Woke up at 9:30am and had a very lazy morning reading books on my iPhone’s Libby app. Charged up at the hiker hut, had oatmeal-crowberry-coconut-chia-almond-flax-peanut butter mix with sausage and maté tea. Stuff was finally drying out. Didn’t leave hut until 12 lol and hiked slowly out of husadalur volcano huts. Relaxing hike through forest of yellow golden alder trees, long wheat grass, bulbous clusters of anise? dill?, eggplant colored crow berry crowning tiny vibrant Christmas trees, juicy globules of fruit punch colored rubies we think were currants, multi—hued purple-mauve-dusky green teardrops of bilberry shrubs, pink tinged creamy gilled mushrooms and giant pancake colored ceps? pored mushrooms. Bumble bees flitted in the fields of late summer dandelions and golden grasses.
We hiked past sheep and waded across braids of grey torrents from glacial melt mixed with black lava sand. Shoes came off and crocs were licked and loaded to wade the strong current and ice water invigorated our first 2 miles. It was thankfully sunny on the glacial floodplain and our feet dried quickly. We climbed up a ridge and onto a plain of black sand and tufts of straggling autumn gold and scarlet grasses. Sheep bleated from the hills and mysteriously from within the thick stunted alder forests, their disembodied voices adding to the troll rocks and mysterious nature of Iceland. We found a windless haven amongst sand dunes being threaded together by wild white and gray roots of some sort of hardy bush. We ducked behind one fine and had a late lunch of havarti and prosciutto wraps in fresh tortilla half smiles and cream of asparagus soup. The sun warmed us, the wind was light, the view of the mountains and enormous snow studded glacier was breathtaking and with full bellies we lay down for a nap – how could you resist?
A few hours later we woke and the shadows were long and sun was low in the sky, the sheep having long since disappeared into the grasslands in pursuit of greener pastures. I looked at my phone and nearly freaked out – we had slept for almost 4 hours! Shannon and I hurriedly packed up and headed across sand dunes and windy plains. Soon we reached what sounded from a long ways off like an enormous torrent of water that was moving so fast you could hear the boulders rolling and flipping in the current. The bridge across this canyon was vertigo inducing, especially when you dropped a stone off the side and the steely soot gray swallowed it up whole in a screaming wall of foaming whitewater. A super steep uphill waited our last part of the hike and embracing the suck, we dug in and climbed the 500 or so feet straight up without stopping. I thought about the metal tips on my hiking poles and the tempered steel alloy they were made out of, similar to the tooling steel for CNC machines and lathes used to cut the hardest of metals. If my hiking poles were this strong, I could be this strong too. (Who knows what I was thinking – I think the Icelandic sun fried my brain at this point.)
The huts of the next campsite called Emstrur soon appeared and we snagged a tent spot for 2000 isk ($14 USD) each. We set up tent and relaxed next to Hungarian friends and then ducked into a large canvas hiker tent where we made spaghetti and potatoes with about 50 other hungry hikers. We laughed with Maria-Antonia from the island of Mallorca who was traveling on her own through Iceland. She told us of her adventures hiking north to south in the Snæfellsnes peninsula with a Catalan friend and finding a cave where the stairs down into the earth took you into a natural lava tube. The most amazing thing about the lava tube was right in the middle of the cavern there was a whale vertebrae that was bigger than the picnic table we were sitting on. Crazy to stumble upon such an amazing site.
Maria-Antonia also stayed with a local Icelandic friend of a friend in the capital of Reykjavík and after a few drinks she got up the nerve to ask the Icelander about some of the local legends. When she questioned if the Icelandic people really believed in elves and trolls, the Icelander became deadly serious.
“Of course he said didn’t believe in them, he said he KNEW that they were real!” Maria-Antonia told us in disbelief with smiling wide eyes. The Icelandic friend told her that when a new road is being planned in Iceland and goes around troll rocks or elf caves that someone who is like a witch goes to speak to the rocks to ask them if it is okay to build a road there. The trolls or elves within the rocks tell the road-wizard-turned-city-planner that either 1) yes it’s okay to build a road through my troll rocks or 2) no you have to build around the rocks because they’re sacred or 3) no you can’t build through this land at all. I couldn’t imagine that this would fly in America where we build roads through whatever the fuck the government wants to build through.
We spent a long time talking to Maria-Antonia about being Catalan and the Catalonian revolution last year to be independent from Spain. We laughed a lot with her and she gave us a warning about the upcoming trail that had us worried. The place where we wanted to camp at the next day had been covered in over a foot of snow when she hiked through it 24 hours prior!! Damn Iceland… I guess it’s winter already. We’ll figure it out. We said goodnight to Maria-Antonia and headed back to the tent as the chill of the glaciers settled in around us.
Just as we were getting settled and brushing our teeth about 200 feet from our tent, Shannon hissed for me to grab my camera and meet him. A small flock of wild ptarmigans (kind of like quail or pheasant that survive arctic temperatures and also probably could survive a nuclear winter like cockroaches) puttered and hopped and pecked on the hillside below our tents. None of the other 80+ other hikers saw the wild birds and we were able to enjoy a bit of up close wild nature watching. The birds could not give two shits about us and as the sunset we admired the flock of eight wild ptarmigans eating seeds and bugs and not only surviving but actually thriving in what we thought had been such a barren lava rock wasteland.
Heading to bed – it’s been the first clear night we’ve had in 8 days so we’re hoping for the northern lights! M-A said her friend in REK stayed up all night last night watching the northern lights in town…maybe we’ll see some tonight if we’re lucky.
Aurora update: All of a sudden screams went up around camp as I was dozing off in my very warm down sleeping bag. It felt like Santa had arrived on Christmas Eve and like a sugar-crazed child I unzipped the tent and literally fell outside the tent into the inky chill, laughing and struggling to pull my down and rain jackets on. Spinning in the sandy campsite in my alpaca wool socks, I didn’t see anything in the skies so I grabbed my knockoff Crocs and put them in “lock-and-load” mode so they wouldn’t accidentally tumble down the mountainside in the dark. Blindly I felt around from headlamp then snatched my camera from inside the tent where we were keeping the electronics warm so the batteries didn’t die in a few hours in the early autumn Arctic night. In the distance it looked like a faint cloud or light pollution from a nearby city was just beyond the mountainside. The sky was very clear, no moon to be seen and I thought that maybe the Milky Way was appearing so I took some long exposure shots to see if my camera’s sensor would pick anything up.
15 seconds later I looked at my screen and somehow by Thor’s good fortune there was something green blue streaking across the photo! I shook Shannon awake and told him I thought the northern lights were coming out. He said let him know when they got good because he’d seen them loads of times growing up in northern Minnesota. I on the other hand had never seen them before growing up in the outskirts of Boston and was in total shock that the aurora was really happening. I had set up my night sky shots originally to face a gorgeous glacier in the southern skies but somehow the city girl in me didn’t really think that the Northern Lights actually only came out of the northern skies. Well let me save all you city and non-Arctic dwelling folks some embarrassment and just put it out there – the Northern Lights come out of, you guessed it, the north. Whodda thunk it?
More drunken shrieks of delight came from the main camp and I twirled around in my super stylish crocs on the lava sand searching the sky frantically for any trace of the aurora borealis. Out of nowhere the faint green glow became more defined. Teal blue ribbons glowed brightly for another minute or two and then slowly petered out into the deep navy skies. I stood shivering in the cold setting up some more camera shots facing north now that I was edumacated in the ways of the Northern Lights. I went to grab something near my tent and my hand brushed against a plastic bottle full of clear liquid. Of course! I grabbed the repurposed water bottle and twisted the cap open where the scent made it very evident that it wasn’t water in there. These Icelandic people knew what was up when they decided to make their local aquavit, firewater, moonshine, hooch or whatever you want to call it. I’m just saying from experience that some local Brennivin firewater definitely makes watching the Northern Lights more…enjoyable.
I was surprised that as these intense bands of light shimmered and folded up onto themselves, stretching and straining across the sky that there was absolutely no sound coming from the heavens. For something that looked so dynamic, so fluid, so alive there was absolutely no audio that accompanied the phenomenon that was the Northern Lights. How were you supposed to know when they were starting when the light show was quieter than a Charlie Chaplin black-and-white film? The Brennivin shots were only burning my throat and the feeling of warmth hadn’t hit the rest of my body yet so shivering I hopped back in my sleeping bag in the tent for a quick timeout and started drifting off in the cozy down baffles.
Luckily no more than ten minutes later another party group at the main base started hootin’ and hollerin’ again like the good ole boys back in Kentucky. That’s the good thing about being human – even though there were probably hikers from 20+ different countries spending the night at the extremely remote backcountry Emstrur hut, some things are a universal language and excitedly shrieking in awe just so happens to be one of them. I popped my head out of our tent with the alarm cry from the Brennivin-induced partiers and my jaw dropped at the breathtaking natural masterpiece in front of me.
The Northern Lights shimmered in curtains of unearthly color that pulled at your heartstrings as it swept in complete and utter grandeur across half the night sky. My eyes teared up (I swear it was because of the cold weather) and I started laugh-crying at how ungodly beautiful this world truly is. The colored lights moved languidly and elegantly like a slow river current, its gentle ancient waves lapping and rippling on the shores of the snow-covered ridges surrounding our campsite. I don’t know how to describe the incredibly odd feeling of watching a sky-lake flipped up into the heavens and moving so fluidically and rhythmically like a summer breeze created ripples across water. The burst of light ribbons curled and unfurled their effervescent petals open until the electric greens melted into warm ambers and fizzled into pale rose corals, altogether disappearing into the deep cerulean abyss of the star-spangled night.
Curious about the excited hikers and what kind of backcountry shindig was going on at the hiker hut, I strolled over a crest of rocks in the dark shining my headlamp on the boulder-strewn ground to stumble upon a roaring fire where 40 or so hikers were drinking and laughing under the night sky. Five or six different languages were being spoken, slurred words thick with local beers brought out to the backcountry courtesy of the guided trips and the local cantina where you could purchase beer for I think the equivalent of the same prices you would pay for a beer at a club in a big city. It was amazing to see all of these strangers from all walks of life celebrating life and lights in the freezing cold Icelandic highlands.
All of a sudden the battlecry went out to, “Turn your head lamps off!” Hikers yelled in an uncontained roar of excitement and we all fumbled to shut our lights off, shrieking with anticipation. The Northern Lights had returned for another round and we laughed and cried and drank celebratory firewater and beers and inhaled the smoke of the golden fire flames. This time the aurora was back with a vengeance, the skies blazing in unearthly glory as the beams of light arced in enormous magenta, red-orange and white ribbons setting the inky night aflame. This radiance was so huge, so resplendent that you had to tilt your head back til your neck was thrown in an awkward angle and your shoulders hurt but the cramps were so worth it. A light not of this world is gleaming before me. It was not a far reach to believe that there was some truth to the legends surrounding the Northern Lights being apparitions of ancient ancestors or animal spirits dancing or demi-gods leading honorable warriors on their way to the glories of Valhalla.
I had stepped away from the fire to better see the multitude of ribbons and curtains and my Brennivin coat had worn off so shivering slightly, I hastily strolled back across the lava rocks in the dark with nothing but to guide me but the bright stars and the aurora shining on the pathway back to the tent. I threw on an extra layer, downed another gulp of firewater and shot photo after photo of the lights on my Sony RX10-iii and remote shutter app. The light arches softened into feathers while simultaneously a huge curtain dropped down from the heavens where the light waves literally danced across the electric beams like wind blowing across a curtain in a breeze in an empty house.
I know there is a whole reasonable scientific explanation for the aurora phenomenon having to do with solar flares and electromagnetic fields of the earth. But when you’re in a remote section of the Icelandic highlands and the aurora is freaking shimmering and bending across the whole sky in a solar breeze that you can’t feel on your skin but can only watch the eerily silent phenomenon, it is very difficult to cast doubt on the stories of the ancient native peoples of North America of the northern lights being the spirits of their ancestors dancing amongst the stars. Norsemen believed the aurora was the reflection of the Valkyrie women warriors on horseback leading only the bravest of fallen warriors to Valhalla to meet Odin in the afterlife. The Icelandic people believed that seeing the aurora would ease childbirth. My favorite stories, however, are the Finnish legends that tell tales of arctic foxes running so fast across the high mountain peaks that their tails would create sparks in the sky. The Finnish word for the northern lights is revontulet which literally translates to “fire fox.” Amazing.
Standing under electric lemon-lime and pastel violet light waves bathing the nearby glaciers, volcanoes and geysers in incandescence, all I could think of was how lucky we were to be here witnessing the aurora’s magnificence. As the light waves swelled and crested like waves crashing on a beach, the luminescent curtains started slowly settling down into the horizon like the outgoing tide. The Big Dipper constellation, or Ursa Major, rose above the craggy volcanic ridge, its bright silver seashells starkly contrasting against the black sands of the Arctic skies as the stars started to upstage the aurora. Incredibly, I was able to capture a few photos of the famous bear constellation sandwiched between ribbons of the aurora borealis, like a birthday present wrapped in a curlicue bow. With dozens of long exposure pictures taken, a good amount of Brennivin down the hatch and being very exhausted after a long day of highlands hiking, my chattering teeth were a good sign that it was time for bed. As I snuggled deeper into my sleeping bag, the tide of the Northern Lights started shimmering light waves again, the quiet radiance diffusing through the cuban fiber tent walls and casted a dreamy night light inside our shelter as we snuggled deeper into our sleeping bags. Smiling contentedly, I closed my eyes and soon I was lulled to sleep by visions of fire foxes bounding across the mountains.