It’s not about the cache, it’s about the journey

Every time I climb, I climb in my rubber boots

As I’ve said in my previous posts on geocaching, the journey is actually the destination, and finding a cache is just a nice addition. That was true also on this trip.

Besides geocaching, I can warmly recommend camping and canoeing in Southern Konnevesi National Park. What a scenery, what waters. Simply amazing!

In this new Finnish national park, there are well signed canoeing routes, maps and tips for which you can get, for example, in the nature centre of the park and in the tourist information centre located in the town centre of Rautalampi (tip: they sell great ice-creams, too).

The actual nature centre of the park is a starting point for many trails of different lengths: on the Kalajan Kierros Trail (4.6 km), you can admire beautiful giant aspens and magnificent views from the Kalajanvuori hill. It's the highest point of the national park, and on the top, you can admire the small Kalajanjärvi lake. Its water is so clear that you can see from the heights what lies at the bottom of the lake (nice sunken logs).

Kolmen Vuoren Vaellus (The Hiking Trail Three Mountains, 14 km) circles the majestic and rugged Enonniemi cape. Loukkuvuoren Lenkki (Loukkuvuori Hiking Trail, 2.8 km) starts from the Enonranta campfire shelter at the Lake Konnevesi. The trails are quite demanding because of great height differences, and even though none of them is very long, I recommend preparing to spend an extra hour or two on them, compared to your normal hiking speed, because of the difficult terrain.

In this national park, there are also many other hills. One of them was called Hill Rastasvuori (if I remember right), the highest point of the geocaching trail that we performed by rowing, climbing, and swimming. Some of the caches were placed in low locations that could be reached by paddling next to them, but for the others, we needed to park our boat at a peaceful shore and continue by foot.

This time we climbed in our trustworthy rubber boots: a pair of old-school Kontio boots and newer style Viking Trophy II boots. Both pair of boots fitted so well and had such a good grip that it was pleasant to use them even at the most difficult and scary spots.

As usual, finding caches made me feel successful, but they were not the things that really stuck on my mind. The most memorable things were finding a way to climb a steep slope, juicy blueberries and horns of plenty I found on the slope, studying holes of shore cliffs from the boat, and ebullient skinny-dips after strenuous climbing. It was a good trip, definitely good.


This container could be reached by swimming, canoeing, or stretching out one’s hand a little bit – if we had had a small boat.



The geomobile of the day, and a refreshing (actually cool!) dip in the water after conquering the hill.

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