Oulanka National Park

Oulanka National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Oulanka is the river and forest wilderness of north-eastern Finland, just below the Arctic Circle on the Russian border, reached from the town and airport of Kuusamo and the ski resort of Ruka, forty-five minutes to an hour away, and it is best known to Finns as the setting of the Karhunkierros, the Bear's Ring, the country's most popular long-distance trail: eighty-two kilometres from Hautajärvi in the north to Ruka in the south, walked in four to six days, with free open wilderness huts and lean-tos along the way, where firewood is supplied and sleeping places are first come, first served, so that a tent is prudent in high season. For everyone else there is the Pieni Karhunkierros, the Little Bear's Ring, a twelve-kilometre circuit from the village of Juuma that fits the best of the park into four or five hours, over swinging suspension bridges, past the Myllykoski rapids with their old log mill, the Jyrävä waterfall and the gorge viewpoint at Kallioportti;

it is well marked, free, and needs no guide in summer. The operators in Ruka and Kuusamo sell what needs equipment: rafting on the Kitkajoki, in a gentle family section and a wild section through class three and four rapids, where the unrunnable Jyrävä fall is portaged; canoe hire for the placid lower Oulankajoki, a day or two of drifting between sandbanks; and in winter, guided snowshoe walks along the frozen rapids of the Little Bear's Ring, when the spruces are loaded with snow. The Oulanka visitor centre, by the Kiutaköngäs rapids, has an exhibition, a café and short trails. Bear-watching hides near the border are a separate evening excursion.

Visiting Oulanka National Park: what you will see

The park was established in 1956 and enlarged in 1982 and 1989 to about 290 square kilometres in the municipalities of Kuusamo and Salla, and it continues across the frontier as Russia's Paanajärvi National Park, the two forming one of the largest protected wildernesses of northern Europe. It does not look like the rest of Finland. The Oulankajoki and Kitkajoki rivers have cut deep valleys and canyons into the bedrock, with rapids, waterfalls, cliffs of red dolomite, sandy river terraces and oxbow meadows that were mown for hay until the mid-twentieth century and are mown still to keep their flowers. At Kiutaköngäs, a few hundred metres from the visitor centre, the Oulankajoki drops fourteen metres in a run of three hundred between red rock walls.

The lime-rich rock and the varied relief have made the park a meeting place of plants from three directions, arctic species left behind by the ice, southern species at their northern limit and Siberian taiga species at their western, and it has been a magnet for botanists for a century, with a research station of the University of Oulu inside it. Its emblem is the calypso orchid, the fairy slipper, a small pink flower of mossy spruce forest that blooms in early June. The forests of spruce and pine are old and rich in hanging lichen, with Siberian jays that come to the campfire, capercaillie, three-toed woodpeckers, great grey owls and golden eagles; brown bears, wolverines, lynx and the odd wolf are present and unseen, and semi-domesticated reindeer, belonging to local herders, wander everywhere. The Ristikallio cliffs and the Oulanka canyon in the north are the trail's grandest scenery. This was borderland in the wars, and the old haymakers' barns and the mill at Myllykoski recall a harder life.

Oulanka National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open at all times. The hiking season runs from June to late September: June has the midnight sun, the calypso orchid and, from mid-month, clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies that last until August; the second and third weeks of September bring the ruska, the autumn colour of birch, aspen and the forest floor, no insects, and the busiest days on the trail;

the first snow falls in October and lies until May, and from December to April the Little Bear's Ring is a maintained winter trail for snowshoes, with temperatures down to minus thirty and the light of the polar twilight. The spring flood in May makes rafting wild and some paths impassable. Allow a day for the Little Bear's Ring, five for the whole. Ruka and Kuusamo are the bases, Riisitunturi's snow-crowned trees an hour west, and Rovaniemi three hours.