Sand skiing in Jiehtájohka

On the way back home from the Käsivarsi wilderness area heli-hiking trip, we saw a large sand dune near the Jiehtájohka river as we were driving by. We were about to stop at a restaurant few kilometers away, and fortunately Jarmo and Duncan were game for returning after lunch to check out the dune. And indeed, there was sand, it was steep enough to be skied, and I was able to make a couple of turns on my red mini-skis! Enough to call the month's turns done.

And thanks guys for taking the photos and videos while I skied :-)

But this sudden appearance of a skiable sand dune came after some earlier disappointments. I had my mini skis on the hiking trip. Carried them for tens of kilometers... *Except* of course on the side trip that we unexpectedly found the snow on the north side of a far-away ridge. 

Well, maybe that's just as well. As you can see above, there's a narrow snow patch on a steep ridge. The mini-skis are great for taking them into different places, but they are not the safest skis to make precision turns on treacherous places with sharp boulders to fall onto. 

We also saw snow on the far away mountains while we hiked, and even some snow from the windows of the helicopter, but didn't have time or money to make extra stops.

Finally, we also saw snow in the Olos ski resort (near where we stayed in Särkijärvi). Unfortunately, it was snow stored for the next winter season, covered by thick blankets:

Anyway, despite these disappointments I managed to make my turns in August :-) All hail the sand skiing!

Video:

Jiehtájohka is the Saami name; the Finnish version Hietajoki (sandy river). The dune is in these coordinates: N 68.468224 E 22.423468. There's easy access from the road, and space to park. I'm sure there's plenty of more of the sand in this area, but the area right towards the road seemed to be the one with most open sand.

The Käsivarsi trip was for discovering caves. It is discussed separately here, here, and here. And the previous year's trip's findings were discussed here; I also skied back then, but in the wilderness, see this article.

A picture of Duncan's camera after he had taken photos:

More pictures of the snow we found near a ridge behind Doskalharj:

More pictures from Jiehtájohka:

Read the full Planetskier series at planetskier.net, or all blog articles from Blogspot or TGR. Photos and text (c) 2024 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.  The audio has been generated by Google's NotebookLM in podcast mode.