An early winter bikepack

It seems that a late November weekend scout camp is now part of my kids's annual schedule, so a couple of Fridays back I found myself back up in the Forssa area, about 100 kms northwest of Helsinki with 36 hours to kill. It was mid-evening, slightly below freezing and very very dark. Last year I had taken my mountain bike and tried bikepacking the hiking route, the Lynx Route/Ilvesreitti, with limited success. The 'trail' was marked by waymarks but not enough people had actually walked it to make much of trail on the ground. I did a lot of pushing and carrying the bike through forest brush. This year I decided to stick to roads and forest tracks, including riding sections of the long distance bike route the Häme OxRoad/Hämeen Härkätie, that goes from Turku to Hämeenlinna, so took my cyclocross bike. A lot of the roads and trails are unsurfaced so the CX was a great choice, I could nip along paved sections at a decent pace, but had plenty of grip on the gravel.

Last year it was grey and just above freezing for the whole trip, and in November in Finland the days are so short and the sun always so low that it brings a whole new drab meaning to “grey”. This year I lucked out and the sky cleared early on Saturday morning and stayed clear until after I was asleep that evening, the temperature never got above 1 degree and was often just below freezing according to the thermometer on my excellent newish bike computer.

Saari Folk Park

The Saari viewing tower

I camped in a carpark in LiesjärviNational Park on Friday night with the luxury of a tent and left the car (and tent) there on Saturday morning. That day I rode a bit over 90 kms; this included some hiking single track in the Saari Folk Park but mostly was on unsurfaced roads and forest tracks. A good day of gravel grinding. It didn't feel that big a day but I ran out of daylight and had to ride the last hour or so with lights on to get to the laavu (lean-to shelter) I had decided to use that night. This was actually the same one as I had camped in last year, but it was much nicer this time with all the stars out above and no wind.

I lit a fire in the fireplace with out much trouble, although it never really got to that pleasantly roaring stage. There was only the dregs of the woodpile left, I guess after a summer of visitors, and although the logs burnt they didn't seem to put out much heat. I made lots of hot drinks to rehydrate – it's easy to not drink enough riding in cold weather – and ate my dubious far-eastern pot noddle thingy for supper, but with an indifferent fire retired to my sleeping bag very early.

Sunday morning, I didn't have much time before needing to go and pick my son up from scout camp so got up early, made some hot drinks with breakfast and packed up. It was still only getting light as I left the laavu and the moon was shining brightly over the lake. I only needed to ride about 20 kms back to my car that morning. It had snowed over nigh; enough to make most of the world white but not enough to bother me in terms of riding. My new tyres seemed to grip through the snow perfectly well and reasonably soon I was back where I had started and putting the bike back on the car.

Overall, the Häme Lake Uplands area is nice region to ride and the available map designed for hikers andother outdoors user is a great resourse. The roads away from a couple of highways, that I only crossed, are almost deserted. I reckon only around a dozen cars went past me all day. At this time of year in particular though, it is rather lonely – even though there are national parks with the related infrastructure you might expect, everything was closed. I found one cafe in the post office in Porras open, where I had a lovely chat with the ladies picking up their parcels and having coffee (I suspect and Englishman on a bike speaking very bad Finnish might have been one of the more novel events of their day), but beyond that I went past no open shop, cafe or similar. Make sure you have enough food with you. There are also large numbers of abandoned and decaying buildings in the area, barns and old farm houses like this are quite normal in rural Finland, but the empty petrol station and shops (see photos above) had an unnerving feeling of looking a bit too much like a scene from "The Walking Dead".

Of course you can camp pretty much anywhere, but I pushed on to get to a laavu I used last year – knowing it was great spot and has a fireplace, wood and a compost loo. But because of the hiking, riding, canoeing and cycling routes around that area there are quite a few similar laavus around.

I had new tyres for the trip, SchwalbeMarathon Plus Tours. I was still using my original Marathon Pluses through this summer on that bike. They came on my last bike and have been absolutely superb. I must have done at least 10,000 kms over five years on them and have never had a puncture but they're showing their age with the sidewalls beginning to crack and the tread must be wearing somewhat even if it doesn't look like it. I've ridden a few cyclocross races this autumn and using my light CX tyres and have had a puncture in one race then a double puncture in the next – all pinch flats from hitting rocks and having the tyres blown up firm doesn't seem to help. Hence deciding to try the Marathon Plus Tours – the same hopefully bombproof construction as the normal Marathon Plus, but with a bit of tread that seemed more suited for gravel roads and forest tracks of Finland. On this trip they were great – the grip felt great, even on Sunday morning riding back on snow. The only downer is that with those very meat tyres plus mudguards on, the bike felt bloody heavy. I'm not sure if serious CXers would want to race on them, although for me if they didn't puncture it would offset any slowness caused by their weight. For touring like this though they seem perfect, hopefully I'll get 10,000 trouble free kilometres out of this pair.

For cold weather bikepacking you need a bit more gear just to keep warm. I used the same set up as in September with my new Alpkit bikepacking bags and lashed-on dry bags but also took a waist pack; just that bit more capacity than I needed in summer. One of those bigger things for winter is the excellent Jöttnar Fjörm down jacket that I'm reviewing for UKClimbing currently. It's very warm and a nice “insurance” layer to have, obviously designed as an belay jacket for ice climbing but works great for any cold weather camping. It was stuffed with my sleeping bag in the dry bag that goes under saddle. This is fine when riding, but I need a number of straps to hold it in place which makes getting things out of the bag a hassle if you're not stopping for long. The obvious if a bit expensive solution to this is to buy one of Alpkit'sKoala seat packs, meaning retrieving a jacket from the seat pack would be easy, but I'm not convinced the Koala packs would fit as much as my current arrangement despite supposedly being the same size as my current dry bag I use there. Nevertheless, I know from winter climbing that your belay jacket HAS to be easy to reach because otherwise there is the temptation not to use it with the inevitable downwards circle into shivering. I guess with cold weather bike touring the situation is not dissimilar so I need to work this one out.

Bikepacking - new bags, new camera.

Autumn is here and the sky is full of skeins of geese

So far all my attempts at bikepacking have been made with gear that on the whole I already had. I did buy a cheap bar bag that worked well but it won't fit the wider bars of my cyclocross bike. I also bought a seatpost rack, but that snapped on my last trip. Mainly I've just lashed dry bags to various parts of the bike. But with the bikepacking idea taking off in the UK as well as elsewhere, the British firm Alpkit (who I've written about in the past) are now offering custom frame-bags and are bringing out additional bikepacking luggage. I invested in the Stingray frame-bag for my CX bike and also bought one of their "beta" Fuel Pods.

Packed up and ready to go

 Last weekend I went for an over-night trip to try the bags out. The morning before the ride had also seen the UPS guy deliver my new camera - a rather fine little Canon - so I was keen to try that out too. The photos in this post and video at the bottom were all taken with it.

Quiet Finnish roads #1

Quiet Finnish roads #2

It's pouring with rain now but last weekend was far closer to the glorious summer Finland has had this year, rather than this newly arrived, business-as-usual autumn. The sun shone until it set and then through the forest canopy I could still see lots of stars. I rode about 85 kms to a little beyond the town of Karkkila, around 100 kms northwest of Helsinki on Friday afternoon. Just west of the town the land becomes more forested and less agricultural, and with lots of lakes. I wanted to camp on a lake edge; for aesthetic reasons and simply as a source of water, and despite there being lots of lakes around those parts, I was quite surprised by how many summer cottages there also are - so it took me a few attempts at following various quiet gravel roads to find some lakeside forest that kept me a respectful distance from people enjoying the last weekend of great weather in their summer places.

I had thought perhaps optimistically that the mosquito season was now over so took a tarp but no mossie net. At first in the evening there were more than enough mossies to be annoying but interestingly later at night they all seemed to dissappear allowing me to sleep with my head out of my sleeping bag comfortably. It was just below 14 degrees when I went to bed (my new cycle computer very handily has a thermometer on it) and just below 12 when I woke up, so I'm now theorising that there must be some magic point between 12 and 14 degrees Celsius where its gets too cold for mosquitoes!

The morning sun starting to burn away the mist

Overnight camp

A bit before midnight I could hear in the distance some interesting howling, that at least to me didn't sound like a dog. Noting this on Twitter as I lay in my sleeping bag, caused some amusement amongst other late evening Twitter perusers around the world, along with some useful research done for me on the most southerly sightings on wolves in Finland, some terribly bad lupine-themed jokes, and even a friendly suggestion from the deputy mayor of Helsinki to make sure my tent zip was done up tight. This of course made the howls feel closer as I lay there under my door-less and indeed side-less tarp!

The only nighttime visitor

Dew droplets on a spider's web

Morning arrived sunny and wolf-free with the forest glistening in its thick coating of dew. I had some breakfast and coffee and made a reasonably quick start as I had promised to be home by lunchtime in order to be ready for the family's annual trip to Linnanmäki, Helsinki's long established amusement park. Overall I was gone for less than 24 hours and rode about 170 kms, probably split evenly between surfaced and unsurfaced roads - the kind of riding that my CX bike is perfect for.

Greeting the morning sun with coffee

Packed and ready to leave where I camped

 There's been some good stuff written, originating in the UK, about "microadventures", whilst from the US there's the idea of "S24O" - or sub-24-overnight bike trips. It's taken off in Helsinki too which is really great. The ideas are simply about encouraging people to get out, see some countryside and sleep under the stars. I think it's a great concept; not everyone has the time, money or family situation that allows them to go off for months to some far-off wilderness, but most of us can nip off for 24 hours, and some exercise plus a night out in the woods listening to the bird calls (and maybe even a wolf howl in the distance) has to be good for your health - physical and mental.

It's probably not funny at all to Finns, but I would love to live in a place called "Ahmoo"

Somewhere in the Finnish countryside

 The Alpkit bags seem great so far. The frame bag takes quite a lot of gear but doesn't bulge enough to rub. I picked the thinnest option, 4cm bulging to 6cm width, as it was for a CX bike. On a MTB you might be able to get away with a slightly wider bag. The 'fuel pod' also worked well, although due to the hydroformed frame shape at the front of the cross-bar on my bike, I could do with the velcro tabs being a little longer, whilst the tab that goes around the stem could be thinner. They only had them in size large when I bought it, so went for that size by default. Nevertheless it's not that big, so I think the smaller option must be tiny with room just for some energy gels or similar. I wasn't sure when I ordered it, but I'm glad I got the bigger size.

The Alpkit "Fuel Pod", size large

Drops bars on a CX bike making attaching luggage to the handle bars trickier. A small-ish dry bag packed no bigger than to fit between the drops works OK, and for this trip I had some much better straps to hold it on. These are from the Aussie firm, Sea-to-Summit, which make some of the most intelligent little bits-and-bobs for camping and outdoor pursuits, as well as some amazing if very pricey serious gear like this very high quality sleeping bag that I reviewed for UKclimbing a couple of winters ago. They were sillily expensive for a couple of nylon straps - about €10 - but the alloy locking buckles on them work very well and didn't loosen despite hours of vibration, particularly riding on gravel road - so as long as I don't lose them they should pay off in the long term!

Bikepacking: to Karkkila and back from Toby A. on Vimeo.

Kyrkskär - sailing and cragging in the Finnish Archipelago

Round much of the UK, the border between land and ocean is pretty abrupt - there are a lot of cliffs where the land drops precipitately away into the sea. Indeed sea cliff climbing is a very special part of UK climbing, and something that isn't as common elsewhere as you might think. Finland is different - for a lot of the coastline the border is much more fuzzy - sea and land bleed into each other with the archipelagos of little islands, peninsular and skerries and the forest-fringed bays, channels and fjords in-between. Sea views of the type normal in the UK are oddly rare along the southern coast of Finland at least - from the mainland there are normally islands further out blocking your view to open water. Sailing is obviously a great way to explore all these channels and island and unsurprisingly popular. You might not need to think much of tides or waves or storms sailing around coastal Finland but you do need to read your charts/GPS plotter very carefully to watch out for the myriad of rocks, reefs and shallow water that abounds.

Busy shipping lanes passing the approaches to Turku

I'm a bit of a landlubber but still love being out on the sea, so am very fortunate that my friend and regular climbing partner Dave is an experienced and keen sailor and sometime I get crew for him. This generally takes the form of him laughing at me for being so slow on the winches and conversations along the lines of:

Dave: "haul in the tiddly-pong to tauten the widdly-dee!"
Toby: "....errr?? You what?"

Sailing in the Turku archipelago

But when Dave told me a couple of years ago about an interesting looking crag he had seen while sailing I was even more keen than normal to get on the boat and be completely out of my natural element. We've now been twice and it's a beautiful place with some nice little climbs, so well worth a visit for any Finnish climbers who have access to a boat.

Wine on the rocks

Jellyfish - there were LOTS of these on the first visit

Sea kayakers who know what they are doing could also get there reasonably easily starting from road 1830 south of Dalsbruk. There are plenty of other little islands between the mainland and Kyrkskär, so you could island hop with a maximum open water sections of only a couple of kilometres.

Dave on the first ascent of Iiris Corner (5/HVS 5a)

The reason for the two visits was the climb that would become Iiris Corner - the most obvious and strongest line on the crag. On the first visit I hadn't brought along my biggest cam - the biggest we had was a #4 Camalot and despite it's rather big size, it still wasn't enough to protect the crux moves. On the second visit I had my big Rock Empire Pulsar (I guess about the same size as a #5 Camalot) and with some judicious shoving it up the wide bit ahead of him, Dave 'sent' the first ascent. You need the cam to protect getting on to the foot ledge at about two thirds height. Above this the cracks widens further but it can be protected - I'll say no more beyond take a 120 cm sling and your best wild west skills.

Your correspondent on the first ascent of Swimming with Jellyfish (5-/VS 4c)

We've now recorded 7 routes on the island, including one unfinished project that we both fell off lots of time and didn't have time to try harder on! It now sports a jammed #2 DMM Wallnut to mark the limits of our scrabbling efforts and to tempt some better climber to the finish the line off and think of a good name for it.

Dave onsights the first ascent of Wall Route (6-/E1 5b)

Dave climbs Corner Route (5+/HVS 5b)

One of the great things about the crag is that there is very little lichen on it compared to most inland Finnish crags. We haven't need to brush anything, a real rarity around here, meaning besides Iiris Corner all of our routes have been onsight first ascents, which is always nice.

In the foreground the huge slit boulder, in the background the main cliff.

The very obvious polished offwidth in the massive boulder that sits in front of the main crag still awaits an ascent. It overhangs at the bottom and is horribly smooth, but looks to ease off higher up. I think it would a be more of a boulder problem than a route but make no promises - if you could send the bottom section a rope and some gear for the top out might be nice.

Looking northwest from the top of the cliff

So, topos and maps are all on 27crags. Sailors should note that the wonderful natural harbour is actually on the island to the south, Tistronskär, but there is a tiny isthmus of stones that link the two. There is a summer cottage on Kyrkskär, so if you are coming from Tistronskär it is best to go hard left once you've walked over the little isthmus. You need to push through some trees and follow the shoreline around a bit, but this avoids walking into the yard-area of the cottage. Having said that, it seems to have been unoccupied both times we've visited, but just do the normal 'everyman's right' thing of respecting the privacy of areas around people's houses.

Evening at the anchorage

The anchorage is a great spot with rock slabs plunging down into the sea meaning boats can be tied up close to the shore. I've still not go my head around the seeming sailing "tradition" of graffiti-ing your ship's name on- or even worse?, carving its name into the rock at the anchorage! Considering chipping the rock is about as close as we get to a mortal sin in climbing, it's an odd one - but there you go. You can see that sailors have been occasionally visiting this wonderful spot for some time, I hope some climbers get the chance to go now but no need for us to leave any similar permanent traces (hence apologies for the jammed nut!).

 Early autumn bounty, chanterelles for tea.

Heading home - plain sailing

Racing the afternoon ferry from Stockholm back up the Airisto channel

Home at sunset