TRINE DANIELSEN BEDDARI
Trine lives in Melkefoss with her family. She is a trained teacher, but left school to follow her dreams. She is now a small-scale entrepreneur with her own tourism company, Birk Husky.
A year as a teacher at Pasvik Folk High School gave Trine the opportunity to teach dog sledding to students at the nature-loving school. After the year was over, she was unemployed, but with a renewed enthusiasm for taking people out into the woods with their dogs, and sharing the joys of nature with them.
She started her company Birk Husky, and went through many years of trial and error, as many small-scale entrepreneurs seem to do. Today, the business is thriving, and every year tourists from Europe have the opportunity to taste local food, visit the area in the summer, and go into the forests with dogs and sleds in the winter.
…Trine has turned her great passion, dog sledding, into a lifestyle…
When she has guests, she always gives tourists the opportunity to ask questions about the area. In this film, we can hear a German tourist asking if she speaks Finnish and Sami , due to her background. She says “no, unfortunately not”. A longer answer is that her family, like so many others in this region, has lost their language due to assimilation.
Trine has made her great passion, dog sledding, a way of life. But with this passion comes a concern about the growing industrial interest in the vast mineral resources of the north. When the iron ore mine Sydvaranger Gruve began searching for iron ore in 2009, with Australian investment support, she started a Facebook group demanding that the company stop toxic emissions into the fjord. The mine has since closed, but hopes to reopen.
Sydvaranger Gruve AS says that mining will always affect the environment, and that it is their vision to operate the mine as environmentally sustainable as possible, within the permits and legislation provided by Norwegian authorities.
The Norwegian government, as well as international companies, are keen to further exploit the mineral resources of the High North. Norway is one of the few countries that allows the discharge of mineral waste into the fjords.