The snow stopped falling as we ate dinner and we put off clean up until after the hike as it was past 19:00PM. Our destination was SVARTIFOSS and it would be a 2 mile hike round trip. The trail head was across the tenting field at the base of a scrub covered lava escarpment.
We climbed a wide trail gradually over the toe of the ridge which was made up of lava flow layers and shortly we had a long view to the west to a ridge of distant cliffs that wrapped around the humongous VATNAJOKULL Glacier to the north and to the south the coastal plain and the sea. The trail reaching the top of the ridge now turned North and followed the top of the ridge.
We came to viewpoint overlooking a small foss dropping into a steep rocky and scrub filled gorge.
On ahead the ridge top broadened out into a wide grassy plain with a mountain out of a fairy tale in the distance. SKAFTAFELLSFJOLL is the highest peak in Iceland outside of the main ice cap reaching 2,044 meters into the sky and as we had been hiking the clouds had been lifting and now SKAFTAFELLSFJOLL’s sharp steep snow covered peaks stood out in sharp contrast against the gradual deepening of the evening sky.
You could tell by looking at the landscape that it was newly formed, like in the last 100,000 years. The glacier that covered it still here, right over there in fact. Time stretches out here, you can see it in the land how unfathomably long this Earth has been growing, forming and reforming and how minuscule, so f&$%ing minuscule the petty dramas we call human history have been. Time turns limestone into marble, what will it do with our detritus? We destroy the biosphere…that sucks but so what? Earth will grow another one. I mean we live in this beautiful wonderful mystery and what do we do with it? Exploit, Pollute and kill each other. WTF? In 10,000 years an Ice Sheet will grind us and all we have fucked up down to elemental particles. If we squander the opportunity to be the caretakers of the Earth we are not worthy. But we are so what is stopping us from achieving our potential?
There were two couples at SVARTIFOSS taking pictures beyond the railing on a rock at the base of the falls as we hiked into the gorge. The cliff is made up of beautiful black geometric columns and looks like a giant sculpture of a waterfall carved out of the basalt by Icelandic Dwarfs made even more striking by the actual waterfall dropping over it’s edge. We stayed for a bit after the couples left listening to the water and taking in the trippy formations of the columns. Above the falls the clouds were catching the red of the setting sun and setting sail, lifting slowly and floating towards the coastal plain and the sea beyond.
The sky was golden on our walk back to the campground as the sun dipped beneath its cover of clouds filled up the glacier and the plains below with its rich butter yum light. All around us on the ridge the grass glowed bright amber. It was quite a contrast to the weather an hour ago with low gray skies and snow flurries. Now we were lit up in Golden Hour at 20:30PM on a sunset grass-covered lava-flow of a ridge-line. It was beautiful even Jakobi had to admit as we descended the last quarter mile to the campground.
There were only eight or so campervans in the campground. In the Summer there must be ten times that number. I wonder how full the tenting area gets. As Ambiana, Jakobi and Colleen get ready to tuck into the tent for the night I retrieve our dinner dishes and head into the small room with the washer/dryer and sink to clean up. There is a woman doing laundry and a man at the sink filling water bottles. He offers to make way as he has a lot of them but I need to charge my phone so I decline and lean back looking out the small window. I see Ambiana heading back from the bathroom to the tent.
The man tells me he is having trouble with the heater in his campervan. They had another van and the heater didn’t work so they had to take it back to Reykjavik and now the heater in this new campervan is not working and his girlfriend is cold and afraid she is getting sick and asks if I have had an issues with my heater and how did I deal with them. I’m sorry I told him, We don’t have a campervan and the only heating issue I had was when my sleeping bag was stolen in Reykjavik but that was remedied by a trip to the home bedding store.
He thinks maybe they are using too much water and that is affecting the heater so he is filling the water tank to see if that makes a difference. I wish him luck as he gathers his water bottles and vacates the sink. Dishes done it is time to read and sleep. Sleeping is weird here, I doze and dream and wake and it seems to get light before I get to sleep and most sleep seems to take place in the early morning hours after 4:00AM.
In and out of sleep, snow scratching on the tent all night, it seems like its been light out forever yet ts only 830AM when I check the time. Outside the tent it is gray skies and widely spaced blowing snow flakes. Pulling open the restroom door with my left arm sends a wave of ache across my left pectoral. On the way out I remember and reach out with my right arm for the door handle. I gather my breakfast components from the car and assemble it on the picnic table before ducking back into the car out of the wind and do a little journaling and reading while waiting for the ladies to awaken. I notice the other 3 tents are gone.
When there weren’t 8 billion people on the planet I imagine you could move on to some uncivilized place. Flee the blight of civilization: Europe to America, Urban Areas to Suburbia, Ohio to Alaska. People move to a new place to try and make democracy and capitalism somehow work together, immigrate to escape the bullshit not realizing they are the bullshit and have bought it with them. That is how the globe was civilized but now there is no place left to go. There is so much space here in Iceland, wild untamed nature but we don’t know how to live with it. We need to exploit it, make some money from it, fuck it up in the process. Iceland in the last few years has implemented new regulations covering where you can camp or more specifically sleep in your campervan as too many people who park on a wayside shit in the bushes and leave their trash behind. Trapped in our disposable lifestyles unable to see a way out we can not fathom that living with Awareness in the Midst of a Mystery with Love and Gratitude towards All Living and Non-Living Things is enough.
When the pandemic was in its first months I hoped that we would come together and solve it and then with our new unity we would solve climate change. But what the pandemic showed us is that we need racial healing, gun control, income equality, lives that matter. Why does our culture love the rich and famous and believe material wealth to be the pinnacle of our existence? Because we’ve been sold an image, a lifestyle, a fashion that we yearn to attain. Brainwashed from birth with the image of success we know nothing else and when it is attained and found wanting the rage of the betrayal and the easy access to weapons produces mass shootings, suicides, domestic violence and opioid addiction. Capitalism gives too much to the few, not enough to the many and to those living on the streets of our urban centers, nothing at all as if they weren’t even there. And we step over the homeless, do nothing yo stop the mass shootings, stand by while those in our communities overdose and die in record numbers all because of the stories we have been told in one form or another for our entire lives.
These stories are what keep us from reaching our potential. We cling to them because we believe we have nothing else. But we do. We have the capacity to create a new story, one we can all get on board with. A story that does not reward one group or person over another. One that places the Earth and all that inhabit and exist upon it in the place now taken by GOD and STATE. A story that creates HEAVEN on Earth instead of the HELL we have brought into being. One in which the HERO is re-integrated back into the COMMON-UNITY and puts the Ideal of the Rich Man in the place now occupied by the DEVIL. A story that takes the BEST of our civilization and puts it to work fixing the WORST of our civilization.
In the small room with the laundry machines and the sink I meet a young couple from Canada who are circumnavigating Iceland Clockwise and have traveled all the way around the island to here in six days. Wow I remark, we are coming counter-clockwise from Reykjavik and its taken us six days to get here as well. “Do you get out and do stuff? She asks. For a second I think she is joking but she’s not. “Yeah, we do, do you? I ask her about Diamond Beach and the glacier lagoon which they passed on their way here. No we didn’t stop, it was dark we wanted to get here. Wow I thought, that’s supposed to be one of the jewels of Iceland and they drove right past it, and at night as well when you can’t see the landscape.
Driving in Iceland in the daytime is like being in a 4K technicolor documentary of the Earth’s Most Beautiful Landscapes. There is so much beauty I have a hard time keeping up with the speed limit which is good as you can get a speeding ticket by CCTV here in Iceland. There are cameras taking pictures and not being familiar with the system we have no idea where they are. Couples in the Campervan driving around Iceland in 10 days is a thing. We’ve seen them everywhere we’ve gone here in Iceland. We are here for for nine days and will barely have seen a fifth of the Ring Road. I am so much looking forward to coming back for at least a month to see more of Iceland’s incredible geography and geology.
Right now it is day six for us at the foot of the VATNAJOKULL ICE CAP and we are starting the day with a short hike to the glacier. Jakobi no longer groans audibly and falls in step grudgingly. Ambiana is out ahead. We hike the coastal plain inland along the base of the lava-flow ridge we hiked last night towards the mountain ridge on the opposite side of the wide valley the Park Welcome Center & Campground occupy.
Ahead we can the the white and crumbling snout of the glacier and as we get closer the lagoon filled with the recently detached icebergs. The water is a milky gray fitting in with the leaden skies and dark black rocks of the mountain ridges
We are up on a gravel bench, a moraine perhaps deposited by the glacier we are looking at when it was younger and flowing towards the sea instead of retreating as it surely is now. Jakobi takes a seat on a bench while Ambiana scurries down the path in the bank to the plain below in which lies the lagoon and the face of the glacier. Underfoot are rocks of all sizes ground smooth by the advance of the glacier mixed in with more angular and darker rock eroded from the lava cliffs that line the valley holding the mass of ice. The VATNAJOKULL ICE CAP from whence this glacier descends covers an area of 8,100 square kilometers and has an average depth of 400-600 meters. Under the ice cap slumber BARDARBUNGA, GRIMSVOTN, and ÖRAEFAJOKUL, three of the most volcanoes in Iceland are hidden
Ambiana does a beautiful dance with the snowflakes as the glacier looms behind her all captured by me for the dance video then she is off having seen people walking at the the base of the cliff up along the side of the glacier.
I hadn’t planned on going there but seeing her enthusiasm I followed her rock hopping along the path until we were right next to the glacier, in fact what we were standing on was a mix of glacier and silt.
A small melt water stream was below between us and the twisted melting silt covered side of the glacier, its very substance being swept out, transformed into the stream gray with the silt of crushed stone heading for the sea. What we are seeing here is a process that has been on going for at least 3 billion years mountains turned to dust to be deposited in sedimentary layers on the seabed floor that one day an Eon from now will form the bedrock of a new continent.
Colleen and Jakobi are now working their way on the rocky path below the cliff, coming to join us beside this ancient bed of ice, the glory of the elemental Earth going about its business.
After awhile we headed back the way we had come into the wind past the visitors center to the car which failed to start. The battery again drained. We had not charged any phones, not used any lights and couldn’t believe locking and unlocking the car with the fob would drain the battery but it was really cold last night. We scanned the parking lot for other cars and there was only one campervan in sight. We approached a group of 5 guys and asked if they had jumper cables bu they did not. Colleen headed to the Park Office where she was told the cables had been let out to two Americans and had not been returned yet.
On the way back from seeking help at the Visitor Center Colleen stopped at one of the glacier guide offices and asked if they could help and one of the guides got a jump box from the back and came over and got us going. Colleen mentioned to him that we lived off grid and powered our house for a short time with car batteries and Ollie, his name, was very interested in our off grid lifestyle. He said he hoped one day to live off the grid, that all his mates out here do and that we were living the dream. Yeah that’s us. We were very grateful to him for his help and while frustrating it had all worked out only delaying our departure for maybe 45 minutes. FM Radio on, Diamond Beach our destination, we pulled out of the campground parking lot and made our way out of the Park and back to the Ring Road heading East.
