Lost in Lapland

Which way did the others go? I ask Katie, my girlfriend and skidoo co-rider, as I pull up at a snow-covered intersection of numerous forest tracks. “I’m not sure,” she replies. It is midnight, the temperature is -15C and we are lost in a forest in Lapland, northern Finland.

Oh, and we’ve just spent the past hour sitting around a campfire with our guide (and professional hunter) Lars, discussing what to do when a bear attacks you. I choose a track, hoping it’s right.

We’re on a winter break to Iso-Syöte, a ski resort in Finland’s southernmost fell region, about 90 miles from the Arctic Circle. The two-hour drive to our hotel from Oulu Airport, two days earlier, had taken us through a landscape of forest, wooden houses and thick, deep snow, the sort that would cripple UK infrastructure for three months.

As we’d approached the Iso-Syöte Hotel, perched on the top of a 430m fell, the highest point for miles, we’d passed pine trees shrouded in bizarre capes of snow (known as “tykky”), which gave them a strangely human quality: a woman holding a child’s hand, an old man stooping, a judge.

But now we are lost, and these benign figures seem more sinister. I soon realise that we’ve gone the wrong way but we can’t turn around because the track is too narrow and I have no idea where reverse gear is on a skidoo.

Just as we are contemplating walking back to the abandoned campfire, we see headlights cutting through the ink black of the night. Lars! He’d followed our tracks after quickly realising we were missing. We hug him in relief and sheepishly rejoin the group to resume our search for the northern lights.

This ethereal show, known as aurora borealis in the northern hemisphere, is caused by electrically charged particles from the sun, which create a yellow-green, blue and purple flickering halo in the sky. Our chances of seeing it had seemed good — this year and next are a peak of aurora activity — but nature has other ideas.

Our disappointment is short-lived. The next morning, we visit Kolmiloukko Husky Center. After a briefing — “If you are going too fast, brake!” — each couple is assigned a sled harnessed to a team of six Siberian huskies. One person “drives”, while the other sits in the sled on a reindeer skin. “Menn ään!” (Let’s go!), I shout. The dogs shoot off downhill. I cling on, desperately trying to apply the brake — a serrated metal bar that digs into the snow — as we hurtle around a bend.

Once the track levels out, the driving becomes easier. We leave the forest and cross white, treeless areas that become impassable swamps in the summer.

The panting of our huskies and the rasp of the sled runners are the only sounds. I watch the dogs trailing their pink tongues in snow banks to drink as they run. Large snowflakes drift down from thick white clouds. Stress ebbs away. No phone, no email. Bliss.