Qualla: Liesjärvi National Park

Liesjärvi National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ajattokoj Ahyaj, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kyynäränharju is a narrow spine of gravel with a lake on either side. Walk it and the water is never more than a few steps away in either direction, which is disorienting in a country where lakes are usually things you come to the edge of rather than walk between. The ridge is an esker, and it was laid down by a river that ran in a tunnel underneath a kilometre of ice. When the glacier melted, the riverbed stayed - a long, sorted heap of sand and stone left standing where the water used to be. Liesjärvi National Park was drawn around that ridge and the lake country either side of it, and it has been protected, in one form or another, for more than a century.

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Image: Ajattokoj Ahyaj | CC BY-SA 3.0

Liesjärvi National Park: What the Ice Left Behind

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Markus Rantala (Makele-90), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Häme lake highlands are glacial leftovers almost everywhere you look, but eskers make the process unusually legible. Meltwater under the ice sheet carried gravel and sand along a fixed channel, sorting it by size as any river does, and dropped it when the flow slowed. Then th...

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Image: Markus Rantala (Makele-90) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Liesjärvi National Park: Korteniemi, Still Working

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joneikifi, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1878 a tenant farmer's holding on the shore became a forest ranger's station, with Kalle Lönngren as its first keeper. Rangers lived and farmed there for generations. Korteniemi is now the only forest ranger's homestead in southern Finland whose yard survives in its original a...

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Image: Joneikifi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Liesjärvi National Park: Trees Older Than the Park

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Miraceti, CC BY-SA 3.0. Some of the spruce here has been standing for around 180 years, which means it was already mature timber when Finland was still a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire and Kalle Lönngren had not yet taken up his post. Walking the park's roughly thirty kilometres of marked trail takes...

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Image: Miraceti | CC BY-SA 3.0

Liesjärvi National Park: Protected in Instalments

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olga1969, CC BY 4.0. Part of what is now the park was already set aside in 1920, a strikingly early date for nature protection in a country three years old. The national park itself followed in 1956, in the first significant wave of Finnish park designations, and it has been enlarged since - once in ...

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Image: Olga1969 | CC BY 4.0