The week of COLD

This past week has been freezing in Lapland. The thermometer has been hovering around -35°C, and our tours have been cancelled. It's too cold for the guests, and even getting to the limit of what the dogs can handle. When its colder than -20°C, we put jackets on them when they're waiting in line, and we place straw piles on the snow so that they can curl up and find some warmth even on the cold days.

All rugged up to go fat-biking in -35°C on my day off.

Clothing

The cold temperatures definitely challenge us at work. Perhaps the most obvious is that we have to really rug up to stay outside for 8 hours a day. Most days this week I wore:

• 2 pairs of socks (1 thin, 1 thick wool)

• 2 pairs of thermal pants

• My arctic work suit (like a down-jacket but in an overall form)

• 1 thermal top

• 1 thin fleece

• 1 thick wool sweater

• A work fleece as my outer layer

• Glove liners and mittens

• Neck-scarf

• A beanie

• An extra head-covering fleece

Even with all of this warm clothing, the cold still wriggles its way in. One day, I went out on the snowmobile with Joyce for an hour to check a trail. My face was mostly covered (as shown above), but I still got a patch of frostbite on my cheek! It disappeared after a minute inside with Jessie's warm hands on my face, but I couldn't feel my cheeks for a while.

At Work

We also face some other challenges at work and at home. Preparing the breakfast and dinner for the dogs normally takes 10 minutes, but when everything is frozen solid, it's taking up to 90 minutes. The taps are all frozen, so first we have to boil a kettle, pour the boiling water over the tap, and then wait 10 minutes for the water to start running again.

But the real time-waster is that the sausages don't defrost properly. Standard practice is to put them in our dog-kitchen room the morning before (e.g. start defrosting Monday morning so that they're ready to use on Tuesday), but even with the heater on, the room was only at 2°C. The sausages had no chance! They were still frozen solid after 30 hours in the kitchen room, so we were having to pull them apart with our hands, and cut them up manually with a knife. The sausages are pretty big (~5kg), and we currently use 4-5 sausages per feeding, so you can imagine that this process took a while. A few days ago, Joyce agreed to take the sausages into her warm house to defrost properly, and since then, they've been much better.

At Home

Auroras every night because of the cold clear nights.

We've also had a lot of problems with our car, and the power in our house. When the temperature sits below 0°C, everyone plugs their cars into an electric socket on their houses, to keep the engine warm and defrost the windscreens. Usually, we only have to plug in the caddy 2 hours before we need it. But with the extreme cold, even 5 hours wasn't enough - the caddy wasn't starting. We had to leave it plugged in overnight, and 24/7 so that we could use it when we needed it. Even after running the engine for 45 minutes, the engine was still cold.

On New Years Eve, we tried to open the back-door of the caddy so that we could drive to the hotel to celebrate. But the door handle snapped off in the cold! I was positively gobsmacked - I'd never heard of that happening before. It's happened again since, so apparently it's more common that I'd initially thought.

Plugging in the caddy uses a lot of electricity, and so does keeping the house warm when it's freezing outside. We've had a few fuses blow lately, which is super frustrating, and if it happens while we're at work, we come home to a freezing cold house.