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Retrive the Muonianalusta Meteor... 2018.

The Muonionalusta event.

Late July 2017 I was riding from Jokkmokk in northern Sweden towards Muonio in Finland, mainly easy gravel roads that sometimes turned into sandy single track. The weather was warm and my Honda XR was running like a dream.

The motorcycle was a last minute change in the plans for that year. Some months before on the first day of Easter I collapsed on the bathroom floor with a massive pulmonary embolism. I had not been feeling very well for some time. Technically I was dead for several seconds or minutes, who knows?

After 3 day I went to see my GP who then made an appointment with the hospital. Some hours later I was in intensive care where I was told that not many people survive a saddle embolus.

Lucky or unlucky?  I don’t know. The year before in October I nearly died under a truck in Uzbekistan while cycling on an otherwise deserted highway 50 km out of Samarkand. Driver fell asleep. I escaped with sort of minor injuries. Once again, was I lucky or unlucky?

After spending some days in the hospital and recovering for weeks at home, I felt immensely tired. I could barely walk 50 meters without getting winded. I see the cycling trip I had in mind for the coming summer evaporate into a non-event.

Between sessions of resting and sleeping I start to google for a used motorcycle the summer is not lost as far as I’m concerned. I just wane go places!

After some time I find a nice Honda XR650R with only 4000 km on the clock. This is a serious machine although dated it is still a good contender for the trip I have in mind, nearly 60 hp. and only 128 kg. But I’m still too weak for a test ride and the bike is kick-start only.

My initial plan was to fly to Murmansk and ride my bicycle back home via the North Cape in Norway. I want to stick to the plan as much as possible and apply for a Russian visa. I book the ferry from Ghent in Belgium to Gothenburg Sweden.

Meanwhile I order some panniers and new tyres for the bike, change the oil and filter and hope for the best.

On the road to Muonionalusta I have to stop a couple of times to rest, I’m constantly tired, somehow this is not easy for me to deal with. The mind pushes me on but the body wants to sleep…..

During one of those stops near the little village of Kitkiöjärvi I stopped and kicked my boots around a bit in the loose gravel on the side of the road. My eye locks onto something unusual, it is a strange pointed stone, brown blueish and it appears to be blistered. After careful inspection I put it away in my pocket.

I never made it into Russia that year, about 100 km before the North Cape in the Olderfjord hotel I discovered that I was peeing blood. Time to go home…..

It was only after I bought a new motorcycle jacket and emptied out the pockets of the old one that found the stone again. I pulled me hard, it had some sort of lure on me.

After some googling the region I discovered that the stone I had in my very hand was most likely part of a meteorite that impacted the Earth during the Quaternary Period, about one million years ago. It is quite clearly part of the iron core or mantle of a planetoid, which shattered into many pieces upon its fall on our planet. The material is almost pure iron and more than four and a half million years old. All depending of the height when it exploded the area where the fragments landed was already quite large to begin with. After that it had to endure four ice ages that spread the fragments out even more. The Muonionalusta strewn field is therefore one of the largest ever discovered.

The chances of finding a meteorite by eye are smaller than a million to one I discovered later. And again I ask myself the question, lucky or unlucky?

 I can do without this sort of luck and decided to leave it somewhere as a cache in an unknown location. Just to make sure it was not some heavy pebble I send it a way and had it certified. The long side was filed and polished to reveal the core and the very peculiar triangular structure that is known as Widmanstätten pattern.

Then I decide to put a hacksaw into it, roughly cut it in two pieces and drill holes through the pointed tips, if you ever retrieve it you want to wear it around your neck.

July 2018, on the road to Teriberka on the Kola Peninsula in North-Western Russia and I’m about ready to hide my first piece of Muonionalusta meteorite.

Find your way to Teriberka. The first road sign can be ignored. Do not go to the right and over the bridge unless you want to eat something first in the only restaurant I could find. Follow instead the road to “old” Teriberka and stop at the road sign claiming you have actually arrived in Teriberka. Stand in front of it facing the village beyond, or what is left of it I should say. On the inside is a ledge where I left it.

Grab it and ask yourself the question like I did a thousand times, lucky, unlucky?

Who will be the first, to uncover the secret?... 2012