Recommended read: Skiing and Packafting | Korpijaakko

During the internship period I didn’t have that much time to read blogs and enjoy the great articles and videos of other people but few things caught my eye. This time all the stuff is related to either winter travel on skis or to packrafting. Enjoy!

Winter Travel in Fast and Light Style

I don’t do fast & light winter trips as I don’t yet feel confident going very lightweight style in winter and I haven’t yet had a good enough reason to go “racing style” in winter. On the other hand Luc Mehl has both the experience and reasons and he has written a great article about Fast and Light in Winter Travel and it’s now available for everyone on his blog! It’s the most highly recommended read of this post if you are interested in such things.

What I do and like to do is a bit lower pace and heavier winter expeditions. In 2010 an expedition of four Finns (website in Finnish only) did a Greenland crossing along the standard route in a faster-than-standard time covering over 600km in 21 days. In expedition standards they also went relatively light and thus fast. There is a ten episode web documentary about the expedition. The first seven short episodes are already available in the Finnish UlkonaTV and I believe that the rest will follow shortly. The documentary is available only in Finnish but at least everyone can enjoy the scenery.

Packrafting!

The number one spokesman of modern packrafting Roman Dial wrote a post about defining packrafting which is a nice read: What is packrafting anyway? I tend to go with Roman in this one and I’d say it’s everything done with a lightweight man-portable inflatable boat.

Roman, Luc and few others left Alaska for a moment to do a very cool packrafting trip to Southeast US and there are several posts about it in Roman’s blog and also one in Luc’s blog. There are also several videos on those posts and in addition there is Timmy’s video linked right here:

Psst, I also just discovered that Forrest McCarthy has a blog! Very much worth a read and includes also things related to skiing and packrafting. It’s all epic. Things like the Antarctic Ski Odyssey: