Our Route Map

The red route takes you to our reindeer herding corral. Here you can see the structures that the reindeer herders use when they collect their reindeer from the forest. It is only used two or three times a year, at mid-summer and at mid-winter, but you can look in and around the fences, or light a fire in the shelter and have a winter picnic up here in this rare setting.

The green route takes you northwest from our kennel up the the Old Niesi Road, which is an old horse cart track used over a hundred years ago to get to the village of Niesi 22km away. After 1km it turns left and directly south along Sunshine Boulevard, which lines up with the first brief sunrise at around midday after our month-long polar night. Then after a couple of bends it turns southwest along the Flagstone Line, which is an old mapping baseline, called a "paasilinja" in Finnish, which was made by cutting long straight lines through the forest throughout Finland. A "paasi" is also a big stone, or a pile of flat stones, which was used as a navigational aid like a cairn, hence the term flag stone. The end of the green route crosses the southern tip of the Lower Peatbog finishing at the "Spaghetti Junction"! From here it's now possible to go a number of ways:

The blue route continues southwards and takes you down to the river where there is a bridge that offers pretty views, and, if you're lucky, you might catch sight of an otter or a white-throated dipper on the riverbanks. Just before the bridge, the route divides to the left and then the right, making the Lower and Upper River Routes. The Lower River Route takes you in a 2km loop downstream, around and over Honey Hill back to Spaghetti Junction, or, over Little Big Hill, down onto the lake and back to the cabins. The Upper River Route takes you along a less used path towards an area of the forest called "Narnia". However, it's easier to get to Narnia by following the purple route for half a kilometre from Spaghetti Junction.

The purple route takes you from Spaghetti Junction to the turning down to Narnia, an untouched, ancient and magical part of the forest off to the side of the route, full of big old trees clinging to the steep river bank. Here, the head of the river flows over gentle rapids at Luusuankoski, which are ice-free in winter. You need to take snowshoes along with you to explore this area, as Narnia is very much "off-piste".

If you decide to stay on the main Narnia route for another half a kilometre, it will take you to a fork in the route. The left-hand path will take you via the Little Marsh up the hill to the reindeer herding corral. The right-hand path will take you along the old School Route and up to the Upper Corral Route, along part of the red route, and then back towards the Flagstone Line. 200m on from where the School Route joins the Upper Corral Route it forks again - if you take the the right-hand path you will be on the orange route, called the Lower Corral Route, which goes down to cross over the Flagstone Line at Red Rock and continues around to the Westside of the lake. From here it's just a short way back to the cabins.

The yellow routes weave their way through all the other routes and connect up all the peatbogs: the Upper Peatbog, the Little Marsh, the Lower Peatbog and the Straight Line over the last peatbog to Little Lake. Here a dilapidated "kota" sits next to an ancient reindeer hunting pit from the days before reindeer herding was practiced.