Woods recap

Last Sunday I did, indeed, go innawoods as planned[1], and had a fantastic time.

I hope to do this sort of thing more often in future, and I feel profound

vicarious disappointment for gunnarfrost at the illness-induced cancellation[2]

of his hiking plans[3].

Because of the limited bus schedule, I arrived at the national park at about

9:30am. Not ridiculously early, but early enough that there were only 3 cars in

the carpark and it was probably an hour before I saw the first other person. As

I had hoped, there was still plenty of snow and nice. The weather was not

• quite* as nice as forecast, as it was overcast the entire day, but it was at

least warm enough that I had no trouble with the cold except when I sat still

for a long time.

Which happened more than I had hoped. One of the trails I wanted to spend most

of my time walking along had a sign not very far along it saying that it was

closed. The sign was entirely in Finnish, but someone had scribbled in black

sharpie "PS: believe Finns!" at the bottom of it. I took this to mean "believe

us, there really is a good reason for closing this trail and don't think that

you'll be fine if you try it anyway", so I believed them. On the other hand, at

the top of the sign someone had scribbled "Proved!!!" and I don't know what

that was supposed to mean. Then there was a longer scribble that was in Finnish

and also badly faded, so all I could tell was that it had began with "Why",

which makes me think it wasn't just the stupid foreign devils who thought the

track looked perfectly manageable.

Because I had bought my return bus ticket in advance (makes it cheaper), but the

longer trail was closed, I had a bit of free time on my hands. I had bought my

Tecsun shortwave radio with me, so I trudged into the centre of a short loop

trail, brushed a whole load of snow off a fallen tree, put my small cut-up

scrap of discount store foam yoga mat down on the trunk and sat down to see what

I could pull in.

Even though it was day time (when atmospheric conditions are not ideal for long

range propagation), and even though I was too lazy to string up my wire antenna

so relied on the inbuilt telescopic, the simple fact that I had gotten far, far

away from any buildings packed with interference-generating modern appliances

yielded fantastic results. The Tecsn's auto-tuning scan pulled in 70-something

stations! Lots of stuff in Russian and Chinese, not too surprisingly, but I

listened to two English broadcast long enough and took good notes so I could

request QSL cards. Ironically, one of them was Radio New Zealand International,

who came in pretty clearly and who I was never able to pick up while actually

living in New Zealand. The other was China Radio International. Neither of

these are remotely prestigious catches because they are pretty easy to pick up,

but somehow I haven't got cards from either yet, so it will be nice to correct

that.

I'd like to spend more time at this park, but having to take the bus there is a

bit of a pain. According to Google it's a two hour bike ride, so when the

weather is better I might attempt that. I haven't ridden a bike for that long

in I don't know how many years, but it seems feasible. If I managed this I'd

want to make it an overnight trip, as otherwise it'd be too much of a daytrip

just getting there and back. Another reason to wait on better weather, as I'm

not at all geared up yet for sleeping in sub-zero temperatures.

[1] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/going-innawoods.txt

[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/gunnarfrost/20180316.post

[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/gunnarfrost/20180313.post