Due to time constraints, I had to skip a trip to Kymijoki with few other packrafters, but drove to flooding Keravanjoki instead, on Saturday morning, accompanied by two friends in a canoe. Their plan was to paddle a longer strech of Keravanjoki through the day, but as I had only few hours to spare, I joined them for the first part, which runs through an area also referred to as “canyon” in some route descriptions.

We started from Hyvinkää, next to the wastewater treatment plant near Kaukas, where you can park the car and lower the canoe on the water. Once in the water and around the first bends in the meandering canyon it became obvious that we were again up for another bushwhacking battle, and despite nice flow the journey slowed down into a crawl. Having a tight schedule myself, I unfortunately had to depart from the canoe crew, after progressing only 1 kilometer in about 1.5 hours. Alone I was able to move more swiftly, tossing the packraft over obstacles and around roadblocks, and pushing and pulling through the hurdles on the way.

Originally we had imagined (or hoped for) that the river would be mostly free from obstacles, but despite the flood giving a bit more room to maneuver in the thin canyon, it was quite the opposite. In the end it took me a bit over 3 hours to get to my planned finish, 5 kilometers down the stream, in Tuusula.

Still don’t have a new camera so borrowed an old GoPro (original Hero HD, 720p) and shot some quick video footage instead (no fancy stuff, just shot something on the way, GoPro was mounted at all times on a GorillaPod Hybrid on top of my pack in the bow).