10-Oct-2003 -- Middle October is off-season time for Lapland traveling. Ruska season (time of the colourful autumn foliage) up North is over and usually there is not enough snow for winter activities. For Ilkka and me that was the perfect time to spend an extended weekend at Lapland and for trying to visit two unvisited confluences. Tickets for taking a car there by train from south were cheap, water levels in rivers and swamps ought to be low after the dry past summer and there should be after all not so many tourists at the time, just some elk hunters.

We arrived in Rovaniemi by train early Friday morning. After unloading the car from the train we drove about 200 km to Lokka village where we had asked ahead from a local tourist service provider Raimo Mattila to rent us a canoe. With a canoe attached to the roof of the car we drove another 40 km from Lokka village to the northeast corner of the Lokka reservoir to the riverside of Luiro.

We paddled one km downstream the river Luiro to the opposite side of it and stepped ashore about two km from confluence N68E28. After walking through the woods to the swamp where the point should be and when approaching the area we saw to our big surprise a note attached to a tiny pine tree about ten meters from the confluence! The note told about the DCP and that this was the N68E28 confluence. In the note there was also the names of the visitors and the time of the visit, about three months earlier in July.

The status of the previous visit puzzled us during the way back to car. So we located the phone numbers of the visitors and phoned to them while driving back to Lokka. We heard that they were going to submit the N68E28 visit and also the visit to the N68E29 confluence soon. Another of the visitors also told us that he had been very close to the very difficult unvisited N68E22 confluence by hovering about 5 meters above it in a helicopter. We encouraged him to make a report of the visit although it cannot be considered successful. Also we heard that they had not visited our next target confluence (N69E26) at Angeli, so that's where we started to drive after returning the canoe to Mr. Mattila at Lokka.