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The Head of Course Setting: Notes from Keminmaa

The Head of Course Setting: Notes from Keminmaa

Winter has arrived in the southern parts of Lapland. In November and December, we had 3 weeks of sub-zero weather, during which the swamps froze. After that we got permanent snow cover (a little over 20cm in open areas and even more in dense woodlands). In the middle of March there is, on average, 65cm of snow in Keminmaa. Hopefully this will be the case during WSOC 2022 as well.

The competition areas for the different competition distances were determined in 2019, when we prepared our bid for WSOC 2022. After that the plans were sharpened and we started to design the ski tracks and competition tracks. Last spring the planning went into full gear. In the fall we marked tracks to the more challenging areas to ease our work in the winter time. In the competition venue, Kalli, there are also nature reserves and some of the ski track will cross these areas as well. These tracks were also marked beforehand. Unfortunately, we didn’t get all the planned land use permits, so we had to make some changes to the tracks.

At the moment we are finetuning the plans. We will begin driving through the tracks with snowmobiles in week 3 or 4, if there’s enough snow. A large part of the competition area is quite rocky and the natural preserve area also requires a lot of snow, before we can enter the areas. In the middle of February, we will have driven the whole ski track entirety with snowmobiles at least once.

Happy New Year and hopefully we’ll see you in WSOC 2022!