Luukki Loop

Kaitalampi is a popular lake among open water swimmers because it's long, clean, deep and narrow. 

There is a nice and easy 'Seven Ponds Trail' 8K loop in Luukki. I ran it to kick off June and summer holidays.

One of many awesome ponds in the nature reserve along my way.

It was the Global Running Day - whatever that means. Anyway I was participating in this Strava Challenge.

Also the weather was great. I felt the pressure and urge to do more than the usual loop. Something unusual.

Lake Mustlampi is a must place to visit as many great trails run by it. 

The date was '1.6.16', so I decided to log 16 geocaches. Long story short, I succeeded - but it was a bit harder than expected.

Yes, I was stupid enough to attempt climbing this. Mosquitos made me do it!

For example, after going off-trail I got lost for a while. I wandered down in a valley with steep rock walls in the direction I wanted to go next. The other direction was impossible swamp with millions of mosquitos.

Standing on the Hauklampi boulders - these magnificent cliffs have to be seen in real life. 

After a couple of failures I managed to climb half-way up. It was hot, so I took a sip of water while leaning on a tree. Suddenly the whole tree cracked and fell down. I had not realised it was a dead old tree, because the sun was in my eyes. Fortunately I got all the way up safely and found a trail again.

A swan pair nesting along the trail.

After a long and winding route, I ended up in Pirttimäki. I hopped on a bus, which took me to the train station, from where I could get a train to another bus to take me home. Funnily enough, when I uploaded my Ambit data to Movescount, it claimed my ascent was 6141m in 26.7km run. It was an undulating route, but I couldn't have climbed more than 1000m at most.

When the same data was automatically imported to Strava, it changed to 919m ascent in 29.5km. I guess my GPS had got very confused when I dived in a deep lake surrounded by steep rock walls. C'est la vie!