Day 15 – Hornstrandir I

I woke up to a gorgeous open view that was all mine because the others were still sleeping.   The sun had warmed me enough to come out of my sleeping bag, and  I communed with the guide book, planning the future for some time, until the wisps of cloud in the blue morning sky coalesced into overcast, and I woke the others as it began to sock in and cool off.

We drove off from our renegade camp spot at the secret mountaintop location at 10:30.

What to do?  Suðereyri or not?

We chose Suðereyri, and it was bust.  Nothing was open, and it was a weird place.  It looked impoverished, but supposedly it is a progressive model of a green community committed to sustainability and thriving on tourism.

We didn’t see that.  We didn’t see anyone, or anything, interesting in the least, and we turned directly around and left.

At any rate, it was worth the trip, because the only way to Suðereyri by road is by an amazingly long tunnel bored 5km through a mountain.

A lovely green view approaching Suðereyri

This seemed astounding.  First of all, it’s the longest road tunnel I’ve ever been in, bar none (five kilometers!), and it seems a  monumentally costly road construction project to connect one tiny town that used to be boat-in.  Also flabbergasting, it has a T-junction in the middle of it.  After driving in the dark for minutes, there’s a T-junction!  Somewhere in the depths of rock under a gigantic mountain, there’s a little sign.  Notifying you: left turn to Suðereyri.  Another wonder of Iceland.

We sped on to Ísafjörður, where we promptly went to the Gamla Bakaríið bakery and ate a lot of bread.  We were near crisis with our camera batteries now, perhaps accounting for the dearth of photos on this day.  Everywhere we went we subtly sought out outlets and plugged our batteries in to snatch a few minutes of borrowed power – at the tourist outlet, the bakery, the library.

Our “hitchhiker” Cheryl was leaving us.  We were destined to go on a Hornstrandir hike, and she had less time left in Iceland than we did and wanted to be more economical.  At the tourist office she investigated flights and we bought tickets for a passage to Latravík at 6pm.  The man there grilled us about our preparedness and experience hiking, looking skeptical and intoning about “cold” until I bristled and said “Look, we’re Canadian, ok.  We’re prepared!”  Then he warmed up.

6pm seemed to allow us tons of time, but as it turned out, it ran out fast.  We took Cheryl to the road to hitch out of town, dropped a load of clothes in the laundry at the campsite, and Derek camped at the library to empty SD cards and charge batteries in preparation for a multi-day hike while I picked up stamps, provisions, and shuffled the laundry.

Laundry is no joke in Iceland.  Unbelievably, our single load of laundry cost $8 here.  To wash.  It cost another $8 to slightly overdry it. For a country with abundant geothermal heat and energy, the cost of laundering is astonishing.  It also takes forever.  I never thought a wash cycle could last two hours.

One $16 load of laundry later, our time had run out, and we were hastily packing our expensively clean clothes into our packs for Hornstrandir.  12 minutes away from 6 o’clock without the food packed yet, we panicked and rushed off to our departure dock at Bolungarvík… and promptly ran into road construction.

Road construction in Iceland – well.  The fend-for-yourself and we-assume-you’re-not-an-idiot ethos is alive and well in this aspect of Icelandic life too.  Clearly, they think flag people are a waste of money, or who could stand to do that job anyway, and cones and pilons must be considered a nuisance too.

We hit construction elsewhere too, and never saw a flagger.  But this was a rather massive operation, over a couple of km, with multiple lanes torn up and the traffic of a pretty busy road diverted.  No signs, no pilons, no flaggers.  That’s right, just traffic rolling pretty smoothly around the big yellow machines that were busy working.  Everyone was working!  I held things up a bit, because  I didn’t know where I was supposed to drive for a moment, but I figured it out.  And I guess that’s what they expect- people will figure it out.  When there’s an excavator sideways in the road, you stop for it.  When it gets off the road, you go around it.  Who needs flagpeople?  If there’s traffic waiting both ways, they work it out, like at a stop sign.  No biggie.  This was totally amazing to me, though, used to a million-cone line marking a lane reduction, flashing arrow signs, temporary streetlights, and flaggers in chartreuse jumpsuits with radios, ubiquitous everywhere there are potholes being repaired in North America.  Where we still have accidents.

We reached the dock at Bolungarvík in the nick of time to find our boat obviously there but no one in sight, thankfully giving us time to pack our food and snack a little.  Someone came to tell us we were departing around 7 instead, so we had time to repack, properly, grease our boots, and mail postcards.

We were the only tourists on the boat with a group of men who stood outside the cabin drinking beer and talking Icelandic.  Their cargo was two bales of insulation, which was really strange and mysterious to me.  I wanted to know, but didn’t know how to ask.  Why were four men taking two bales of insulation to Hornstrandir? That won’t go very far.

The boat ride in the flat light of an overcast evening put Hornstrandir in perspective real fast.  This was the open ocean.  Although Hornstrandir is connected to mainland Iceland, the fastest way to the eastern edge of the peninsula is by boat, which cuts across the Atlantic much more efficiently than overland.The bow of the boat was bouncing up and down, smacking the waves and throwing spray over the cabin.  Weirdly, the captain of our shuttle would not speak to me at all, directing all his speech to my brother, including his responses to my questions, steadfastly refusing to make eye contact with me.  He would ask my brother questions, looking at him, and then I would answer some of them, and he would continue talking, to my brother as if it had been he who just spoke.  It was a bizarre experience.

I stared out at the waves until my vision blurred, hoping to see a whale.  I saw a spray I was pretty sure was a spout, but it was too far off to confirm.  After the long boat ride, we slowed into harbour, where there was a lone bundled-up woman waiting on the dock to be picked up.  The men with their insulation put out in the zodiac to cross the shallows, then we went.  The boat zoomed off with the woman at the end of her trip, and the men had vanished somewhere as we walked up the beach, alone.

Its hard to describe, but there is no “alone” until you’re alone on an uninhabited island with no phones, radio, contact of any kind.  Hornstrandir isn’t an island, but a 580 sq km area without a road may as well be.  We were scheduled to be picked up after three nights at Hesteyri, a mountain range away.  We were completely on our own until then, and had to manage navigation, food, weather or injury without any back up plans. There are almost no paths, no trails, because the routes aren’t traveled heavily enough to create many.

Where we disembarked at Látrar there was garbage everywhere.  Rusty shells that used to be cars and farm equipment, grown-over, hollow foundations, and random buckets and trash almost hidden in the long serrated windswept grass.  We quickly found the emergency hut and curiously checked out all it offered.  There were blankets and candles and fuel and firewood.  There were quite a few snacks and bits of gear, obviously left behind my hikers finishing their hikes for others to use.  We were quite delighted with the emergency hut.

Since 1975, no one has lived on Hornstrandir, and the whole peninsula (the curved “horn”, or a rooster comb, of what I’ve always thought looked like the head of the creature that Iceland’s outline resembled) is a wildlife preserve.  There were several boarded up houses, and we followed the beach line looking for a place to camp for the night.

We chose the sandy bank of the river we’d have to cross in the morning, at the delta where it spilled out into the sea.  Seabirds were gathered on the surfy edge of the water, but they were too shy to let us approach them.

Camping on the sand has never worked out that well for me.  There’s always a humid feel to the air so you wake up feeling damp and wet, and I hate sandfleas.  There’s no purchase for tentpegs, and although the sand promises to dish into a cozy nest shape, in reality it tends to pile up in the wrong places and make a lumpy night’s sleep.  There was nothing but sand, though, sand and sand with coarse grass growing in it, so we chose a spot sheltered by a little dune and sought out rocks to anchor our tentpegs with.

We ate noodle soup and fell asleep on the beach.  It was loud- the waves.

For a few more pictures from this day, click for the Extra Photos

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Day 16 – Hornstrandir II

We totally got checked out by a fox in the night!

In the morning, there were delicate little prints thoroughly circling our tents.  I thought I’d heard walking in the night but was too tired to wake up and look out.

Gratefully, it was a bright sunny morning and we woke up warm and dry.

We walked up the river and crossed it where it was wide and therefore shallowest.  It was cold, and flowing strongly but smoothly, with a smooth sand and rock bottom, so it was by no means a scary ford.

Contrary to all instructions about fording rivers (always leave your boots on)- and there are good reasons for those instructions – I crossed barefoot.  I spend most of my summers barefoot so my feet are hard and tough, and it was such a delight to be in sand and grass I couldn’t stand to be in my boots.

Then I stayed barefoot for a couple of hours, until we got into terrain full of scratchy bushes, and it was amazing.

Derek thought I was crazy.

Whole essays and poems could be written about the pleasure and reward of being barefoot, but I’ll restrain myself here.

After crossing, we backtracked on the sandy opposite bank of the river to skirt Klief, the fjord in our path, by climbing over the rocks at the sea’s edge.  This was very beautiful, with the black rocks and peach sand.  However, it would not be nearly so pleasant on a stormy day.  After nipping around the base of the fjord we were on another beach (Aðalvík), and we crossed the river at the bottom of that valley and walked up the other side.

We were navigating with a topo map of the area, that had suggested routes and advice marked on it.  Routes are different from paths.  There’s a general direction you’re advised to take, but there are no walking paths worn down by frequent foot traffic.

We walked steadily and sometimes at a fair distance from each other, peacefully walking in the sun.

Our overall route was over the next fjord to Buðanes.  There is another cliff edge route around the base of this fjord, but it is marked as impassable at high tide, which it was.  The map also noted that you’d better move quick even at low tide, or you’ll be seriously f#$%ed when it goes underwater again- I forget the exact wording.   The cliff-skirt route is considerably shorter, but we weren’t nearly on time for low tide.  So it was over the top for us.

On the way we stopped for lunch by a little foss in the middle of the bushy field of blueberries, everywhere.

We encountered some mystery poop, as well.  I can’t imagine what produced this.  It’s still a mystery. Foxes are tiny, and while polar bears are known to occasionally swim over from Greenland, and this scat was pretty huge, it didn’t seem grand enough for the world’s biggest bear, nor likely.  Could it be – a swan poop?

It was a long climb up.  Climbing, or walking, on a trail is a different world from climbing or walking through vegetation.

It wasn’t exactly bushwhacking- the bushes weren’t that tall, but constantly lifting your feet up and over, and the small muscles constantly working to balance your feet as you place them on uneven ground, is fatiguing over time.  It’s about the difference between walking on a sidewalk and climbing stairs.  With nothing in their way on a sidewalk, your feet just swing forward with almost no effort and you can go forever.  Just walking through the scrub was like climbing, and on top of that, we were climbing, and it was steep.

Happily, it was a fantastic day, clear and warm.  Still, we climbed high enough to need to put cozy shirts back on.   It was cold enough for some snow to survive the beating sun at the top.   The snow was unexpected (in August) and refreshing. It was spring snow, grainy and heavy.  We promptly made a small snowman.

Next there was another climb, over the next bump of desolation- the grey wasteland of plateau atop the fjord.  There was a fantastic view, grey and hazy, over ridges of fjords, with the ocean eventually on both sides.  It was a wild feeling to know that literally as far as we could see, there were no other people out there.

Leaving the plant zone and entering the rocky “tundra”(?) was a welcome change of terrain for our legs. We were vague on our exact location per the topo map in such a monochromatic, featureless field of rock, but we were headed down into the next valley between fjords.  We had to go east in order to go west, because there was a clearly impassable area where the topo lines were all squeezed together.  We had a discussion about steepness relative to how close topo lines appeared.  Rather than walking all the way to the east where the route map suggested, I wanted to cut a little bit closer where the topo lines were only “pretty” close together, not “very” close.

So we popped out at the top of this:

As soon as we could see over this, we could mark exactly where we were, and it cleared a few things up.  Topo lines “very” close together means a sheer vertical; topo lines “pretty” close together means very very steep.  Still impassable.

We kept going east at the top of this stone amphitheater, although not as far as the map suggested.  Where it seemed safe we started to zigzag down.  It was crumbly, grainy orange dirt and rock, and it was definitely still too steep for comfort.  We were fine, however, and we saw some interesting birds nesting in the scrub on the way down.

Back into the land of vegetation, here the bushes were very deep, and there were actual walking paths here and there that semed to be formed through the thickest stuff.  Everywhere there were billions of blueberries.  Literally.  All the bushes were heavy with the clumps of blue fruit, and our entire view was carpeted with the reddish green plants.  I could lean on the bank of the trail and stuff blueberries in my mouth for minutes without moving.

Down in the valley with still miles to go to the beach mouth, it was rough going, and wet; swampy.  At the bottom of the valley, there was a pond in a marshy flat that had swans in it.  Exhausted from the day’s hike, I hit the wall, dropped my pack, flopped over and declared we were camping right here.  Everything looked the same, anywhere was as good as anywhere else.

We walked packless to Buðanes for the sunset.  There is an abandoned settlement of houses and a church on the coast, all brightly painted and picturesque.

Some of the homes don’t seem so completely abandoned- locked up and accessorized with modern BBQs and yard appliances; perhaps they are maintained for vacation homes.  It was a beautiful stroll in the late evening light, on winding paths that crossed many streams, to the little vacant town and the beach.  We saw four seals lounging in the bay, and inspected another emergency hut.  Far across the water, we could see Látrar, where we had started from yesterday, and it seemed amazing we had walked so far in one day.

So we started the day on a beach, and finished it on one, at sea level with a monster climb in between.

I slept beside my tent, set up in case it rained.  It didn’t though, so I spent the night outside.  The swans and loons farther down in the bottom of the valley were making an energetic racket, almost loud enough to keep me awake.   Besides that, there was another kind of singing, a subtle, mesmerizing kind, that lasted all night, and in my sleep I knew it was the elves.

For more pictures of our 16th day in Iceland, click Extra Photos

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