Stykisshölmur harbour

There are two stone men on the heaths of the West Fjords, Karlinn and Kleifabúi. They were made by road construction workers in their spare time. Kleifabúi was made by the road construction group of Kristleifur Jónsson in 1947.

National flag on the Ferry Baldur

Stykisshölmur lighthouse, looking toward Breidafjördur

Stykisshölmur harbour monument

There are a lot of similarities between Iceland and the Eastern Aleutians: the grasses and lichens and wild fruits (not just blueberries and crow berries – they have wild strawberries here, something I discovered after talking to a potter about the berries she’d put on her tea mugs); the waterfalls and the cottongrass meadows cut through with myriad rivulets; the type of rocks and even the shape of the mountains are similar. But the scale of things here is truly astonishing… Imagine if you will the tool in a photo editor, the one that allows you to pinch and stretch different parts of your photos. Now, take the Aleutians and stretch the ridges until they are miles long. Grab a mountain peak and double or triple its elevation. In fact, raise the whole Chain so the passes become instead vast valleys. That’s what it feels like here: the Aleutians, super-sized. I’ve yet to effectively capture this in a single photo, but I’m working on it.

In other news, I left West Iceland and have arrived in the Westfjords, a highly serrated peninsula that juts from icelnd’s northwest corner. I could have spent an entire day driving here, but instead took took a ferry ride across from Stikkishólmur to Brjánslækur, across Breidafjördur. Im not sure how big this bay is, but it took three hours to cross it and there are at least 3000 islands in it. Seriously. And it’s a hot-spot for eider down production, in case you’re wanting an eider down comforter and want to know where it was sourced. About halfway across is the only year-round inhabited island, Flatey (say Flat-ee), serviced only by the ferry and a few  privately owned work and fishing boats. The ferry brings fresh water to the village because there isn’t any there except what can be captured in snow or rain fall.

Aurora forecast is good, and it’s only partly cloudy tonigh. Tomorrow I’m headed to the westernmost point in Europe, a place which also happens to be the largest (14 miles long by 1200 feet high) seabird colony in the northern hemisphere…

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Today dawned with significant wind still howling around the guesthouse and other structures, with the addition of sunshine and rainbows (literally)! It stayed like that most of the day: I could stand in a patch of sunshine, see blue sky overhead, and all the while be pelted with horizontal rain. Just like home… It made for great lighting though, and I took more photos today than I did the first two days combined.

Today’s explorations were much closer to home: waterfalls, and lots of them; a hike up a nearby canyon, and a shocking visit to a local handicrafts store where a pair of hand-knit socks cost $61! Other, larger items were priced accordingly. I stayed, I looked, I did not buy… I visited three sets of falls today, one of them twice because I wanted to see it in evening light as well as morning. This particular place, Hraunfossar, is fascinating. There’s a plateau of lava just off the banks of the muddy glacier-fed rIvey Hvita. Out of the plateau and directly into the river flows clear, cold water – and it’s not as if the plateau is fed by any surface source of water! The falls aren’t particularly large but are just lovely, with rainbow colors dancing in the light of the sun on the spray-drenched rocks.

My hosts said they saw the Aurora Borealis last night, during a break in the weather.  They’re to wake me if they see them again tonight. It’s cloudy right now but supposed to be clearing. Have camera, will awake…

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Another blustery day, but with less rain and higher clouds – perhaps at about the 1500′ level today. The sun has shone off and, less frequently, on. Today I drove to and around the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, which allegedly has as its iconic centerpiece a 4700′, glacier-capped statovolcano, visible for kilometers and kilometers… Unless of course the clouds cover everything above 1500′ and rain obscures most of what’s below that. Alas, no Snæfellsjökul for me. I will be going one more time in that general direction and hope to catch a glimpse of it then.

The coast along the Peninsula, while just as windy as that of the interior, had the advantage of at least being occasionally rain-less and so I spent most of my day checking out fishing villages, wandering amongst the lichen- and moss-covered lava (thar’s blueberries in them thar rocks!), and walking along spray-spattered cliffs. I have to say, a stormy day in the North Atlantic is impressive indeed. Perhaps it’s simply because in our own somewhat protected bay we rarely see or feel the full force of the Bering Sea, but this ocean today bore down hard on everything in its path, battering 200′ cliffs and tossing auto-sized boulders to the beach. It’s hard to imagine WWII convoys, much less Viking explorers, crossing this ocean between Europe and North America. In one area the winds were strong enough that waterfalls appeared to be moving backwards, the water arcing up and away just as it dropped over the precipice. Seen from a distance it looked as if the cliff tops were steaming – which wouldn’t be unusual since steam seems to be coming out of the ground around every corner!

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