Hetta

Hetta is the kind of place that people who know Lapland describe quietly, without much enthusiasm, because enthusiasm would attract the wrong kind of attention. The village — officially Enontekiö, a municipality, but the settlement itself is called Hetta — sits on the southern shore of Lake Ounasjärvi at the foot of Pällästunturi, and it is the starting point for the Hetta-Pallas trekking route, which runs forty kilometres south through the Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park. In summer this trail is one of Finland’s great hikes. In winter, on skis, it is something more private and more demanding.

I came in the second week of March, which the locals told me was the best week of the year: the sun had been returning for a month, the temperatures were still cold enough for excellent ski conditions, and the light — sideways, golden, lasting six or seven hours in a low arc above the fell ridges — was the best light in all of Finland. They were not wrong. I set out on rented cross-country skis on the first morning and the fell opened up in every direction in that quality of light, the snow textured and lit from a low angle, the shadows of the birch trees running long and blue across the white ground.

The village has a reindeer herding community at its centre. In March the herders are in the phase of separating their herds — distinguishing the animals and preparing for the calving season — and the activity in and around the village has a purposeful quality that I found moving to witness without quite understanding. Snowmobiles moved through the birch at dawn hauling feed. Dogs worked the herd boundaries. The Sámi women I passed on the trail wore the traditional kolt — beautifully patterned in blue and red and yellow — in a way that suggested they had not put it on for visitors’ benefit.

The church at Hetta is worth the time: a small stone building with a pale wooden interior, its windows looking out over the lake. In winter the lake serves as an airstrip — small planes land on the ice with skis where in summer boats come ashore — and standing at the church window watching a plane descend silently onto the frozen surface was one of those quietly surreal Lapland moments that no guidebook had thought to mention.

When to go: March is ideal — the light, the snow, the herding activity converge into something singular. August for the Hetta-Pallas summer hike, which can be done in four to five days using the national park’s wilderness huts, each one a different view of the fell landscape.