National landscape of Finland

Today we hiked up to 492 metes to the peak of Särkitunturi. Särki comes from Sami language and means blueberry. Tunturi is the word for mountain in Lapland.

Särkitunturi is part of Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park. It’s one of the national landscapes of Finland. Many ads have been shot in these landscapes. What I remember are beer and cheese ads that use this kind of imagery. During summer months there’s 150 different bird species.

The route was good and there were resting areas along the way. There was even a small lake with small pier that you could jump into the lake from (and there were kids swimming!). On the peak there was wood to burn if you wanted to make a fire and barbecue something to eat and there was a toilet and another small lake to enjoy. But the view…

…it was fabulous. It was very hard to choose just one picture.

We could see Sweden. The peak is about 20-25km from the Swedish border. We could see all the other tunturis: Pallas, Ylläs, Olos, perhaps others too.

Luckily we didn’t see any reindeer (dogs would have gone berserk) or bears. Not too many mosquitoes either. The higher we went the fewer insects.

We saw two reindeers on our way. A mother and a calf and as I was taking pictures of them I saw that my camera batteries were to die. My DSLR is in Helsinki as we have soooo much stuff to carry and I’ve been using my back up camera Ixus. Luckily we have cameras in mobiles these days so today wasn’t a total lost.

PS. I think I managed to add one to the extras. With the slow connection it's been very difficult to do.