routasenkuru

Paddling and exlporing the canyon

By Erik Plankton

September 21^st, 2019

into the canyon

This post is a portion of our 10 day hiking trip to the Vätsäri Wilderness area.

You can read the whole story here: https://www.packgofind.com/vaetsaeri-wilderness

Routasenkuru is a 10 km long canyon located about 13 km from Näätämö village. On the second day of our trip we crossed the Uutuanjoki river and entered the canyon. After a short hike we stopped to inflate our packrafts and started exploring the gorge.

bliss

The weather was nice and warm so we stopped after about 5 km to chill out and do some fishing. After making the decision to setup up camp and enjoy the sunny evening it soon started to rain heavily. We spent a good while under the tarp with a bunch of mosquitos.

rainbows and reflections

After the rain had gone away we made an unsuccessful effort to catch dinner. A lot of small fish made rings on the mirror like water. We offered our lures to them as a sign of friendship, but all of them politely refused to make contact.

misty morning

We woke up to a calm and misty morning. After breakfast we got going and approached the most difficult part of the canyon which required a lot of portaging between the pools that were paddling friendly.

the hard part

Routasenkuru canyon is not ideal for paddling and not many people have done it. We found a few blog entries (in finnish: Avisuora and Timo Anttalainen) that have done it before, and we were prepared for a tough day with a lot of caved in sections that would require some scouting to find the best route to carry our gear through. For the whole canyon our average speed with breaks was about 1 km per hour. So be prepared to invest about 8 - 10 hours for the passage if paddling / scrambling. Walking on top of the ridge would be much faster, but the views from the bottom of the canyon are totally worth the effort.

cliffs and grayling

The cliffs got steeper and hit almost vertical in some parts towards the end of the canyon. The water got deeper as well. Antti had his fishing gear on standby and I urged him to try. There was a school of grayling present and they were biting. I got my rod ready and got two small ones within five casts. I was sure we would catch our dinner today. On my next cast into the sweet spot of the pool I saw my lure flying backwards and almost hitting AV in the face. I thought my (two year old) line had snapped, but it was the titanium leader that gave up. Well that's a first. Lost my favourite Bete Lotto lure (PU-24 brass color very effective in Lapland).

The waterfall

We went through the canyon from north to south. Before the very end there is a massive rock formation, which is passable, but requires some climbing and after that there is no safe way climbing out. So in order to go to the waterfall at the very end would mean going over the rocks twice. We decided to deflate and pack up hiking to the top of the canyon to check out the waterfall. But this was only the beginning of our trip...