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At home when you need water, you simply go to the tap. But finding H20 becomes a bit more complicated on a wintry wilderness trip in the middle of the Finnish woods. Antje Neumann tells all.
I guide hiking trips for the adventure travel agency Boreal Tours. In some of them, we have stationed accommodation and in others we walk on snow shoes or ski from cabin to cabin. During those trips we spend a whole week in the woods away from shops, restaurants or villages. There is just forest, snow, us and the dogs - an experience for travellers from a more densely populated central Europe.
The dogs, best friends for the trip, pull sledges with our sleeping bags, food, and woolly socks. We've everything with us including dog food.
Oh, except water.
In Finland, water's everywhere; it's just not necessarily readily available. I know what you're thinking: no problem in cabins. Well, most Finnish cabins in the wild have only a place to bunk, a table, benches, and an oven. You might find a gas cooker hiding in a corner but you won't find an electric socket or running water.
This means you can't just go in, put the coffee on, sit down and relax: there is a lot to do first.
First, you get a good, sheltered rest and sleeping place for the dogs. They all have thick winter fur and will spend the night outside. Then you make a fire into the oven of the cabin, as it takes at least an hour to warm up. Next, you chop fire wood in the nearby wood shelter to have enough supply for the evening and night.
A guide I have never to worry about that. The male part of my groups is usually extremely eager to do all the fire and wood work. I've never understood the connection between gender and chopping wood. For firewood, you basically need an axe, two arms and the right technique: your gender and strength really don't influence the whole process.
While the men head towards the oven and wood store, the ladies of the group usually start to wander around, take pictures and wondering about what to do next. What remains is one of the most important tasks: getting the H2O!
A group of ten persons and five to six dogs needs an amazing amount of water; for coffee, filling the 10 thermos bottles, cooking the dinner, soaking the dry dog food, washing the dishes - and you'll want to leave reserves for the morning, when you'll need the same amount again.
So where does an explorer get water from when everything's frozen solid? The first method that occurs to people is to melt snow. It's everywhere anyway. But snow is for practical purposes distilled water. Contrary to tap, table, or mineral water, or the H20 you find in rivers and lakes, melted snow doesn't contain any minerals.
But why are minerals so important? When you drink distilled water, it acts as a purgative, stripping the body of all trace minerals and elements. Drinking it over some time makes you only thirstier and even can be dangerous when being consumed in large amounts over a longer time.
Another problem is the vast amount of snow you need to melt to get enough water for cooking. It not only takes a lot of time but also a lot of fuel. So you avoid melting snow and try to come up with a better water supply.
Something better than snow is ice from natural water bodies, or frozen surface water containing a similar amount of minerals to a lake itself (and sometimes pine needles). The problem there is the huge amount of work to hack enough ice for the whole group including the dogs. And it's not much fun to carry big pieces of ice to the cottage, especially when the men of the group are busy with the fire wood and not helping.
The best solution to the wintry water problem is an ice drill – the same type people use for ice fishing. You drill a hole into the ice, make the opening a bit wider, and have access to a never ending spring. Usually, the ladies on the trip want to try it out by themselves. In Central Europe, where most of our visitors are from, you don’t use ice drills.
 On one occasion, a Dutch woman drills and drills but makes no progress. She just polishes the ice. Using all her strength and body weight. Growing tired fast, and disappointed, she gives the drill to the next woman, who is not more successful. Strange, I thínk, since you don't really need any more strength for an ice hole than chopping wood - and it usually takes no longer than a minute.
I try it out by myself. The drill isn't sharp.
After getting over the embarrassment (I didn't notice the fault when packing), I come up with a fourth method for obtaining water: I go up to the woodshed and take the axe away from the men.
You can hack a hole into ice without any problems.
The only hard part - after getting it off the men - is that in Northern Finland, the depth of ice can easily reach half a meter, which is deeper than the shaft of the axe. Therefore, you need to hack a really big hole into the ice until you get down to the water.
As it turns out, during this particular trip, we ladies do much more muscle-building chopping ice than the masculine part of the trip would ever have dreamt of!
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