Skiing in Levi

May 10, 2023August 13, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

The last segment of our trip was to another small town in Lapland called Levi. It’s only about an hour from Yllas, so we drove there after our visit to the snow hotel. While I didn’t care to sleep in a snow hotel, I was keen to try out one of the glass huts. There are several different glass huts around the region and as the name suggests, they are basically glass roofed hotel rooms. Unsurprisingly, they are not cheap, so I shopped around a bit before deciding on the Northern Lights Huts in Levi, which are pretty new and the cheapest I could find in the region.

It was a great choice! It’s located on a reindeer farm about 20 minutes away from Levi town. There’s 10 glass huts on the property and we had one booked for 2 nights. The huts are very new and really nice on the inside, so it was nice to relax for a little bit after a busy day of dogsledding. We returned to town for supper, but otherwise had a chill evening.

My primary motivation in booking the hut was as a last ditch attempt to make it easy to see the northern lights. Fortunately, we’d already seen them 4 nights in a row by then, so it removed a lot of the pressure. The geomagnetic storm was winding down and the KP was back around 2-3 for our last two nights, so I wasn’t sure if we would see them. On the first night it was pretty cloudy and we didn’t see anything before bed. The app said the clouds would clear around midnight, so I set an alarm and we woke up at midnight and could see them from our bed! So it ended up working out nicely because I definitely would not have trudged down to the lake in Akaslompolo at midnight, but it was nice to wake up and watch them inside for a bit and then go back to sleep.

On our last full day in Lapland we had planned a second skiing day. Levi resort is bigger than Yllas and fortunately the wind storm had moved on and the entire resort was open! While Yllas only had two faces to access the mountain, Levi had at least 4. There are two main lifts, one from Levi town and one from the south face, which is where we opted to start. Levi was busier than Yllas, so it took a while to get our rentals, but after that there was a lot of terrain to choose from.

I recall there being at least 3 chair lifts and 1 gondola, but pretty much all the other lifts were T-bars and there must have been at least a dozen of them! The mountain is completely bare on top, so you can pretty much ski down it in any direction. Each T-bar only services about 2-3 runs, so we slowly made our way around the mountain. The terrain was simple enough that we could ski any run on the mountain, so we just explored as much as we could. It’s a very different experience than skiing in Canada, but I enjoyed it more than Yllas.

We had lunch at a small restaurant on the east side of the mountain, but my favourite skiing terrain was on the west side. While the temperatures had been between -10 to -20 degrees celsius when we arrived in Rovaniemi, it had warmed up a lot over the week and it was around 0 degrees when we skied Levi. It felt much warmer and it even starting to feel a bit like Spring. There was no fresh powder on either mountain that we skied, but because it’s generally cold and dry in Lapland, neither mountain was icy.

We discovered a pancake restaurant in Levi that I was excited to try for dinner on our last night. So we enjoyed some giant savoury pancakes before retiring to our hut for the evening. The KP was only 2 on the last night, so I wasn’t expecting much even though it was clear, but the aurora treated us a real show! I guess because we’re so far north, you can still get a very active sky, even with a low KP.

At first the lights seemed pretty normal and similar to other nights, but around 9 or 10pm they got incredibly active and despite having the glass roof, I couldn’t resist going outside to photograph them. The lights were pulsing from horizon to horizon and we couldn’t catch the full scope of them from inside. It was probably the second best night we’d seen them and it was a real treat to witness them swirling across the sky one last time. Seth had kind of gotten over the allure by that point, but the northern lights captivated me every single night I saw them. I admit I got a little obsessed and since I returned home, I’ve been plotting when I can see them again.

The aurora goes through cycles throughout the night, but they also go through larger cycles throughout time. We’re currently heading into a period of increased geomagnetic activity for the next few years, so it should be easier to see them over the next 5 years, so if there’s ever been a time to plan an aurora trip, this is it!

Our last day in Finland was pretty boring. We enjoyed our buffet breakfast at the hotel and then drove two hours back to Rovaniemi to catch our flight. One thing we learned is that the Finns all have a secret sweet tooth and eat a lot of candy and chocolate. Finnish chocolate is really creamy and delicious, so we stopped by the grocery store on the way back to stock up. We had an uneventful flight back to Helsinki and returned to Katie’s apartment for our last night.

Katie took us to a ramen restaurant for our last meal and we spent an hour walking around the city before returning to her place for one last sauna session. She’s scheduled to finish her degree before the end of the year, but she’s also planning to stay in Helsinki and look for work, so who knows, we might be back again in the future.

Finland is probably not the first place that comes to mind when you’re planning a holiday, much less a winter holiday, but I really loved it. The aurora certainly made it memorable, but even without the aurora, it’s a cool place and I liked a lot of their progressive policies. I would definitely come back in the winter to chase the aurora again – I’m not sure I’d visit Lapland in the summer, but I’d consider returning to Helsinki in the summer and maybe tack on a visit to Norway or Sweden to do some hiking. Overall we had a great trip and would definitely recommend!

Dog Sledding and Other Adventures

May 3, 2023August 13, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

On our second day in Yllas we made another attempt at the ski hill. This time we drove around to the Yllas side since there are more chair lifts. It was still windy, so we were disappointed that the top half of the mountain remained closed, but we decided to go skiing anyways. It was mid-week, so fortunately it wasn’t too busy – we had to wait in line at most lifts, but given that half the mountain was closed, it could have been a lot worse.

Skiing in Finland is a very different experience from skiing in Canada. It’s not a very large mountain and it’s incredibly bare and exposed, so the skiing is not as adventurous. If you like groomed runs, it’s a decent mountain, but there’s almost no ungroomed terrain, so it can be a bit boring. The mountain is deceiving because it looks like there is un-skied powder between each exposed run, but because of the climate, the snow off-piste is very crunchy and bumpy – not fun for skiing.

But the biggest difference is the lifts. Yllas had one high speed chair lift going half way up the mountain and one (closed) gondola going to the top. Besides that, it’s almost entirely T-bars. We also skied a second resort in Levi and it was the same. None of the terrain is very steep and because the mountain is so bare, you can ski down any face, so I guess it’s a lot cheaper to install a ton of T-bars, with each one only servicing a couple runs. It wasn’t that big a deal, but it does make for a tiring day when you don’t get to sit on the chairs because then you are constantly on your feet.

So it wasn’t my favourite mountain to ski, but it was definitely an experience! We skied all over the mountain in the morning, then after lunch we managed to find one glade run on the far side of the hill, which ended up being our favourite, so we skied that one a few times. There’s a lookout on the way back to Akaslompolo and we timed our departure to catch the sunset from the viewpoint. We didn’t see that many sunsets in Lapland, but the ones we did see were very beautiful. The sky turns purple and pink and reflects off the snow.

On our last day in Yllas we opted to do a dog sledding tour. I was really on the fence about it because they’re not cheap and you can do them in Canada. But I went to Banff last winter and opted not to do one, so I figured now was the time and booked a half day tour with Rami’s Huskies.

Rami’s is located just outside the National Park and we arrived to the predictable symphony of screeching huskies. We didn’t really know what to expect, but we were excited to learn we would sledding in pairs of two, which meant we would get to drive our own sleds! We got a quick lesson in the basics: hand signals, stopping, how to take turns, and when to slow down; and then we prepared for our 16km run in the National Park, with a lunch break at the half way point. The sled is just big enough for one person to sit in it and one person to stand at the back. The person on the back is the driver, so we decided Seth would steer first while I took photos from the sled.

There was about 10 of us on the tour, plus two guides. Each team had 6 dogs, so there was a whopping 42 dogs in our party! When you’re dog sledding in the wilderness, you direct the dogs verbally on where to go, but we were following a track the entire time, so the dogs pretty much just follow each other and the track, so it’s easy to drive. You just need to use the brake whenever the person ahead of you signals because you don’t want to run into the team in front of you.

It’s a bit of a slow start at first because the dogs are extremely excited to run and there’s a very sharp turn early on that the guides want everyone to take slowly. We had a few stop and starts, which are challenging because the dogs were very restless, but eventually we got into the groove and no one fell off their sled the entire trip, which is a bit of a rarity. Seth had his work cut out for him when we kept stopping because the team behind us had a very excitable lead dog named Ginny, and she would get too close to Seth whenever we’d stop and nip at his butt to try and get him to keep going. Our team was a bit slow, so eventually the guides swapped Ginny into our team and we went a lot faster after that!

We had so much fun on this trip! I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but we were thrilled to drive the sleds ourselves and what left the biggest impression on me was how much the dogs love to run. They are loud when you arrive because they are already hooked up to the sleds and they can’t wait to get going. Around the 8km mark we stopped for a break and the dogs mostly settled down for a rest, but as soon as we started getting ready to go again, they were up and eager to keep running.

We had what I can only call a boil-up for lunch, which is popular in Newfoundland (the similarities continue). We got a little fire going to make tea and the guides roasted sausages for us to snack on with some biscuits. We had the chance to question them on the dogs and learned a lot about the sledding industry. At Rami’s, the dogs will run about 32km a day, 5 days a week, at their peak age and health. They’ll either do two 16km rides (like ours), or a 16km ride in the morning, followed by a 10km ride in the afternoon, and a 5km ride in the evening. They regularly swap out which dogs are in which teams, but the dogs all have distinct personalities and some won’t run together, while others will only run with certain dogs, and some will only run as lead dogs.

It takes about 2 years for dogs to mature, so they don’t work full time before then and are mostly in sled dog training. Once they get older, they reduce the number of kilometres they run per week, but they never fully retire the dogs for their mental health. Huskies are an eccentric breed and I can see how it would drive the dog nuts to not run at all after a lifetime of it. Rami’s doesn’t do dog sledding races, only tourism, and they have about 75 dogs in their kennel, which is considered small. Some kennels have up to 450 dogs!

So if you ever find yourself in Lapland, or even anywhere in Canada that offers dogsledding, I would highly recommend it! We really loved it and I wouldn’t hesitate to go again – now I just need to do some research on where I can go in BC!

Rami’s is close to the Lapland Hotels Snow Village, so after we finished our tour we decided to drop by the hotel. It’s a hotel compound made entirely of snow, so it gets re-constructed every year. I think the layout remains the same year after year, but the village is filled with tons of snow sculptures and those change every year depending on the theme. It seems like their most popular year was when they did a game of thrones theme, but when we visited they had an around the world theme and had sculptures of iconic monuments from around the world.

The village comprises of a snow restaurant, a normal restaurant, an ice bar, and a hotel. During the day the hotel has a cover charge to view, so it operates primarily as more of a gallery. There’s about a dozen different themes rooms with varying numbers of beds. Since no one stays there during the day, we were a little bit confused about how it worked because the village is open to visitors from 10am to 10pm. But if you’d like to stay in one of the snow rooms, they are available purely for sleeping starting at 10pm. So basically you check in, sleep in the room, and get hurried out in the morning, so it wouldn’t be my choice, but to each their own! We enjoying viewing the sculptures and then hit the road for our next stop in Levi!

Ski Resort Series: Stevens Pass

March 1, 2023August 13, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might recall that every year my friends go on a big long weekend ski trip to one of the local resorts. To date we’ve been to Big White, Sun Peaks, Silver Star, Apex, and Mount Washington. But even though we go every year, unsurprisingly we missed a few due to covid over the past few years. We’ve been really keen to resurrect the trip, but it is a lot of planning and Karen and Grant have since moved back to Newfoundland, so it was hard to find the inspiration.

I was convinced to buy the 5 day pass for Whistler this year because it was really good value. I knew it would be a struggle to use all the days, so a bit of research revealed that we can use the pass across the border at Stevens Pass in Washington! I’d never even heard of this mountain before, but it turns out it’s the place to ski if you’re in Seattle, so we decided to make a long weekend of it and drive 3 hours down for a few days. We downsized the trip for ease of planning, but there were still 8 of us that headed across the border on Friday for the weekend in late January.

It’s not that far of a drive, but it can definitely chew up a chunk of time. Me and Seth crossed at truck crossing and didn’t have too much trouble, but Megan and Nick crossed at Peace Arch and ended up stuck at the border for over 2 hours. Then we had to make a grocery stop at Trader Joes (which was a lot of fun I admit) since bringing groceries across the border is complicated. Then finally, we hit traffic coming from Seattle on the way into the mountains. So it ended up taking most of us between 4-6 hours, depending on our success at the border. So I wouldn’t recommend it for a day trip.

We booked an AirBnB in Index, which is about 30 minutes before the ski resort. It was a gated community, so it made for a very confusing turn-off in the dark, but was a beautiful house right on the river. We had a fully stocked kitchen, fireplace, and 4 bedrooms. We decided to take Sadie with us, which ended up actually being a lot less nerve-wracking than I expected. I thought it would be hard to cross the border with her, but none of the border agents really had any interest in her and no one asked to see her vaccination record (which is required to cross).

We had a fun first night celebrating the lunar new year with bai tai’s and raclette and playing the AirBnB’s old school nintendo! On Saturday we drove out to the ski resort and had a full day to explore the runs. A word of warning, visiting Stevens Pass definitely requires some pre-planning and coordination if you want to be successful. They do sell out of passes (one friend ended up bailing on the trip when passes sold out), so make sure to get them in advance if you want to be guaranteed to be able to ski. Fortunately half of us were using our Whistler passes, so all we had to do was show up.

Parking was also a challenge though. I drove up with Brandon and he pretty much got the last spot in the main lot on Saturday. Carolyn and Steve had to park further down the highway and take a shuttle to the resort. What’s worse though is that Carolyn and Steve tried to go back again on Sunday (they were the only ones) and by the time they arrived, there wasn’t actually any parking available and they were forced to take a refund on their lift passes and leave. So even if you do buy the lift ticket in advance, you could still drive up there and get turned away, so go early!

The weather was a bit touch and go. It was lovely when we arrived and the sun was shining, but the mountain got caught up in a cloud for most of the day and the snow kept coming and going. That said, it’s a nice little mountain. I was expecting long line ups because of the parking situation, but the mountain never felt crowded. There’s one lift (Hogsback Express) that’s a bit more popular than the others and has longer lines, but for the most part we didn’t have to wait too long. Plus, the resort is open until 10pm, so there’s lots of time to get your runs in.

We started the day on Skyline Express and gradually explored as many of the lifts as possible. We didn’t bother with 7th Heaven, which was stuck in the clouds and was all double blacks, but we hit almost all the others. I did like Hogsback Express, but Tye Mill and the back side of the mountain were probably my favourite. There’s a few nice runs right along the Tye Mill lift, but the backside was really the best runs. There’s a lot of terrain to explore back there and very limited people. We skied down the transmission line first and then went exploring some of the other runs. The backside isn’t open very late though, so I’d recommend going there early. We got hungry after a few runs over there and left for lunch and then it was closed when we returned.

Brooks Express has a few nice runs as well and we finished the day with one run on Kehr’s Chair. One run on this one was enough for me as it’s pretty much the most terrifying chairlift I’ve ever been on! It’s a two seater chair, but it doesn’t have a safety bar and has really low side rails, so I was basically clinging on to the bar in the middle of the chair for dear life. Great for thrills seekers, but I wouldn’t take a child on it!

Seth couldn’t join me for skiing because we didn’t want to leave Sadie alone at the AirBnB, so him and Lien ended up taking her snowshoeing. We all stayed in for supper and spent the rest of the evening playing some games and learning to line dance. Yes, you read that right. Megan and Nick are getting married in Alberta this summer and they’re determined to get the party started at the reception with group line dancing, so every time I see Megan these days she teaches me a new line dance and we got some really quality instruction on the trip.

Sunday was pretty low key. We slept in and packed up before slowly making our way back home. Me and Seth stopped in Fairhaven and visited the beach with Sadie for lunch, but it was very windy and cold, so it was pretty short lived. Megan told me about an awesome bookstore called Village Books, so I made a quick visit there, but couldn’t give it the full attention it deserved because of Sadie.

We decided to cross in Aldergrove to avoid border traffic at Peace Arch and crossed the border in less than 5 minutes. So it was a much faster drive home and we had plenty of time to decompress from the trip. It’s the shortest ski trip we’ve done (we’ve always go for 3 nights and this was the first time we only did 2), but it was also more low key and easier to plan than previous trips. I would have loved to ski the second day, but mostly it was nice to get away with friends and re-visit some of the magic of pre-covid times. I would definitely return!