Avainsana: Ice

Julkaistu

Sunday walk with snow and ice at Helsinki Old Town Bay

Walking yesterday 13.2. through Helsinki-Helsingfors old history. In 1550 the town was established here where the Vantaa – Vanda River reaches the sea. Today, the Old Town Bay area is a popular starting point for hiking and cross country skiing in the large and close by green areas. 

Well, I should say fishing as well. In fact it is so popular that one has to buy a special license for the bay area and an even more special one for the rapids. On the other side of the small island in the middle there is a waterfall – man-made of course – and the old power station from the last years of the 19th century.

The people in some of the pictures were fishing out on the ice where low temperatures during the last weeks and days have made this quite safe. The water is much less salty than the oceans and therefore freezes during cold winters.

A lot of voluntary work is being done in the Finnish capital to restore healthy trout populations both in this river and in the many creeks in other parts of the metropolitan area. In my own village Pitäjänmäki – Sockenbacka much has been achieved, and we are now pushing for the city to remove some last obstacles for fish to swim up river for spawning, or their love encounters…
 
There is still much snow here and outside the city centre the ground is covered by shining white layers. So why is the ice so brown on some of these riverfront pictures? The colour comes with the running water, picked up from the ground it runs through, but the water itself is nowadays quite clean. Not drinkable, but you can take a swim there. And I suppose cook some coffee…

Nice weather to go out it was when the -15C or so has given in a bit and it was just a few degrees under zero.

Julkaistu

COLD WINDY AND PEACEFUL DAY AT KOPPARNÄS NATIONAL PARK WEST OF HELSINKI

Yesterday we felt like going a bit outside our usual nature targets in the Helsinki metropolitan region. So we ventured some 40kms westwards, to the Gulf of Finland coast at Kopparnäs in Ingå – Inkoo. The two names are used here as this is a bilingual Finnish-Swedish part of the country.

Not exactly mild, with 0 C temperatures and a brisk wind the weather gave a freshening taste of northern late autumn climate. Some years there is already snow at this time, but more seldom now. If air temperature goes well below 0 C for some time, the Gulf of Finland freezes as it is less salty than the water of the high seas.

Our excursion started with some moments at the shoreline, watching the waves come in and enjoying the view of the open sea. Even for us northerners it soon got a bit chilly so the walk continued for 3 kilometers on a trail through the forest area of this national park.

When I was a child we could never have gone here as the Porkala – Porkkala region was ’rented out’ as a military base to the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1956. Originally the rental period was set for 50 years, The only Finns allowed in were passengers in the Helsinki – Turku-Åbo trains which transited through with a Soviet locomotive and the windows covered with wooden boards. The base was close, with the border only some 20 kilometers from the downtown city centre.

After our big neighbours did not succeed in occupying the country’s capital Helsinki through the wars of 1939-44 they forced Finland to cede a large area just outside the city. They even paid a symbolic rent for this land and sea base from where they felt able co control both the city and the waterways to St Petersburg.

In January 1956, just under three years after Stalin died, the Soviets gave up the base. It did of course reflect the fact that Finland was not considered an immediate threat anymore, but equally much that they could not afford to keep these expensive military bases outside the country. Also technology and weapons had developed so the Porkkala area lost much of its strategic importance.

Now peace and quet has settled also in this coastal region on the outskirts of Helsinki. Down at the sea there was a lonely person fishing from the cliffs and another walking in the distance along the shoreline. During our one hour noon-time forest walk we did not meet anyone else, once again realising how sparsely populated this country is even in the big southern population centres.