Karelian heartland

Google Earth is in many ways a totally different map of the globe. Apart from providing so many views to the ground below it also has so many settings you can switch on or off. This includes also the borders of nations. Without the added border lines the countries often melt together when observed from above.

Not many borders in the world have etched such a clear frontier to the physical landscape as that between Finland and Russia. The border exclusion zone used to be quite broad in the time when the Soviet Union still was present. There were restricted zones on both sides of the border. Today the restrictions are not so strict. Within three kilometers of the border you need a permit, You can live there, have agriculture and so on.

Where the 65th parallel crosses the border, the native landscape has been wet, swampy forest. In the Russian side the forest has largely remained in that state.

The screenshot above shows the existing borderline from the space. The added pink line shows the position of the Parallel 65 North. The light green young forest on the western side is also streaked with draining ditches. The eastern side is more or less intact. You can also easily see the actual border line cut in the forest to make an elbow turn towards north by north-east.

When we advance eastwards, the forests give way to another lake district. There are also more and more villages, small and larger. First we see the Lake Sudnozero and a small village which even has an old russian orthodox church built of round logs. Image below by Aleksey Protasov.

Not far from this place open the wide stretches of the three Kuito lakes. The significance of the lakes has been great for the salesmen in the middle ages who used to travel by boat in the roadless frontier. Their trips reached up to the Finnish coastal towns. The villages and settlements around the lakes were originally populated by Karelian people whose language is closely related to Finnish. Actually most parts of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala has been transcribed from the local folklore. Even the largest city in the area bears the name Kalevala. It sits on the northern shore of the Middle Kuito lake.

The waters of the Kuito lakes drain through the river Kem which meanders in the boggy landscape first to south-east and then back to north. The route starting from the Kuito lakes seems to be very nice for boating and canoeing. There are some rapids in the river but due to the high water flow it most probably gives one a comfortable ride. The river slows down from time to time to form sizable lakes. The first one is lake Panozero where Kari T-S, a Finnish tourist has captured this scene of cattle gathered around a new farm house of traditional construction.

Next we come to an even larger lake, which we later recognize as being a man-made reservoir for a hydroelectric power plant. The Krivoporozhsky reservoir has been there for thirty years. Thanks to the virtual nature of our travel we need not to worry about the dam in the river. A few clicks and downstream we go past the village of Avnyeporog. With about 150 inhabitants a local pub may not be so profitable but the Audi in the front tells a different story (Image by maklai).

Even if it would make it more interesting to follow the river, I follow my guideline, the 65th parallel and in less than 50 kilometers find myself over seashore at the town of Rabocheostrovsk. The huge expanse of sea is a surprising sight. But that is mostly due to my own ignorance. I really had no idea that the White Sea which is in fact a giant bay inlet of the Arctic Ocean, reaches this far south. So here finally is the end of the river Kem.

I really had to double check the map of the White Sea to see how wrong I had been. The southern reach of the White Sea is actually another 135 kilometers south from my latitude (shown with a red line in the image below).

A view from the harbour of Rabocheostrovsk by picabiette. That is where I need to go next.

Eastward bound

Finland is a country which shares one common property with the two other nordic countries, Sweden and Norway: it is long in south north direction, but relatively narrow from east to west. Coincidentally the 65 N parallel crosses Finland at its narrowest waist-line. From the waters of the Gulf of Bothnia (still frozen solid) to the Russian border the distance is a mere 195 km (120 miles). The distance is small but I think I'll start with low speed as there are also many interesting images available on that first leg on my journey.

Before I leave the my home turf, the rural parts of city of Oulu show a wide network of bike, ski and snowmobile tracks. The bike tracks are mostly for summer use, but the ski tracks have a double function during the summer months. They are used for trekking, jogging and cross country biking.

The above photo shows a nice little bridge built on a track causeway crossing the western end of the Lake Seluska in the newest parts of the city. The snow has melted and the lake water is high as seen by the flow on the front of the image. (Image by Kimmo Lahti).

The water is very close to all Finns. The city of Oulu has its own river (aptly called the River Oulu), on which the city was originally built hundreds of years ago. There are also a few smaller tributaries inland. The next significant river north of Oulu is called Kiiminginjoki and its upper stretches turn to south-east forming a nice recreational waterway (120 km inside the city limits) to paddlers and fishermen. Quite a few rapids make the river fully navigable only for the most experienced whitewater paddlers. However there is a fully documented route description for those who are interested.

The image above shows the serenity of the river Kiiminginjoki at the Ylivuotto village (Image by marko_). Still upstream the river turns again to east following neatly the 65th parallel. It forms a string of small lakes which have been suitable locations for small farms and today also for holiday cottages. An interesting testimony of old history is the following image which shows the remnants of an old water driven lumber mill (Image by Eero Paso).

The landscape around the 65th parallel in Finland is a mix of forest and farmland. Small villages of only a few houses each are scattered throughout the countryside and a tight network of small dirt roads connects them to outer world. Towards the eastern border the flat landscape turns hilly and at the same time also proportion of old, unmanaged forest increases. Along with that also other wildlife becomes more varied and more easterly in terms of individual species.

Several species of lichen covering a mossy rock in an old forest (Image by terhirepo).

Mineral sources are not very common in central Finland. There should be no reason for the apparent absence of mineral riches, but there are not many places where the bedrock is exposed for the prospectors to do their work. There has been however a few exceptions in the past as we see in the last photograph showing an abandoned quarzite quarry near the Lake Kianta and the community of Suomussalmi (Image by psp67).

Suomussalmi is the easternmost urban area approximately at 65 degrees North in Finland and not far from it is the Russian border, which we will cross in the next episode blog.

What on Earth??

This blog is actually going to do a round the globe trip following roughly the 65th northern parallel. I will be traveling east starting from my own home town, the city of Oulu, Finland.

One of the main inspiration sources has been the Google Earth software, which I found pretty quickly after its publication about ten years ago. I feel myself really a veteran user of Google Earth and it would make a good topic for a blog article to describe the technical challenges posed by the relatively high processing load for the computer and net connection I used to have by then.

I know that there are numerous other blogs being authored of the discoveries people have made using just their home computers and Google Earth. I hope however that mine will be little different, since it will be geographically limited and eventually find its end point when my journey reaches my home again.

Everybody knows that the circumference of the Earth is roughly 40000 km and after a brief brush-up of my latent geometry skills I could calculate that the 65th parallel measures slightly more than 16900 km. Consequently the sun traverses about 705 km of our latitude each hour.

In order to fit the trip to 24 nice weekly episodes I must keep up with the pace of the sun, albeit in the opposite direction. Of course there will be stretches which are too monotonous to deserve a longer study. Also the other way around I may find myself stuck in some interesting area finding it very hard to depart again to continue my journey.

I will rely much also on the photographs many of the residents and tourists of these northern parts of the world have posted to the Panoramio photo service. Another beautiful feature, the Street View will be of very limited use for me, since my roads will most of the times go where the Google view recording cars have never gone.

By the way, there is also a similar topic in the Wikipedia article “65th parallel north”. You may want to read it for a starter to have an idea of what parts of the world my tour is going to visit.

The start and reference of scale – City of Oulu

The City of Oulu has grown steadily to the third largest communities in Finland after metropolitan Helsinki area and Tampere. After the most recent annexation of neighboring communities the city area is also huge – only slightly smaller than that of the Greater London.

The 65^th parallel crosses the city just south of the city center. There are no formal signs of the latitude crossing. It merely is an imaginary line, even if a very important one for my blog topic. The image above shows the exact spot where the parallel 65 rather unceremoniously crosses the road from the west. The building used to be one of the many in this area of car dealerships, which today are driven outside of the busiest shopping districts.

When I am writing this story Oulu is waking up to the spring. The winter 2015 – 16 was not only mild, it was also surprisingly poor on snow here. I know, that if I physically would travel the 65^th parallel to east today, I would see totally opposite snow conditions not far from here. The ski resorts towards the eastern border of Finland are still busy.

I bring the snow situation up, because I know that most parts of the 65^th parallel are among the snowiest in the world. Of course this virtual travel will not be consistent in terms of seasons since I will experience the places mostly on Google Earth satellite images taken during summer months. However the encountered user photographs may be taken any time around the year.

The image on the right shows the snow status today as presented on the Foreca weather service page. The red line is showing the approximate location of the 65th parallel. See how neatly it dissects the country in two halves, almost equal in height but also marking the snow-free spring conditions below the 65N.

The last image shows view near 65th parallel in Greenland where this radar base in deep snow is awaiting us later on our journey. Image by Leif Fielstrup Guldbrandsen. Panoramio.