Tag Archives: waterfall

Iceland’s Stones of History

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It is the horizon that marks the way across Iceland. It is there, where soft rock broken apart by fast-moving glaciers shows itself against the low, high-latitude snow, that one sees the difference between the impossible jumble of the near and the impossible formlessness of the distant.

It is the most basic cultural act to set up a human marker in that spot, in the most recognizable shape: a human guide. The jumble and the white-out become intimately more human, as a deep, psychological break between darkness and light. It clears the mind …

… and you find the way, exactly at the point, the ridges, where the wind blows the snow away. For most of Iceland’s history, these cairns were the difference between life and death as one travelled across country. Here at Litlafoss, it guides herdsmen out of the canyon pastures and away from the cliff where the raven nests and waits for you to slip and break your head. You can see some of these cairns on the left of the image below, although the one above was on the right and out of the image.

For Icelanders, these cairns are some of the deepest history in the land, and one of the historical markers of the creation of Icelandic culture.

They are to be approached with the reverence with which one approaches the caves at Lascaux or the Sphinx, and so are the glacial rubble fields that inspired them. Walk lightly in Iceland. Nature here is historical space.

You pass through history to get to the falls.

Litlafoss

To find the falls, you must go deep into the earth.

Volcanic Ash Blowing in the Seljaland Wind

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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.

We Are Dettifoss

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Water that enters a fall zone and flows down through air to the centre of the Earth, before being stopped by stone, first attempts to find its original level by climbing back, before the Earth draws it away. Have a look.

Dettifoss

People come from around the world to experience this power. What at first appears to make one small and insignificant actually makes one large because as humans we live in what we see. We are the waterfall. Keeping a little distance is safe, though.

Lunch in Iceland? It Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank

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So, lunch. That would be nice. Why not the Apotek in Reykjavik?Highly rated. A rather desolate environment, sure…

… but you came here for desolate, right? The bracing subarctic! And there is a fine menu. Why, the hamburger is only about CAD$40. Add a Gull, of course, and it’ll be around $55.

What? That was a whole day’s food budget? Not to worry. There are other options. The road to Seyðisfjörður, for example, or just off to the side, in case there’s a car. Serving travellers for 1100 years.

Neðri Uðafoss

The menu is simple.

Bilberries and Rainwater

Add a Skyr for CAD$2.00…


15 grams of protein!

It even comes with a clever little Chinese folding spoon, which you can keep as a souvenir! And you can wander while you eat.


Efri Selfoss

Bring a coat, though. It’s Iceland! Oh, and dessert is the same as lunch.

But that’s OK, right?

 

Beautiful Systrafoss

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Back in the days before lava covered the best of Iceland and people had to move up onto the hills with their sheep…

… the priests of Kirkjubær …

The basalt column marks the old church.

… were famous for keeping a group of nuns, well, orphan girls for the most part, over at Kirkubærjarklaustur, for the pleasure that could be gained from that …

 

… in just the place the Irish monks (who were on Iceland before the Icelanders) were camping out in caves in the cliffs and living off bird eggs (and then abandoned because a bunch of noisy pagans and their Irish women [slaves aka wives] had moved into town), and I wonder, you know, if the priests didn’t choose the place because the falls are like a bridal veil.

Systrafoss

… that flows down the hill separately, splits around the rock (fine Christian symbolism there) and then unites as one — before flowing through the cloister. We’ll never know, but we do know that the young women were set to work embroidering cloth, and that Icelandic cloth was the best in the world. It would be a surprise if the amorous priests missed out on the symbolism, or didn’t point it out to the girls left in their charge. At any rate, the falls are beautiful, and richer for a history older than Iceland, even though the lava took all the best land away, some say to punish those lascivious priests.

Still, the land’s still good enough for zipping through on a tractor, so all is not lost.

The Most Beautiful Thing About Hengifoss

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Well, first off, Hengifoss is cool because to get there you have to walk at the top of this 80 metre high cliff, and you don’t see it, which is good.

And then you get to spend a couple hours, and finally you get to walk up the river.

You never reach the falls.

Distant views are good, though.

And a bit of dilly-dallying along the way.

And the sandstone, like, that’s cool, too.

And, well, this stuff:

Not to mention a bit of cooked seabed. Very shiny!

You’ll never get to the falls, though. Here, let me show you why:

Sinkholes! Worth a peek. All this ice is hollow like this. Tricky.

And not just that. No path to the left:

No path to the right:

 

The whole time, the falls are calling out with the sound of artillery going off as boulders are bonking down off the cliffs. You can’t get close to the cliffs or the water, but who cares.

 

You can just sit around waiting for the sun to get out from behind a cloud.

Definitely that. There is, you see, a mystery here, and I don’t just mean how gorgeous these falls really are, but, well, dragon blood:

And the best of all is you don’t get to the falls. That’s key. The cliff along the way plays a part in this. That’s it in shadow at the left of the image below. 

Here, maybe the following image will make it clear. The water doesn’t matter, except to focus your body and your eye. The mountain makes a space, and in that space water has no floor. It falls straight towards the centre of the Earth.

And you are in that space, falling with the water. You are in the centre of the Earth.

You can’t go further because you are as far as anyone can go. In the heart.