….

Salinkalliot has an kitchen building where is a fireplace. It was really nice cottage, but forgot to take photos inside!
Sign says in the door : Mancave, 3 x knock lol Also there was someones old shoes outside.

There was only the sauna and no camping possibilities, so we head back to the Haukikalliot.

We set our hammocks and prepared a fire. Also made firewood enough for whole night and for the next morning too. Me and Jani decided to not use the tarps, since it won’t be raining at all. Will be clear night, but temps around 0 celcius (32F)

We had great evening chatting and making food. Also some joined us since they don’t have much of experience from hammocks, so we show them some dutchware and some of our solution for our tarps (WB Super Fly’s).

Gear we had were : 1 DD Frontline, 2 Ticket To The Moon’s, 1 Amazonas and 2 WBB XLC’s. Mostly DD Underblankets, since we don’t have other options here available… Jani has WB Wooki, which he ordered over a month ago. Cost over 100$ more because of taxes and delivery. Wish to get mine someday too.

Around 8 pm the sun was starting to set.  It was really calm weather, no wind and all and lake reflected sky and it’s clouds perfectly. It was also very quiet, sometimes could here some traffic from road far away.

Some photos from inside of the XLC during the night. Seems temperature were below the 0 C, since there was some ice in the bugnet.

Got up after 7 am and wow…fog gave really nice light around us with the sunrise!

We had quite cold night after all, it went down to -4C in the night (25F) so we had some ice on our hammocks and underquilt protectors (2QZQ). One had only spaceblanket under him and he got cold butt syndrome.
I got only +2C bag but i took the fleece blanket with me and wrapped it around me inside. I was warm and toasty whole night. Didn’t sleep well, i mostly looked stars and listened sounds of night. Above me was Polaris, Capella and Pollux. I could see the bright Vega in the left side.

We were quite early, left around 10 am. There is some hunting season, since we heard dogs barking and heard also some shots fired.
Cars were a bit frozen so we let them on idle to warm up and talked about some ideas for our next meeting. Possibly we going to book a sauna. But we going to have a big hammock meeting 2.October in the Nuuksio National Park, so that will be our next trip.

Will write about it more then, thank you for reading!

All photos : http://pixabilly.1g.fi/kuvat/Hiking/Riuttaskorpi/

Enjoy your day and your hikes!

Marko aka Pixabilly