South Karelia is a border province in the southeast corner of Finland, between the Saimaa lake district and Russia. It has for centuries been part of the old, historical Karelia  - a borderland between the cultures of East and West.As a province South Karelia is young, for it only aquired its present borders under the post-war treaty of the 1940's, but the first settlers came to the area thousands of years ago. Today South Karelia is a province of great diversity: an expanding economy, giant wood-processing mills, white steamers, the Imatra rapids, seals and rare flowers, spectrolite, moraine ridges and verdant groves. The greatest natural wonders in South Karelia are the two parallel Salpauselkä ridges, dividing the whole province. It is a little difficult to see their shapes in the landscape because of their enormous size. A tourist, a hiker or an outdoorsman can, however, learn to see smaller signs of this ice age wonder piece by piece in a scenery that always has interesting stories to tell.Hiitolanjoki Kangaskoski Most places have their own stories to tell about the history of different periods from the time of the ice age to the beginning of today's wood-processing industry. The warmer periods that lasted some two hundred years, gave birth to the first and second Salpausselkä ridges some 10,000 years ago. The Lake Saimaa of that period was connected to the Baltic Sea, and it was separated from the Baltic Sea at the same time as, for instance, Lake Päijänne. Due to the uplift of the land, the outflow of Lake Saimaa found its way through the first Salpausselkä ridge at the site of present-day Imatra, and started to run to Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe. This enormous convulsion of nature, the birth of the Vuoksi River, took place some 5,000 years ago.In the landscape there are noticeable signs of the ice age, for instance at Kyläniemi in Taipalsaari on the second Salpausselkä ridge, the Ukonhauta "graves" at Joutseno, "suppa" pits also on the island of Lammassaari in Imatra, the Parikkala ridges and "suppa" ponds, as well as the great suppa in Uukuniemi called Huttumalja.