night frost on the pail, rowan red, birch going over
Reserve a seven night Kuusamo autumn colour trip
Seven nights in one log cabin on the south shore of Ala-Kitka are held against five starts inside the week of 12 September, from $3,818 per person on two sharing. The week is picked because the birch and the aspen go over to yellow on it and the first hard night frosts arrive on it, and at 66 degrees north those are the same event. Three of the seven days are guided and the other four are yours with a car.
Seven nights, from $3,818 per person. Two sharing.
Reserve a seven night Kuusamo autumn colour trip and what you are holding is a week rather than a day. The company that runs it puts five starts inside one named week, the 12th through the 16th of September, and you take whichever of the five fits the way you get here. Kuusamo is a district of about 2,240 square miles in the northeast corner of Finland at 66 degrees north, near enough to the border that the rivers on this side of the divide run east instead of west. The town holds around 15,000 people. Ten miles past the last of them the map is forest, dolomite ridge and water, and it goes on being that in every direction for a long way.
The cabin is on the south shore of Ala-Kitka, 24 miles northeast of the town, the last mile and a half on a gravel road that a low car has to be driven slowly. Two bedrooms, a wood stove, a kitchen you actually cook in, and a sauna at the water's edge. It is yours alone for the seven nights; nobody else holds a key, and the couple who own it live three quarters of a mile up the shore.
This office owns none of this. No cabin, no boat and no car stands on our books. Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC works a telephone and an inbox in the Kansas City metro, puts your names and your dates in front of the company that actually runs the week in Kuusamo, and then stays inside the correspondence until what you asked is answered in writing. That company bills you under the contract it writes, in its own name, and nothing at all is collected at this end. This office sells no airfare either, so reaching Finland is yours to arrange, and the figure on this page has never carried it.
When it goes
Five starts, 12 to 16 September
a week of dates: several starts inside one named week
What is reserved
A seven night Kuusamo autumn colour trip
Seven nights, from $3,818 per person. Two sharing. Send a booking request
The reservation holds one two bedroom cabin for seven nights on sole occupancy, a wood heated sauna with the week's wood already split, one compact car across the eight days that bracket those nights, three guided days with a named guide, six meals and two hours on the water; nothing else moves you, and you have the whole cabin rather than a room inside somebody's house.
Kuusamo sits at 66 degrees north on the watershed where the ground stops draining toward the Gulf and starts draining the other way, and that one fact gives the district its trenches: the Kitkajoki leaves the lake and cuts down about 250 feet on its way east out of the country. The municipality covers roughly 2,240 square miles and holds about 15,000 people, so ten miles past the last house the count is nearer one person to every three quarters of a square mile of forest and water. Ala-Kitka and Yli-Kitka together make up some 110 square miles of clear water lying on dolomite, which is why the shore stones are pale grey instead of the tea brown you get on peat lakes further south. In the middle of September the day runs about thirteen hours from sunrise to sunset and gives back seven minutes of that every twenty four hours, so your last morning is three quarters of an hour shorter than your first. Air at the cabin sits between 45 and 52 degrees by day and drops to 27 to 34 on a clear night, which is roughly what Kansas City sees in the first week of November, and it is that drop rather than the date that pulls the yellow out of the birch. The mosquitoes are finished after the second hard frost, and that is the trade this month makes with you.
Seven nights in a two bedroom log cabin on the south shore of Ala-Kitka, sole occupancy, two sharing; a lakeside sauna heated with birch, with the week's wood split and stacked under the eaves; a starting food box waiting in the cabin, bread, butter, eggs, coffee, potatoes, rye flour and a jar of lingonberry; three dinners carried up to the cabin at seven and left on the table, fish twice and reindeer once; two packed lunches on the walking days; a compact automatic car with a full tank, collected in Kuusamo and left in the same place eight days later; one guided day on the 7.5 mile Juuma loop, two suspension bridges and a 30 foot fall inside it; one guided day in Oulanka along the red dolomite trench, including the 46 foot drop at Kiutaköngäs; two hours in an open boat certified for eight on Ala-Kitka, a passage held and skippered by the company that owns the boat under its own permit; one afternoon picking lingonberries and funnel chanterelles with somebody who can tell you at a glance which is which; firewood, bed linen, towels and the end clean; all local charges.
Round trip air out of the middle of the country into northern Finland, which you arrange yourself and which this office does not sell, $820 to $1,480 in September; fuel at about $7.40 a gallon over the 300 to 450 miles most people put on the car, $70 to $105; the four dinners not carried up to the cabin, $26 to $54 a head; groceries at the village shop and the town supermarket, $18 to $35 a day; a river fishing permit if you want to cast for grayling, $16 a day or $58 for the week; a fourth guided day added to the three, $145 to $210 for two people; rubber boots, a wool hat and a headlamp if you land without them, $45 to $95; a night added at either end of the seven, $130 to $190 for the cabin; a lift back from the far end of a walk you decide not to finish, $60 to $110.
The Juuma loop is 7.5 miles with about 1,300 feet of climbing in short pulls, and half of it runs on wet roots, cut rock steps and two suspension bridges that move under you; past the second bridge there is no shorter way round. The cabin stands 24 miles from the town with the last mile and a half on gravel, the nearest shop keeps five and a half hours on Saturday and none at all on Sunday, and once it is dark outside there is no light except the one you are carrying. Nights in the high twenties in a building you heat by feeding a stove yourself will find anybody who dislikes being cold at four in the morning. The week also comes two ways, still and frosted and yellow, or eight days of rain at 40 degrees with the leaves down by the third morning, and nobody knows which one you have bought.
Why the middle week of September and not the first or the last
The colour does not come on a date, it comes on a temperature. What starts it is a run of nights below freezing, and at this latitude those usually begin in the closing days of August. The ground turns before anything else: blueberry leaf, dwarf birch and bog whortleberry go red across the mires while every tree above them is still green, so by about the 5th the floor of the forest is the loud part of it.
Birch and aspen follow the ground by roughly a week, and in most years the middle of the month is when they are fully over to yellow with the leaves still attached. Rowan reds before either and drops early, which is why the berries are so easy to see from the road by then. That middle stretch is the week the operator runs, and it runs five starts inside it rather than one because the turn moves three or four days either way from year to year; a spread of starts covers more of that swing than a single Saturday can.
What ends it is wind. One southwesterly at 40 miles an hour and the birch is on the ground overnight; the following year the same trees hang on to the 28th. Nobody sells the peak. Nobody at this office will tell you the trees will be at their height on your Tuesday. What the named week buys is better odds than one fixed date gives, and that is a different thing from a promise.
first night frosts, mosquitoes finishing, cloudberry over, the mires starting to redden from the ground up
ground layer fully red, trees still green, lake water near 52 degrees, swans beginning to gather in the bays
birch and aspen going yellow, nights 27 to 34, thirteen hours between sunrise and sunset, funnel chanterelles up
colour at or just past its height, sleet possible on the fell tops, cranes gone, lingonberry firm and picking well
leaves down after the first gale, reindeer round ups starting, eleven and a half hours of light, trails empty
bare birch, dark by six, sleet and rain most days, a first snow that does not stay, most cabins shut
snow that stays from the first week, ice forming along the lake edges, four hours of usable light
leaf out in the last days of May, no real darkness at any hour, and the mosquitoes at their worst
One cabin, one sauna, and a shop that closes on Sunday
The sauna is the fixed point of the day and it is heated with birch, up to somewhere between 175 and 195 degrees, which takes about ninety minutes from a cold stove. Water off the end of the boards is around 50 degrees in the second week of September and falls close to a degree every two days after that, so people who go in on the Monday tend not to go in on the Friday. There is a thermometer nailed to the post at the top of the steps and it has been read by a lot of people who then thought better of it.
Three dinners are carried up to the cabin at seven and left on the table: fish twice, reindeer once, potatoes with all three. The other four nights you cook. The village shop on the main road opens 9 to 6 on weekdays and 9 to half past two on Saturday and not at all on Sunday, while the supermarket in town stays open until nine and is 24 miles away, so the practical rule is to buy Sunday's food on Friday afternoon and not think about it again.
Drinking water comes from the well and tastes faintly of iron. The stove takes a load about every four hours through the night if the outside temperature is under 30, and if you let it go out you wake up at 52 degrees indoors and light it in the dark. None of this is difficult. It is just work that somebody has to do, and in a cabin on sole occupancy that somebody is you.
The trenches at Juuma and Oulanka, and the road between them
Two of the three guided days are walking days. The first is the loop at Juuma, 7.5 miles round, dropping into the river trench and climbing back out of it twice, with two suspension bridges that swing enough to make people hold the wires. Jyrava falls about 30 feet in one step and you hear it four minutes before you see it. The old mill at Myllykoski sits where the water splits round a rock island, and the boards on the bridge there are wet from spray in any month.
The second is in Oulanka, 42 miles north of the cabin and an hour of driving. The river there runs between banks of red dolomite, and at Kiutakongas it drops 46 feet through 400 yards of rapid that you can stand beside and not hear yourself think next to. The walking is flatter than at Juuma, six miles on sand and duckboard, but the ground is river meadow and it holds water; boots that are merely water resistant will be wet through by lunch.
The driving is the part people underestimate. It is 34 miles from the cabin to Juuma and it takes 50 minutes, not 35, because the road bends with the lakes and the surface changes twice. Reindeer are the reason to keep to that. There are around 4,000 collisions with them on Finnish roads in a year, most in the hour on either side of dusk in autumn, and where you see one there are usually four more in the trees behind it. If you hit one you are required to report it, and the guide will go through what that involves on the first morning rather than leave it to the moment.
Holding one of the five September starts
Write or call with who is going, which of the five starts you want, and the airport you would be leaving from. A written costing against those names and those dates needs two to four working days at the operator's end, because somebody there is putting your actual week together instead of reading a screen back at you. When it arrives it sets out the cabin, the car, the three guided days, the six meals and everything that sits outside the figure.
Third Coast Dispatch handles no money in any form at any point. The company running the week invoices you directly, on the terms and the schedule written into that quote, and you settle it with them. The office is at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302, Lee's Summit, MO 64063, the number is +1 (816) 525-2846, and requests reach this office at bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com. Corrections go to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com, and on a page carrying this many numbers something will eventually need one. Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC is registered in Missouri and does business under the name Third Coast Dispatch. Anything sent overnight is answered within one business day.
Send this office a booking request
Open 24/7, this form will take a booking request whenever you write it. Nowhere on it is a card number requested and nothing is charged, because no money is ever owed to this office. Whatever reaches the form is opened in the order it landed, and an answer goes back inside one working day.
Nowhere on this page is a card number requested, and none is kept by this office anywhere. Writing costs you nothing and ties you to nothing. Asking is not the same as holding: your date belongs to whoever asks next until the operating company has confirmed it on paper and you have read what it requires of you.