Volcano meets the sea:
Kopasker
Volcano meets the sky:
Myvatnsveit
Volcano meets time:
Near Dettifoss
Volcano meets ice:
Myrdal
Volcano meets iceberg:
Jokulsárlonsandur
Volcano meets ancient soils (and cooks them red):
Volcano meets birch trees after a conversation with a post-glacial flood river:
Ásbyrgi
Volcano meets glacier:
Snaefell
Volcano meets itself.
Near Dettifoss
Volcano meets snowmobile:
Myvatn
Lots of fun meeting new people!
The basalt rocks of Myvatnsveit are particularly loyal. Even when frost breaks them apart they fall apart together.
They become islands and worlds. On an island of glaciers, they are untouched.
In this context, you are the glacier.
Your walking levels the land.
Worried about ash blowing around in the wind? It’s beautiful and mysterious isn’t, and makes your photographs, well, blur.
Seljaland
But if you go closer anyway, look who you will find dancing in the wind.
Bog Cotton!
So, blurriness, you see, is something to walk out into in the wind. When I did, it made me think I was a child of the wind myself. Oh, wait. I am.
One could be forgiven for calling the place Atlantis.
As Gunnar (who was from the East) did.
In the cold high desert of Northern Iceland, the water that has fallen from the sky holds it to the last of the light.
You feel it flowing through your veins and lose all weight.
You want to stick close to it. What you want to avoid is water and ice.
Southeast
Let the sheep risk that stuff. Such is the knowledge of a people whose origins are in “settlement” and not colonization — a people for whom “land” is a “landing”, a being lifted out of the sea. You don’t forget a thing like that. The darned thing keeps coming back.
North
Iceland teaches a sense of human scale…
Farm below Myrdalsjökull (Covered in Volcanic Ash)
… and human strength.
Well, it’s freezing in Hallormstaðir, and the Lagarfljót isn’t, shall we say, a great place for swimming today, but while the weather stations are warning of heavy snow and ice ahead, let’s remember the ice of April, as it breaks on the shore with the music of a flock of 100,000 tiny birds. The ice is the birds, as it shatters and lifts, and refreezes and tilts and falls, and washes in on the waves, all written with the record of a year.
What wondrous runes telling of every moment the winter through.
It’s beginning now. If you go down to the lake, you might catch the first words, but do stay safe on those slick roads.
And if you can’t, well, there’s April, when the ice plays its recording, just once, in birdsong.
Icelandic glaciers are black and breathe rock.
Icelandic culture was created by using them as highways.
Svinajökull
Well, not the snarliest, maybe. Still, watch where you build with imported road technology.
Skeiðarársandur
Be humble out there, eh.
No. Not Iron Iceland. Ironic. If it were iron Iceland, they wouldn’t build so many home-made scaffolds out of lumber. They’d use steel pipe, as they do in Canada, a lumber country. In Iceland, not a lumber country, they use precious lumber.
Mysterious and lovely!
A Farm in Iceland 