Iceland | Camino Bay Books

2022 The Northern Route – Flatey Iceland

Robin — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 13:30:09 +0000

16 September: I left Westfjords last evening, taking the ferry across Breiòafjoròur, a large bay separating the Westfjords from the Snaefellsnes Peninsula and am a hundred miles or so north of Reykjavik in a community called Reykholt; in two days I leave for Oslo. (About that bay—it is unusual in having an enormous number of “islands, islets, and skerries.” One of those islands, Flatey, is inhabited year-round. I have to wonder what motivates people to have settled there and to remain. It’s an hour by ferry from one side of the bay, an hour and a half from the other and tiny; it won’t stand a chance with sea level rise and it’s only a short walk from one side to the other. I understand and am drawn to isolated living, small villages, islands, and so forth, but this seems extreme. I need to see if I can discover what brought and keeps them there.) In my mind, leaving Iceland divides the trip in half, not just temporally with five weeks in each area, but psychically. I have been on islands—Greenland, Iceland, Faroes—and now go to the northern reaches of the European continent. The four remaining countries have a coherent feel about them that is lacking with the islands. I have no idea how far to take this notion or what if anything to make of it, but it feels different. There’s no question that I didn’t connect with Greenland as I have with these two neighbors to its east. It has to make a big difference that I was restricted to flying and sailing to get around Greenland whereas I’ve taken a car and moved more freely and widely in the other two locales. In Greenland people essentially cling to the perimeter of the land/ice mass and without the time and effort of getting on a ferry they are restricted to their local areas by the lack of roads. Nature in all three is large and powerful yet, once again, in Iceland and the Faroes I could move into it, get closer, as opposed to the sense of just hanging on in Greenland. The Faroes is a much softer landscape, green practically all over and even the high, precipitous mountains were themselves ensconced in grass and seemed only another expression of it. And the people—Earth would be much better off, as would all the people who were part of it, if population density everywhere were what it is in these two countries. (When I get a chance, I want to figure what the people-to-acreage ratio is in both.) Earth seems more comfortable to itself with less of Homo Sapiens (is this projection?) and I suspect most of us members of our problematic species would be as well. Small communities of a few hundred people are better suited to the spirit and relational capacities of humans than those with many thousands. The other notable feature of each of these countries is the less visible presence of commodity world; there are fewer businesses, and they make less effort to announce their presence. I think they realize they are subsidiary to the community and not intended to dominate it; they are there for support. Which is bound to reflect also in people’s view of what they live for. I saw in the Yukon many years ago and in Westfjords a few days ago a very similar tableau: small café and general store with a woman doing domestic type things, tending young children in their corner with their toys, ironing, preparing the food I asked for, and the men doing their sort of work but coming in to help. Integrated lives and seemingly happy ones even if, by most standards, relatively poor ones.

Photo by Einar H. Reynis 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 – Akureyri Iceland

Robin — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 13:30:47 +0000

Big weather change: wet (although not much so), foggy (much so), and temp in the mid-30s. I’d rather this wasn’t happening just as I prepare to launch into the Westfjords region, said to be the most unpopulated except for the Highlands. The main problem is visibility—driving is difficult, of course (and I’m surprised at finding Icelanders seemingly in so much of a hurry when behind the wheel) and equally important, I can’t see the countryside. I had a clear hour this morning after I left Akureyri and it was a landscape I especially like: great valleys, meaning deep and wide, presumably glacier-carved for the most part. There are few trees although small acreage areas here-and-there that have straight-line perimeters suggesting either remnants from cutting or tree farms. The country is softer than I anticipated, not as rocky, although there is abundance of lava field, but even it is very often softened by moss and wonderfully diverse little “fields” of leafy plants and grasses, all very low to the rock. The valleys and mountains are often covered by a variety of plants but rarely trees. Lots of sheep and horses (for pleasure riding, I assume), very few cows and almost no row crops among all the hay fields. Isolated homesteads are always multi-building with barns for animals and equipment, a house, and a variety of smaller shelters. I thought, as I peered through the fog at these home places and the few small communities I passed through, about the wide variety of environments people make themselves at home in, and I wondered which, if any, are overall best for the people inhabiting them and what makes them so. Relative isolation and regular contact with limited numbers and kinds of people would seem a possibly impoverished way of life, yet I think that bigness of towns and populations is depleting in its own way, and if I had to choose would go small. I imagine that the fewer people in an area the greater the solidarity among them; certainly, there can’t be anonymity or impersonal relationships and people are likely to feel more accountable to and for one another. Chances for depth relationships might even be increased.

Photo by Josh Reid on Unsplash

2022 The Northern Route – Husavik, Iceland

Robin — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 13:30:52 +0000

I drove the “Diamond Circle” today—it’s a name that confirms that marketing hyperbole has infected travel talk as much as it has real estate and anywhere else it is considered useful. I enjoyed the trip, about 250 km, and it adds to my growing picture of what this Island is like as one very unusual expression of Nature. By the end of my time here, all that I’ll have missed of significance will be the Highlands, the great unpopulated, practically unroaded interior where volcanism has made for an essentially uninhabitable expanse. I don’t know the details of that but lack of potable water is part of it and being at higher altitude winters are bound to be fierce. Those who visit it mostly do so with guides and 4-wheel drive vehicles; considering Iceland’s popularity among tourists I feel sure if it was practical to more fully exploit the area it would be done. What I found in the regions I traversed today was a variable landscape ranging from agricultural to moonscape to lava fields, grasslands, and mixed areas of low shrubby plants, grass, and rock. It isn’t mountainous in the least. I stopped in Husavik, a whale-watching center on the peninsula’s west coast and an appealing little town with snowy mountains across the bay, but only briefly and drove across one of the northern edges of the country that reach out to but barely miss the Arctic Circle. And then to Asbyrgi, a striking U-shaped canyon several km’s long separated in the middle by a gray butte of, I’m sure, basaltic rock and at its end by a pool, arc-ed cliff a few hundred feet high, and a meager waterfall falling through the talus and forming a shallow pond. A lone fulmar patrolled the waters; they are said to have moved in due to a shortage of suitable nesting sites elsewhere. The canyon toward its nether end is heavily foliaged with birch and other low trees and shrubs and in spring with flowers. Altogether, a unique site, another of the ways natural conditions come together in beauty and uniqueness. The canyon was probably shaped by glaciers.

Husavik Photo by Maarten Wijnants on Unsplash

2022 The Northern Route – Iceland II

Robin — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 19:10:55 +0000

The drive north along the east coast (of Iceland) pleased me as these dramatic landscapes usually do. It was high, talus-sloped mountainside port and Atlantic Ocean starboard all the way, with the space between them varying from almost none to a mile, more or less. I don’t remember seeing talus so completely covering a mountain up to near the top like this for mile after mile. A few times it came so close to shore that the roadbuilders had to plow through the loose rock at the risk, I’m sure, of setting loose a slide. Where space allowed, as the mountains moved inland, there were often isolated farm homesteads, usually placed with a clear sense of wanting to be situated fittingly in relation to the cliff or slope behind them and the flatland in front. This being Iceland there was water coming down from precipices in the usual array of patterns. No matter how common, they are always a delight, always creative in finding their way and knowing where they want to go.
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I have noticed along Iceland roads that everything is named: any stream, however small, that crosses under the roadway, paved roads that intersect, quarter mile dirt tracks leading to barns or houses—they all have a road sign with a name. What the names mean, of course, I have no idea; I would certainly like to know. But whatever they mean, they exist and must tell us something by virtue of existing, but I don’t know what. Just one more question I will carry along and hope to find someone to ask, or more likely, take home unanswered. I have also seen a fair number of swans, Whooper Swans according to what I read; swans are not common anywhere I’ve lived and I enjoy their unique shape. There is only one native land mammal here, the Arctic fox, and I’d be lucky to see one, and probably would prefer not to simply because predators are always in danger from humans, even Icelandic ones, I imagine.

Photo by Juho Luomala 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 – Iceland

Robin — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:30:54 +0000

3 September: Iceland, the name and the mental imagery that goes with it, evokes visions of icesheets and glaciers and, to a lesser extent, the streams and rivers fed by their meltwater (which in N. America, where I’ve seen it, is always turquoise colored but here is sandy in what I’ve so far seen). I’d have to go to the Highlands—and that would require hiring someone to take me—to see ice in its glory here, although the melting edge of the sheet can be seen behind the escarpment I mentioned yesterday. As this drive is showing me, Iceland is as much water-land as anything and I love what I see. Streams approaching precipices have more ways to get down than one might initially think. I’ve seen waterfalls, cascades, slides, two- and three-stepped falls and the same arrangement combining falls and cascades, and to add more to the mix it matters what the last shape and size rock it is that the roiling water surmounts before ending its vertical flow. One today was large and shaped rather like a hamburger bun and sat at the transition from mountain stream to one of the plains; some of the water flowed directly past its sides and other flowed across the top and then sheeted out and quickly down in an arc with the shape of a bubbly, showery curtain—the source of all this being visible as the stream headed downhill to meet its fate at the bun. Both sides of the opening that fell into a pool where distinguished by very large monolithic rocks standing at attention in honor of what the water was accomplishing.

I had to go twice to find a somewhat less touristed time at a place I wanted to see but I managed to walk up to and along Fjaðrárgljúfur (I don’t think I’ll do that again; there’s not much point in straining to spell correctly names I can’t begin to pronounce; I’ll remember the place by the description), a hundred meter deep cleft in mountainside rock that runs a couple of kilometers. It’s black rock, and green moss and grass, and stream rolling through; not glacial but just shallow depression that water and erosion and temperature changes had their way with over the last few thousand years since the ice cap receded. An evocative sight; it reminds that the area around it that’s not cut out and is still green-covered and smooth is also black rock under the surface.

Why do these long natural world projects always turn out beautiful forms—shapes, sizes, and designs that humans would be seriously challenged to match.
Since this morning when I sat for a time beside the curious waterfall I described above as “bun-like” at its end, I’ve thought about beauty and how, for me, it is most often found in Nature—sometimes in music, occasionally in art, but mostly Nature—and more to the point how we’re drawn to it and what it does to and for us. It is ironic for me to watch all these people working so hard to visit special places and then spending so little time with them before or after their pictures (and why do so many of these pictures have to have a person as foreground?) Dramatic and popular sights seem to draw them but the beauty, which I think takes some time to absorb, almost seems overlooked. When I began to reduce the length of my hikes owing to aging legs, I didn’t realize for a while what a gift was hidden in that. The slower I’ve gone and the shorter the distances, and the more time spent attending to any one place, the richer it has been. Beauty apprehended and honored for its independent being is among those few experiences that make us better for having allowed them to soak into us.

Photos by the Author

2022 The Northern Route – Gullfoss

Robin — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 16:00:12 +0000

1 September – I left Gullfoss this morning and for the first 3-4 hours passed through primarily agricultural country: hay fields and pastures, sheep and horses, no cows to be seen. Then after going east for a while on Hwy. 1 the scenery changed—I entered what’s called an outwash plain with mountains to the north and flattened plain on the south all the way to the Atlantic, which is often visible. The escarpment was only, I estimate, about 1,000 feet high with cliff, alluvial fans, collapsed sections, and all painted the rich green I became so used to in the Faroes. Here the green grows vertically, too, which tells me it’s very often moss. And in fact, eventually I came to lava fields that were completely grown over with moss, beautiful and in a way other-worldly. There was a little of this where I was yesterday that I gently inserted my fingers into and was surprised to find 4-5” deep. I read on an information sign that in the lava field it sometimes reaches 20” or more, which is hard to imagine. In many places other plants, forbs I suppose they’d be called, had rooted in the moss and sometimes flowered accenting the beauty further. All along the mountain face that continuously skirted the road and that was green all over, there were waterfalls and cascades, some of them from quite high above the plain’s edge below.

I took a few pictures but it was the continuity, mile after mile, that made it most remarkable and would require moving pictures to capture. Most of the plain was covered in shrubby plants separated occasionally by lava flows and more rarely by fields. Sadly, along the roadway repeatedly were dead birds. I learned later that baby fulmars, large but still too weak for distance flying, are often attracted to the road, perhaps seeing it as a stream, and land and of course are hit by cars. Over a hundred miles I’m sure I saw a couple dozen of them. Once a young woman had pulled over and was racing back to rescue one who was settled on the roadway edge. He was the lucky one. Damnable to think about all the lost lives and the lost effort of parents who had nurtured these youngsters almost to adulthood only to have them perish in an unnatural way.

I said I was beginning to develop a strategy for dealing with the tourist numbers. Since they apparently go to every place highlighted in guide books, I will mostly avoid those places and, as I often do when camping at home, seek out the less known and less popular areas, which for me very often have their own attraction and the added benefit of calmer, less populated conditions for enjoying them. I have gotten to the point anyway of being less drawn to the grand sights and more to the experience of grand landscapes; I want the feel of new natural places and of coming to know them as much as I can in limited time. As I’ve come to do in hiking around California, I find good spots for sitting and contemplating where I am. I’ve found that tourists are drawn to the dramatic, while I am satisfied with the quiet beauty of other places. Today I spent time in front of a cascade weaving its way down the moss-covered slope, graceful and shapely, while a few hundred yards away one of its sibs was roaring over a cliff edge throwing far more water out and breaking into spray at it hit the pool below. It was good to see but crowded, while I had the cascade to myself.

Cover Photo – by Lex Melony on Unsplash