Photos taken during a March, 2002, trip to Lapland, to visit the Liesio family.
Most photos are commented; some are not. There are still a lot of typos and some severe disorganization. There is an extensive subdirectory.

• ArchitectureIn this directory are portraits of buildings. Finland's architecture has always been simple, pragmatic, and elegant. After WWII, the retreating Germans burned everything they could, especially in rural Finland including Lapland. As nearly all buildings were wooden, this meant pretty much that the Finns had to start all over again. So nearly all rural construction is postwar. And in that construction you can see that "modern" architecture is basically Finnish architecture, though in Finland the simple, spare forms are much more livable and human-scaled than in the derivative glass and steel skyscrapers that plague American cities.
  • Art This is a miscellany of constructions that don't qualify as "buildings" such as fences and snow motels.
  • Cabin The log cabin is a 1990's Finnish fad that has resulted in the forests being depleted of dead pines. This might seem like recycling genius -- taking only the dead wood from the forests while leaving living trees to grow. But the "Old Pines" standing around dead are trees that may have started growing 300 to 500 years ago, and have been standing, dead, unmolested, not rotting, for up to 200 years. They have been so depleted that logging them is now illegal in Finland, so they are now imported from the vast Russian taiga (arctic forest).
  • Churches Every town has a church. The architecture varies. Here are a few, including snow churches, which every town seems to build each winter.
    • OldChurch Sodankyla has one ancient wooden church that somehow survived the German burning binge of 1947.
  • Homes Finnish homes have a simple traditional appearance. many newer homes have a strong California-bungalow influence; I pretty much skipped those.
• Arctic Miscellaneous outdoor scenic images.
  • reindeer We saw no reindeer until almost the end of our journey; then a few wandered onto the road....
• Helsinki This is NOT a survey of Helsinki!
• Luosto Luosto is a tourist town, with a ski hill, hotel, and many old-log vacation homes. The prettiest pictures are right here.
  • Amethyst At the SE edge of Luosto is an amethyst mine which is a very lovely tourist trap.
  • Luostontunturi The Luosto ski hill is on the local "bald mountain" (tunturi). The tree line is not far above the valley floor in Lapland! I think the hill is about 900 meters tall.
  Sodankyla We stayed with the Liesio family in Sodanyla for a week...
  • museums The Arcticum in Rovaniemi and the Lappish museum (in Ivalo?) are wonderful places. We took a few photos...
  • people A couple of random snaps of anonymous Finns being victimized by a tourist photographer. They move so fast I could only get them going away.
  • scenery Random scenic shots...
  • Train The night-train to Helsinki deserves it's own category.
  • windshear One photo, of interest only to soaring pilots.
• Friends
  A large collection of people.
  • Corbin Johnson Our nephew Corbin, who came with us, is interesting and photogenic; I tortured him by taking several portraits, mostly while he slept, a task for which he has a great deal of talent.
  • Mikko & Laura Koskinen And their son, Santori (The Finnish equivalent of "Sandy" which is the English diminuitive of Alexander.)