Search This Blog

Saturday, September 30, 2017

Last Day of Falleg Friður

Took a cab to Grindavik, the nearest town, yesterday. It’s just seven-ish kilometers/ four-ish miles away – we could have walked that easy. Right? Wrong. It was rainy and very windy. There are no trees or buildings to break that swift blowing, biting breeze either – so yeah, we wussed out. Good thing too.
Had we challenged ourselves and braved the wind and rain we would’ve been cursing our efforts. Ya see, there ain’t nothin’ in Grindavik but the harbor.

Sure, there’s Arctic Horses, a “horse rental” concern (they do tours on horseback too), Volcano Tours, who also do a Golden Circle route and a Northern Lights - Aurora Borealis photography tour. There’s Hopsnes Lighthouse and Brimketill – a small, naturally carved pool. There’s the supposedly haunted ruins of Selatangar which, in its day was a big, BIG fishing village. All this sounds utterly awesome!

Why then am I saying there’s nada but fishing goin' on in Grindevik? Because what Jen and I dearly wished for, after a morning spent floating and becoming all happily boneless, was this – shops filled with sweaters made by Icelanders from Icelandic sheep, crazy cool pottery and glassware made by locals and, ya know, other hand made odd bits. Art galleries filled with jawdropping work would've hit the sweet spot too.

Failing that, a bookstore AND a coffeeshop with Icelandic pasteries. Nope – there was none of that. I did see a chip shop and, after unleashing the Google Fu, I learned there were other restaurats in the area but they seemed…dunno…hidden.

We made the taxi ride a round trip. If we'd gotten out to wander about, stare at the harbor and shit, we would've been stuck walking back to our Silica Arcadia. We weren't up for that.

Here’s the very wild, fun thing – Jen and the elderly cabbie got to talking. The brill moss covered lava fields? They weren’t all mossy until relatively recently. Way back in the ‘60s, astronauts were in the area to train. The rough, not moss covered, lava fields around Grindavik were thought to be good training for traversing the lunar landscape. Huh. I’m trying to imagine these vast fields of black rock without their beautiful, cozy green blanket. Freaky and cool!

What ignited the moss invasion? Our driver says it’s due to Global Warming – that Iceland’s much wamrer now than he remembers it ever being. He said that summers are lasting much, much longer – that there always used to be snow by mid/late September. No more.

Now then, I can’t find anything online about the moss beyond the fact that it’s beautiful and delicate (don’t step on it!). Also, it’s the first greenery to come in after deforestation. I must find out more, dammit!

Today will be our last float and final stroll through the lava fields. Our flight leaves late this afternoon. We’ll def come back next year but, quite possibly, later in autumn. There’s just something utterly magical about swimming in the great warm lagoon as snow silently falls.

10 comments:

  1. Living as I do on a land of lava rocks I find the prospect of going from bare rock to covered with moss in a generation not unreasonably frightening.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes indeedy!

      I forget there are volcanoes in the US (HelLO, Mount Saint Helens anyone?!). Are there lava fields like this in the US? Are they also moss covered now?

      Delete
  2. Yes, and no. (I have a personal relationship with St Helens, of the eyewitness hands-on variety*)

    All of the Pacific Northwest - Cascadia - is a lava flow, more accurately multiple lava flows. Ninety million years of lava flowing. Out where I live you can't swing a screaming tourist without slapping a lava flow. No moss.

    There are mosses on the westside, it is afterall Nort "America"'s only temperate rain forest, but they are the products of millions of years of a temperate climate. Mosses here in the river bottoms and creek beds, but generally at an average of four thousand feet above sea level too cold and as a desert too dry for anything wimpier than a lichen.

    On the geological scale to go from a dry faced lava flow to one covered in moss isn't even "sudden", it's instantaneous, and that is truly frightening.

    (I was hooking logs to a helicopter when she blew, fifty miles line of sight. Like the eclipse in the same general area a year earlier, alone, the nearest human a mile away... a primordial experience)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ahem, stupid phone: go from a dry faced lava flow to one covered in moss in a generation.

      Delete
    2. Wow, wow, WOW!
      A) I've GOT to get to your part of the world. Sounds absolutely breathtaking!
      B) "Out where I live you can't swing a screaming tourist without slapping a lava flow." Hah--thank you! Love how you sling words.
      C) More WOW--witnessing the volcano blow must have been unfuckingbelievable! I wish I could inhabit your memory-- see what you saw.

      Delete
  3. @%$$@%&#$U$^! I just lost it all ... arrrgggg

    Snapshot: We were prepared for it, in the danger zone, the red zone, and of course had eyes in the sky. I doubt the air had stopped reverberating from the double sonic boom when the call went out "anyone not on the lz in three minutes gets left behind" and I start running. We are maybe ten seconds into it, less even, the time it takes to look up and process what's happening. The mountainside is starting to slide away and debris is beginning to billow out not unlike the foam used to fight gas and oil (and aircraft) fires out the end of a firehose. At maybe forty-five seconds I am up out of the brush and running down a ridge line. The plume is now pushing a thousand feet, the mountainside is sliding into the billowing foam throwing house sized rocks in the air and there is a rolling rumble on the wind now blowing up from the valley. At two minutes I can see the lz and the helo on approach, look over my shoulder at the mountain and back forward as I jump over a log... and scare up a grouse, a male sage hen, cooling his heals under that log. I can't really describe the sound a startled sage hen makes, it's a cross between whoop whoop whoop, broop broop broop and garr garr garr but bear in mind the adrenaline was running pretty high: it scared me out of at least a couple of shades of my genetic suntan. At three minutes we're on the aircraft with maybe fifteen or twenty seconds for gawking, the mountain now the iconic photos everyone has seen, and then we were over the edge of the Colombia River gorge and as everything else was headed east headed west full bore, nose down attitude two hundred and twenty miles an hour close enough to the water to raise a rooster tail. Got our ticket pulled for ninety days for that.

    Whadahgonnado, right? A bunch of cocaine crazy hell raising harley riding helicopter loggers every damned one of us Vietnam vets who just beat that bad boy one more time. The whiskey did flow that night.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Geez and, again, WOW WOW WOWOWOW.

      Scary, cool, crazy, wow! I'm so damn glad you survived it!

      Delete
    2. We were never in any real danger at fifty miles line of sight. OK, some real danger, but we were prepared for it. We were back in there (with different pilots) in two days.

      Later in the year we went into the blast zone and spent almost three years salvaging timber. That was cool: ground would shake, mountain would smoke, we're like "give me another toke!"

      Been studying geology, vulcanology, plate techtonics and the atmosphere ever since.

      Delete
    3. What a wild experience! I'm envious.

      Geologically, Iceland is utterly fascinating. On our first visit, Jen and I went out to Þingvellir – the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. I know the planet's alive but to stand on a pulse point was brain bogglingly cool.

      Delete
  4. I'm envious. I never stood on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Where the story starts.

    ReplyDelete