Planetskier: Njiellalanjávri swim

Our caving expedition to the Käsijärvi wilderness area involved camping and research around the Njiellalanjávri lake. Of course, I had to swim there every night to clean myself of the day's sweat and dirt :-) Even if it was cold. Well, maybe these more like quick dips into the lake. Anyway, spectacularly nice water and scenery!

And this hiker was clean in the sleeping bag every night. To me that makes a big difference...

The lake is in these coordinates N 69.23190 E 21.41887, a 50 or 25-kilometer hike from nearest road depending if you come from Finland or Norway. Very far away in practice, I'm not sure how passable the Norwegian direction is, for instance.

One interesting feature of the lake is that it drops a lot -- and without any visible outflow river. This lake's size varies between two kilometers long to almost drying up entirely during the year. When we were there it was maybe a bit under a kilometer long. Still, it dropped maybe 7cm every day, e.g., the rock below was right on water level just 12 hours prior to taking this photo:

Also interestingly, this lake is so remote that google yields no search results, not even a single photo. We had been able to locate one old research photo taken in plate camera times, nothing else. This article could be the first public article with pictures of the lake!

Here's the lake:

For more sauna and swimming stories, check out planetswimmer.com and saunablogger.cool websites! And of course the Planetcaver, and

This article was originally published in the Planetskier Blogspot article series.