Improbable story

A good long walk today - the Pieni Karhunkierros Trail. That's literally the "little bear trail". The full bear trail - the Karhunkierros - is an end to end walk of 82 kilometres, but its little brother is 12 kms (well 14 kms if you walk from the furthest car park as we did). The 82 kms trail takes several days to complete - that is unless you are a completely bonkers ultra marathon runner like the husband of a friend of ours. He did **there and back** (i.e. 160 kms) in just a shade over 24 hours in late May (in the appropriately named #NUTSKarhunkierros). I cannot imagine... Mind you, coming 5th, he was a full 4 hours behind the winner, and only just ahead of the winner of the women's race. Well, kudos to them all, I say.

Anyway, the little brother walk kept us busy for 4 hours or so in the late morning / early afternoon. Quite tough enough for us, with quite a lot of steep ups and downs on wooden steps that have been constructed in order to make a ravine down which the Kitkajoki river flows with quite a lot of rapids accessible to the walking public. And down that river come white water rafting boats, of the type seen here. Now we were wondering, when we saw these two boats, whether in fact the boats - and the public in them, whom we saw at a nearby hut enjoying some refreshments - had come down the rapids. Closer inspection of the website on our return to the cottage revealed that in fact the boats come down on their own, empty, and then are presumably retrieved by the guides. Had we arrived a few minutes earlier, we'd have seen the spectacle and worked out how they do it, which isn't entirely clear to me. In any event, the other rapids that we saw on the river would have been too much for me. For sure, this is one "thrilling" trip that we won't be taking.