Tag: Mätäsvaara

  • First night slept in the car. It wasn’t bad at all!

    Small pond “Harakkalampi” in the morning

    We ate breakfast (as fast as we could -the mosquitoes were eating us!) and packed the car. Soon we were driving again.
    First stop we made at one old ironworks area called “Möhkö”.
    Unluckily they have entrance fee to almost everything there is to see so we checked only the cafeteria that was built inside a boat and the old boatcanal.

    This is cafeteria
    This canal they hardly use anymore

    After Möhkö there is very big museum-area about WW II called “Öykkösenvaaran battle zone”. There would be quite a lot to see but we wanted to continue driving. At least I took a picture of this:

    WW II cannon

    The route I was choosing is marked pretty much as the main road… At least in some maps. But I can say that I was about to loose my faith many times! It didn’t seem like the road was leading anywhere! And when I tried to check from google maps where we were -there was no internet!!
    This was the road: https://goo.gl/maps/zsoDNcJEPmVnNNgL8
    But finally we made it to the bigger road and after maybe 2,5 hours of driving we made it to the Ruunaa rapids! Amazing area with many different kind of wild rapids…

    Neitikoski rapids in Ruunaa

    There is also some islands where you can walk and it was so nice to see a duck family there swimming!

    Mother duck with… How many babies?

    You can also see the work of the Beaver in Ruunaa! In one place there was more than 10 trees fallen… It would be nice to see the “guy” in action!!

    Work of Beaver!

    After Ruunaa we were still driving north, we visited Mätäsvaara mine. This used to be the biggest Molybdenum -mine in Finland but it stopped working already in 1947 because nobody needed Molybdenum anymore.

    This is very interesting place! Old mine…

    Finally we arrived to one camping area from where we booked one small cabin. This was in Suomussalmi (one of my own personal favorite places in Finland!) We still took a drive to the “city” and went swimming.

    Kiantajärvi in Suomussalmi

    The route for our second day was like this: