Glaciers | Camino Bay Books

2022 The Northern Route – Norway

Robin — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 13:30:49 +0000

The trip from Oslo to Bergen was the first time ever that I’ve felt shuffled around in a prototypical “tour” group. Thirteen hours from point to point with five changes of transport (train to train to boat to bus and back to train)—a recipe for exhaustion and annoyance. Both of which it was but what saved it were the two hours on the fjord boat. I look at the route we took on the map and am surprised to see that it was a relatively short V-shaped course from Flam to Gudvangen, a mere arm of what’s known as the longest (a couple hundred km) and deepest (1,300 meters at one point) fjord in Norway, the Sognefjord. Seeing the complex of arms on the map it doesn’t seem possible to identify a starting place; presumably the ice sheet and glaciers that carved these regions did their work starting from various places that eventually merged. What I saw yesterday was the prototypical fjord of my fantasy (that I didn’t see in Greenland), and it was a pleasure to suddenly realize that I’d seen it before and it’s Yosemite Valley. I think the Norwegian version is also carved into granite and it clearly had similar results on the fjord walls: steep with occasional waterfalls and green with trees (and here grass that Yosemite lacks for being in a dryer climate). If Yosemite extended to the Pacific, it too would be a fjord, and long ago when it contained a lake it would have looked much like the one here. I was oddly touched to see how similarly glaciers can do their work where the geological conditions resemble each other. But it’s a lonelier “fjord” existence in the Sierra than here where they’re everywhere. There are others, Hetch Hetchy and Kings Canyon, for example, but here they grew in rampant abundance, or so it seems from the map. I’ll know more after my time sailing along the west coast from Bergen to Kirkines at the far northern extreme of Norway. Although I have no competitive feel about these things, I am glad to know that Yosemite is as lovely as what I saw yesterday. Will I see any along the way that are superior? Hard to imagine, but if so I’ll acknowledge it and maintain my loyalty. Yosemite helped make me who I am.

Photo by Mark Twisselmann on Unsplash

2022 The Northern Route – Isafjordur Iceland

Robin — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 13:30:35 +0000

My introduction to the Westfjords was to rolling country for the most part including even the fjords. But as I’ve driven farther, especially since Holmavik, the valleys and mountainsides have grown deeper and higher. This is how I imagined the whole vast (for Iceland) peninsula would be. When the roads are not tunneling through a mountain, they mostly hold to the coast so I find myself going up to the head of a fjord and then down to the mouth and then up and back again. There aren’t a lot of people out here but there are more than I expected. Isafjordur, which is two tunnels back east of the village where I’m staying (or one tunnel—it’s unique in that the tunnel has an intersection where I turned right for 3km after leaving Isafjordur and driving 2-3km into the tunnel; two-lane to the intersection and then one-lane afterwards) is a town of over 2,000 people, built, naturally, on a fjord in a dramatically beautiful location. It’s a real town and one could forget that he lived in virtually empty surrounding space as far as human presence and impingements were concerned. The village where I’m staying, Suòureyri, has about 200 people. In all these places I feel under the sway, or domination or ever-presence, of climate and geology. I don’t see how one could live here and lose that sense, although I’m sure people do, some just from habituation and easily recollected and others from blockheadedness. I like the feeling of it; it reminds me of when I drove through the Yukon and Alaska the first time and realized I was a small visitor to a large landscape, not exactly hostile but definitely one to respect. Wherever we live we are vulnerable to its climate and possibly other or related factors (earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes), but it’s the sense of Nature in its larger and stronger expressions—ocean, mountain, desert—that most attracts me. I certainly feel that here; it’s part of what would draw me to live here if I were younger and could manage it. It was blind ignorance on humans’ part to separate themselves from Nature and choose to think of it as something exterior and only usable rather than something to revere and live in accordance with. It has led not only to immense destruction but to psychic and spiritual emptiness. Incalculable loss in all dimensions.

The only thing lacking here compared to the Faroes is the small scale I so appreciated there, although I imagine on a people per acre basis Iceland’s more sparse than the Islands (not that population is the only factor). But it doesn’t feel it. Iceland is also a more diverse landscape; both though are quite beautiful and satisfy my soul. To live in an isolated village on an isolated island apart from the strivings of most of the present world…that’s something that should be preserved even while not isolating people from knowledge and cultural input from outside. It’s a balance that people are famously inept at managing. And the world won’t stay away if it thinks there’s money to be made here (and world will find those who dance to the same time locally). I can’t help feeling almost as I feel about the vanishing tribal people of the Amazon. What chance have they in a world that cares nothing about respecting otherness when there’s an opportunity to profit monetarily?

Photo by Joel Rohland on Unsplash

2022 The Northern Route – Fjaðrárgljúfur

Robin — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:30:04 +0000

4 September: The day began with a continuation of the plethora of water falling in its diverse ways from the mountain edge. They’re all different and all appealing. One began with a long fall that was unusually vertical presumably because there was no wind to disturb it and it remained out from the rock wall behind it so there was no spray from water-rock encounters: a long descending relatively thin column of water, remarkable in its way, and then a couple of intervening collisions with rock, pond, another fall, and off in a stream to the ocean. Then falls became fewer as glacial tongues filled valleys looking out to the distant ocean. I think I passed a half dozen or so; it’s quite an unusual sight yet becomes almost normal. A couple of these fed into “ice lagoons” where water gathered and bergs floated. Naturally, tourists feasted on these; I was able to park, even eat at the café, and walk up to the lagoon on the smaller and less popular of the two. The second was impossibly crowded so I moved on. In one area there was a display about a 1996 event when sub-glacier volcanic activity erupted causing massive melting and then flooding combined with who knows what volcanic debris and the sweeping away of bridges and roads and scattering of boulders. It would have been a frightening and astounding thing to see. The latter part of the drive, then, consisted of outwash plains, some of them with moss but mostly not (and the moss was gray indicating an insufficiency of rain), the moss seeming to prefer lava rock to other varieties, and the long escarpment broken at times by glaciers and a few falls. The mountains were often striking and the glaciers always so. The mountains were somewhat different than the earlier ones in that they were less green. The sides that more or less aimed southerly toward the Atlantic were green, although not densely, but the front edges were mostly talus slope with no apparent growth. Steepness, different kind of rock, or whatever, these faces had changed.

The lagoons could have been places of quiet appreciation—silently floating bergs, glacier a stolid, slightly ominous presence across the upper side of the lagoon, mountains framing the scene, stream maintaining balance between melt and outflow—but were taken over by guided tour vehicles and the hordes waiting to ride them.

Photos via Unsplash

2022 The Northern Route – Ilulissat Greenland

Robin — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 13:30:06 +0000

*13 August: I am in Ilulissat on the west coast of Greenland at roughly 69° latitude, separated from Canada by Baffin Bay. About 60,000 people live in the country, the largest island on the planet, mostly covered with ice rather than humanity. Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the reasons I am here, the other being my interest in sailing by ferry down the coast for several days, gaining acquaintance, I hope, with the near endless fjords of this region. The town’s name means iceberg in the native language—appropriately since the glacier at the head of the Icefjord feeds a constant stream of bergs into the fjord and thence the bay. From the town, and especially my relatively elevated hotel window, I look out at hundreds of the namesakes floating all over the strait between here and Disko Island, about 35 miles west but looking closer. The bergs are pure white, come in all sizes, and like clouds do not perceptibly move; look away and back and that illusion ends, but the movement is slight and slow. Some of them have the prototypical, turquoise-colored glacial color around their watery base, for reasons I don’t understand. Maybe a sign of the more swiftly melting bergs? [No, I later learn, it’s just ice in purer, transparent crystalline form.] Since I lived in Alaska 30+ years ago I have been enchanted by these transient beings, on their way from life as part of a glacier onward into water becoming part of the sea. They seem to me mysterious in the absence of any real mystery about their source and nature. Like trees, they quietly abide, albeit comparatively briefly. More of them drop from glacier into Icefjord than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere. We will wind our way through them when the ferry leaves tomorrow evening. Before then, I will hike along the edge of the Icefjord, surely one of the most daunting traffic jams imaginable.

Above 2 photos by Author Craig Brestrup

Photo by Alexander Hafemann on Unsplash