The drive up from Kittilä was already an experience, with the one-hour break at Muonio, feeling the landscape changing and turning more and more spectacular at the same time as the mountains grew higher and the trees turned smaller. First the spruces disappeared, then the pine-trees, and around Karesuando where the first reindeers ran across the road, the pine trees started to vanish as well. I was sitting in front in order to see the world changing, and enjoyed watching the busdriver stop every now and then in the middle of nowhere, when there was a big box by the road side, and throw in a newspaper or other mail, like an expert basket ball player, as a fellow passenger remarked. There was almost an incident developing when we arrived at the gas station at Kilpisjärvi village, since a bunch of Norwegian snowmobile drivers had left their vehicles lying around so the bus could not turn. Luckily they appeared to remove them, peace prevailed and the trip could go on a few more kilometers. I had no problem finding my way to the station, since two elderly ladies (well, I am an elderly lady myself) on the bus were headed there, too. And the station is next to the road.
The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the mountains looked exactly like they should in a proper travel advertisement, the buildings were covered in glittering snow, in fact everything was covered in snow. Snow makes things beautiful; it makes the landscape into one whole. In small doses snow can turn any landscape clear and apprehensible, by reducing unnecessary detail and making the main forms and lines stand out. That kind of cosmetic snowcover is not needed in a landscape like this, with the mountains providing all the form and clarity (or obscurity) you might wish for. In contrast to their imposing majestic shapes the small birches abounding everywhere, with their dark twisted stems and branches standing out against the snow provide the decorative details. I was breathing deep faced with all this beauty and then slowly started to realize that I would not be able to move without skis or snow shoes. And my first impulse was to look for a place where I could place my camera on tripod within reach from the opened paths and still get a view of the lake. Then I realized that instead of making some kind of emergency decisions, I should perhaps accept that I might have to alter my plans and think again, look again, and give this new world a chance to appear without imposing my expectations and plans. And perhaps I should try to borrow some snow shoes (which I did, the next day). I snapped some photos with my phone without actually seeing anything in the dazzling light, as if wanting to gather evidence of what I saw around me, (two of them you can see here at the end), as if the view could disappear at any moment. And in fact it did, and does. The weather changes all the time, as on the Atlantic coast, when the clouds keep rolling in. Probably the sea really is close by, behind the mountains. While I am writing this, the snow is falling again, covering the landscape in an ever thicker white carpet. So I guess I have to start planning how I might be performing snow...
