Return to the Isak Pehrsen Tiberg Family

From Kittilä to Utsjoki
In his book, Through Lapland with Skis and Reindeer, Frank Hedges Butler described a 1912-sojourn in Lapland. He observed, "... from Kittila... a fjeldway leads northwards past the west side of the Enare [Inari] Lake...

...to Utsjok [Utsjoki] at the Tana [Tenojoki river].

This route is used for mail, and is probably the best road between Finland and East-Finnmarken [in Norway]. Strictly speaking, it is only a winterway, although it can be used by pedestrians in summer-time. The distance from Kittila to Utsjok takes, as a rule, six or eight days in summer. In winter-time, with reindeer, the same distance is covered in four or five days."

Sami nomad at Kautokeino. Photo: Røe.

From Utsjoki to Vadsø
On her journey home, Emma most likely followed the route described above. Then, from Utsjoki, she would have traveled a day or two east to Vadsø.

In Lapland, published in 1971, Valerie Stalder describes a trip by reindeer sledge through a remote corner of Lapland: "...the village that we were leaving faded from view with astonishing rapidity, and soon we were out in open, snow covered country where the whole world, as far as the eye could see in all directions, was dazzingly white. The only variations were the shades of whiteness, of the snow, the ice, and the frost, and the occasional dark outline of stunted bare trees and low shrubs. As the reindeer clip-clopped along, relentlessly dragging the bouncing sledge up and down over the uneven terrain, I began to wish that I had a foam rubber cushion beneath me instead of hard planks covered by a reindeer skin.

"But I soon forgot my discomfort in the immensity of the scene that surrounded us." Stadler says, "We crossed one frozen lake after another that day, lakes that seemed to be silently waiting, waiting perhaps to thaw, miles and miles from anywhere, and the only sounds that cut the keen air were those we made as we crossed. And once we had moved on, the lakes would be immeresed again in their total whiteness and their total silence.

"In such surroundings it was impossible to be unaware that we were following an age-old, unmarked route that the Lapps have followed for centuries, employing the same age-old means of transport." Stalder says, "The men use no maps or compasses but guide themselves - today as always - by means of the mountains and the lakes, for these, to the Lapps, are signposts they have known since childhood, when their parents took them along the old routes and explained how to get from one village to another - or even from one far-flung tent to another. Obviously, in a land where within an hour the weather can change from clear sunshine and blue skies to a raging blizzard, and where to get lost might well mean swift death, such lessons must be learned early - or not at all. Lapland is a hard, stern country to live in, but over the centuries its people have learned to cope with it. Now, crosssing the frozen lakes, I felt a deep sense of the impressive continuity of human life, as though eternity itself were unfolding before me as our sledges jostled along."