WINTER IS WELCOMED.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4826, 23 March 1925, Page 1

WINTER IS WELCOMED.

CONDITIONS IN THE ARCTIC. LIFE MADE EASIER. When we get our first cold snap, about this tiine of the year, ,we are accustomed to pity the dwellers in that belt of lands of the Far North spanning the globe around the Arctic Circle (states the Daily Mail).

On the Arctic Circle, however, winter is a season of awakening, and its coming is as welcome as that of spring. The land is largely swamp, over which hove clouds of mosquitoes so dense that they often look like black smoke. They render life a burden. Smoke “smudges” have to be burned at your door or anywhere out of doors where your work necessitates keeping pretty Etill. for a, time. You eat your luncheon in' a stream of smoke from- the little fire ; to windward specially lit for the purpose. Only in sunshine and a strong breeze are you • ever able to move about without your attendant swarin. Everyone but the natives with the toughest skin Wear a bag of muslin over the head nad, neck. But when winter comes the plague of mosquitoes goes.

’ Over most of the Northland travel is practically impossible in summer. There are no roads, of course, and the few narrow forest trails are boggy or blocked by fallen trees brought down by the winter stems. Swampy wastes of tundra separate one settlement from another. Navigation along the Arctic coast is a hazardous proceeding. and there is scant room for much besides yourself in the small skin canoes that constitute almost the only vessels available. But welcome winter turns the earth from soup to iron and lays over it a soft, clean carpet. Reindeer amd dog sledge take you swinmming merrily up ’ frozen rivers, where, conoeing in summer, you had to ■ fight your way, inch by inch, against the strong current, -

But it not merely away up inside the Arctic Circle that winter brings much easier travel and livelier social life to the community. So far south in the Baltic as Stockholm the sea freezes for many miles from the mainsledge take you swimming merrily land, giving scores of remote inhabitshore.