Turned up toes

Our route this morning carried us along side a series of connected lakes through country that was covered in low birch trees towards the town of Kautokieno and its small museum. Our guide book informed us that this town is predominantly inland Sami people and traditionally was the winter camping place for the Sami.

The museum was modest but had an interesting collection of traditional clothing and artifacts in a smallish log building. Three of the displays particularly caught my attentions.

• The first was the making of a wooden ladle, the process was demonstrated by showing the ladle in the various stages of construction starting with a branch knot from a tree.

• The second concerned traditional footwear and the turned-up-pointed-toe that is (has been to me) a curious feature of such foot wear. Well today it was explained. The turned-up toe is designed to catch the strap on traditional cross-country skis during that foots rearward stroke. Very ingenious.

• The third display is not really traditional Sami but more like 1950's 1960's arctic transportation of heavy goods before the construction of roads. It was a model of a cat-dozer train. It is a train of large heavily loaded wooden sleds being pulled by a Cat bull dozer. The model showed a special enclosed and heated sled presumably for goods that could not be allowed to freeze as well as a sled carrying a sleeping hut for the crew. An accompanying map indicated that there was quite an extensive network of routes being supplied by these trains.

  Interestingly on a trip to Alaska some years ago I heard a lot of stories about using the same technique for shipping supplies into remote homesteads in the Brooks Range.

Outside there was a display of a series of buildings. The farm house caught our attention and in particular the beds with a fur covering over a twig mattress. A quick experiment revealed that the arrangement was surprisingly comfortable.