Brass Monkeys

TALES FROM THE FAR NORTH

The mercury was hovering around minus 20, I hadn’t seen another person for an hour, and my nose was frozen, numb and beginning to ache. The bandanna over my face was encrusted in ice. On either sides of me were deep banks of snow.

I pulled out my phone to check my location - I was deep in the northern pine forests and certainly didn’t want to get lost - but as I pealed off my gloves my hands froze. So I tucked it away and marched on.

I am lucky enough to spend a good portion of my life walking and guiding in gorgeous locations, not least in and around the remote valley I call home in British Columbia.

But this time I wasn’t in Canada but in Finland, only a hundred or so miles from the Russian border and well inside the Arctic Circle. And it was everything I had hoped for.

Breathing the air felt like imbibing a cool draft of water on a hot summer’s day. The forest was silent in the way that only deep winter can be truly silent. And the sunlit views of the distant horizon beguiling and almost otherworldly.

In my life I have visited one or two of the great cold places on earth (though sadly not the High Arctic or Antarctica). I have travelled to Yakutia in eastern Siberia in February where the temperature regularly drops to minus 50.

It was so cold I bought a large fur hat made from an animal called a raccoon dog. I am not a big advocate of hunting or trapping but it was the only thing I could find that had any chance of keeping my head from freezing.

Another time I crossed the Russian border near Murmansk and headed to Kirkenes, probably Norway’s most remote town. I bought a Russian military greatcoat for that trip - warm but extremely heavy.

I have also been to Oimyakon a small settlement so frigid that it is in the books as the coldest permanently-inhabited place on earth. (Antarctica is colder but is not considered permanently inhabited.)

Oimyakon once registered a temperature of minus 72 degrees Celsius. The locals eat slices of pony meat and fish for burbot through holes they drill in the ice of frozen lakes using an augur and I don’t remember seeing a single vegetable.

Oimyakon is not for the faint-hearted. It is so cold in the winter that farmers cover their cows’ udders with fur to prevent them from freezing. There is no indoor plumbing and a daily trip to the outhouse is a memorable experience.

Nevertheless it is a happy place. I heard little of the whinging you often do in more clement climes. Locals extolled the virtues of sub-zero living - no germs survive the cold one told me - and were proud of the town’s place in the record books.

A few years later I moved to Canada. I spent my first winter in Winnipeg (Winterpeg the Canadians call it.) Temperatures sometimes dipped below minus 40 and the centre of the city was notorious for funnelling the winds that ripped across the prairies.

One day I set out for northern Manitoba to write about a dispute between some miners and the local First Nations. The thermometer showed minus 44 that day and, after a ride on a snowmobile, patches of my skin turned white and waxy.

Of course, as we age, our resistance to the cold decreases. Our circulation suffers, and hands and feet - especially those that have been frozen in the past - quickly become numb.

And it had been a few years since I subjected myself to what I think of as proper cold. But after weeks of London rain by the end of January this year I was ravenous for something different.

And so when Janek, the brother of my late wife Kristin, an Estonian, invited me to spend some time with him and some of his family and friends in a large cabin in the far north of Finland I jumped at the chance.

It was a wonderful week - some gentle snowmobiling, plates of king crab at a local restaurant, reindeer mince on waffles for lunch, lonely sub-arctic walks and an afternoon sledding across the frozen tundra behind dogs.

A sore shoulder kept me off the ski slopes, but I even managed a touch of animal tracking, picking out the spore of snowshoe hare, northern squirrels, and, at one point, what I thought was a lynx (but was probably a large domestic dog.)

Midway through the holiday I was so exuberant I even ran out of the sauna and threw myself into the deep snow. The Estonians nodded approvingly.

Of course nothing lasts forever - not even a cold snap. By day five or six the sky began to cloud over and the temperatures warmed. Minus 25 edged up to minus 15, and finally the temperature reached a pedestrian minus 7.

I repeated my 10 mile walk in the snow, but somehow it just wasn’t quite the same. At one point - heading uphill - I even had to take off my hat and gloves.

I am back in more moderate regions now. In fact as I write this I am in southern Ukraine. My musings over the next 10 days or so will be aired on the podcast Battleground Ukraine. (Google it if you would like to listen - or check out my journalism blog Back from the Front.) After that I have a week in Kosovo.

Wild Bear Lodge in winter. Photo by Tom Weager.

But snow is never far from my thoughts and I can’t help thinking I need some quality winter time in Canada. The lodge is so pretty in the winter, the river ice-encrusted, and there is that wonderful frigid air.

Perhaps next year.

NEWS & LINKS

+ The place I stayed at in Finland is called Kittila. It’s not the cheapest holiday out there but if anyone fancies a week of true winter to alleviate the drizzle of a British February I highly recommend it. In January this year it was minus 39 degrees so midwinter is not for the faint-hearted.

+ I have now opened booking at Wild Bear Lodge for 2027. We will be offering bear-viewing in early June and a Best of the Wilderness holiday - which entails a variety of delights - from mid June. We will also be offering our regular grizzly bear holidays in October and with fish numbers on the climb we should be in for some great viewings. Send me an email if you would like to know more.