Another weekend, another hike. We walked an about eight kilometer hike at Luutasuo, a trail that goes through some bog and marsh, by a couple ponds, and climbs up some steep hills of taiga - boreal coniferous forest - formed by the ice retreating after the Ice Age.
Despite the drought of this year, there were plenty of different kinds of mushrooms, most of them already on the decaying side. I also found some blooming strawberries, confused by the extended warm season.
Autumn and spring are the seasons when I most probably can witness sunrises and sunsets, here in our hemisphere. In winter time, they happen while I'm at work (and except for a few weeks in late January and early February, the sky is mostly cloudy) and in summer time, fast asleep. This September, we have been out several times bicycling, at the time of the most amazing sunsets and sunrises, with the sky partly cloudy and the sun painting the horizon in vivid colors.
Amazingly, we had all of two days of normal September weather of about +10C or so, then it went down to wintery temperatures, at least for the time being. This morning there was already the first frost on my car!
We went for a little hike today at Lemmenlaakso, in southern Finland. Autumn still hasn't started properly, even though the temperatures have dropped somewhat and leaves are falling. Forests are still quite green, flowers are still blooming. And the very dry summer and autumn so far has reduced the Kerava river into a shallow muddy stream.
The green peppers are still growing, despite the cooled nights. The Medina is actually putting out more flowers even! The purplish bhut jolokias are slowly turning orange; the first small one is already there.
Also, our bonsai that almost died last winter has started growing new thick leaves in this late summer, early autumn, after spending the whole summer out in the sun.
The days have still been rather warm, but the nights already sufficiently cold and long to push the trees into the beginnings of foliage, and rising a fog on the ground in the mornings. We've had a very dry autumn so far, but yesterday there came the rains and winds, knocking down the first birch leaves.
We went for a hike on Torronsuo bog approximately 100km North-East of Helsinki. We walked along the duckboards through the bog admiring the fabulous colors around us, then through the forest to a road that took us to this cabin and lean two with a fireplace.
The path through the bog was aligned with wiry hay, cotton grass, marsh tea, a lot of cranberries everywhere and some small lingonberries, but no cloudberries anymore; their leaves were already turning red. Small mushrooms were growing in the wet bog, but the surrounding forests were home to some rather big fly agarics and porcinis.
