CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: planning record, not independently verified geometry.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distances and riding times are planning figures. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
On the way it passes PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki, BÄLJATZ-VAARA Baelljasvarri and back through PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki. It crosses Finland, Sweden and Norway - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
There is a point on a bare hill in the far north of Norway that the world once used to measure itself. Stuor-Oivi is one of the stations of the Struve Geodetic Arc, a chain of triangulation points that stretches about 2,800 kilometres from Hammerfest on the Arctic coast to the Black Sea. Between 1816 and 1855 the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve and his teams measured the arc with astonishing care, and the result was one of the first accurate calculations of the size and shape of the Earth. Thirty-four of the points, in ten countries, were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2005, and this is one of the Norwegian ones.
Read the complete STUOR-OIVI Stuorrahanoaivi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
STUOR-OIVI Stuorrahanoaivi is where the day begins. Next is PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki.
Pajtas-vaara is a fell, a rounded, treeless hill in the far north of Finnish Lapland, in the municipality of Enontekio, where the country narrows between Sweden and Norway. The name is Sami, and the land belongs to the Sami homeland, where herders have followed reindeer across the fells for a very long time. It is open, quiet and big, and on a clear day you can see for fifty kilometres.
Read the complete PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki comes up about 66 km into the recorded legs. Next is BÄLJATZ-VAARA Baelljasvarri.
The Finnmark plateau is one of the emptiest places in Europe, and a surveyor in 1850 would have thought the same. Baelljasvarri, a modest hill in the Sami heartland of northern Norway, is one of the points that Friedrich Struve's expedition used for the great meridian arc, which ran from this Arctic country down to the Black Sea, and it is part of the World Heritage listing. The surveyors worked here in the 1840s, hauling instruments up bare hills and building cairns to sight from one to the next, in a climate that allows only a short working season. Summer was when they came, and with the midnight sun they could work all night.
Read the complete BÄLJATZ-VAARA Baelljasvarri write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 184 km into the recorded legs you reach BÄLJATZ-VAARA Baelljasvarri. Next is back through PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki, late in the day. Next is STUOR-OIVI Stuorrahanoaivi.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete STUOR-OIVI Stuorrahanoaivi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at STUOR-OIVI Stuorrahanoaivi. That is the ride.
STUOR-OIVI Stuorrahanoaivi → PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki is 66 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki → BÄLJATZ-VAARA Baelljasvarri is 118 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
BÄLJATZ-VAARA Baelljasvarri → back through PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki is 118 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through PAJTAS-VAARA Tynnyrilaki → STUOR-OIVI Stuorrahanoaivi is 66 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.