In northern Finland’s “arctic resort” area around Saariselkä, a company has gone all-in on visitors seeking the Northern Lights. This outfit has been around since the 1970’s, starting with bare scratch campsites for hire. It’s grown a bit…

The place has scores of independently-sited log cabins with glass igloo anterooms, each facing the magnetic pole.  These are spread around something like 130 acres in the compound.

But wait – there’s also a king-size dining hall, dozens of miniature cache-houses on posts which serve as exterior lighting, a multi-hall art gallery, dramatic structures focused on sky viewing,  a  new planetarium (in a 200m sphere), outdoor art installations on a grand scale, …

 

 

I’m reminded of the Hammond character in Jurassic Park:  “Spared no expense”.

After bopping around Helsinki, we boarded the day train up to Rovaniemi. The views from the train alternated between modern bustling cities, idyllic hamlets or villages, and a whole bunch of lakes and forests. What there wasn’t was hills; it makes for efficient train-ing, but a certain sameness of the scenery.

The next day, we took a hired automobile further into Lapland, along a well maintained highway—that at one point doubled as a runway, with six times the normal width and painted markers on the tarmac. The whole area up to Kakslattenun still presented as level, or with trivial grades. Then, on the final push to Ivalo, something new: we started up a pass near Magneettimäki (Magnetic Hill).

We were rising at the same time that the trees were shrinking. Just a little ways to the south, the pines and birches reached the same 40′ that we’d seen hundreds of km south on the train, but now both varieties tapered from that height to 10′, then 5′, then to almost nothing. Near the summit, both sides of the road bristled with outsized snow fencing; these fences aren’t your run-of-the-mill Wyoming snow fences, nah: these were 12′ high, in multiple stretches aligned to multiple azimuths. The arrangement looked not so much haphazard as reactive, as if after the first blizzard blocked the road they put in fences to defend for it, but the next blizzard came with winds from another direction, and that too prompted new fences, and so forth for the next blizzard. The hillsides, scrubbed of trees, and of small shrubs, could barely hold on to the low tundra coverings.

We came down the other side of the pass and the normal pattern returned, the trees regained their stature, and now the mild relief of the land seemed different, no longer mundane, but showing that the forest is a badge of success, that plant life has progressed as far as is possible.

Our flight to Helsinki cut northeast across British Columbia and Alberta, aiming to just clip Iceland before the longer part of the Atlantic crossing. We saw Kamloops and Red Deer pass under our track before winging over the less-populated northern ends of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Then came an urgent P.A. call for medical aid, “Is there a doctor or nurse onboard?“, accompanied by intense flight attendant activity, and quickly the beep-beep of an automated external defibrillator (AED). Many minutes of team CPR followed, in the midship galley, during which it seemed the plane might be descending and turning… but the flight map held no hope of ground-based assistance. Winnipeg and Keflavik were both hours away, and other closer strips that might support the A330 aircraft held no cardiac promise. valitettavasti hän oli kuollut

The downside of polar airliner routes is that there are large spaces of time and geography where you’re on your own.