Exploring On Foot For A Change

When I stepped out of the tent I could see so much more around me it was like being in a different place.

I checked in with the campsite manager and paid for my previous night. I wasn’t sure if I could stay here another day, since I was low on food. Riding all day on sketchy terrain with zero calories can get dangerous!

I did some sink laundry and hung it up, then went exploring again. There was another cluster of buildings farther down the valley I hadn’t seen.

There was a lot of activity. People in vans and trucks were arriving on a regular basis, pushing their way carefully through the giant puddle at the entrance.

Eventually I found the most useful building in the area:

A cluster of buses turned into a provisions shop!

Boy was I glad to see this. Now I could stay another day!

The best protein supply I could find was tinned fish, so I bought lots of that plus some crackers, and a few cups of instant noodles.

Now I could afford a more casual walk around.

I’ve deployed the folding chair and footstool to get some remote work done in all kinds of weird places, but this spot beats them all!

I programmed for a few good hours. Sometimes I’d look up and see another crazy tourist enjoying the landscape around me, and snap a photo:

On my way back to camp I passed one of the notorious hot springs.

I had a swimsuit, but the spring looked crowded and uncomfortable to me. I decided to skip it.

The prominent warning about itchy parasites reinforced my decision.

The water feeding into the spring was lovely, though. A big chunk of the valley was threaded with tiny streams, some of which were clearly way above ambient temperature and hosting some interesting life forms. I wandered among fluffy sheep and other quiet hikers, enjoying the heat of the sun and water mixing with the cool air and the shadows from the peaks.

Tourists arrived and departed constantly, all day. Every time, spectators would pause and turn their heads to watch the minor drama of a vehicle fording the stream.

I’d done enough wandering around on flat land. Time to climb some hills!

Just look at those hills! Gotta get up in them thar hills! Let’s do some footwork that isn’t pedaling!

The local maps showed a network of major hiking trails, taking off in different directions and promising multiple days of rough cabin camping, plus a few looping paths that went out into the lava field to the west and up along the ridge line.

I lingered by the ranger station and listened to people ask questions about the weather, the terrain, the daylight, the landmarks, and so on. The variety of broken forms of English was fascinating.

Eventually I decided it would be more fun just following the bank of the river on the north side of the valley for a while, rather than doing a loop trail. All of them felt longer than I wanted, since I tend to walk very slowly and inspect the ground and wave the camera everywhere.

I swapped some kit out back at the tent, and started some Skyrim music on my headphones because I’m hopelessly metropolitan. The shoreline was easy to follow. True to form, I spent half the time with my head bent down staring delightedly at tiny weird plants and textures of rock that were familiar in context but alien in detail.

Eventually I climbed up the hillside and walked out along the top of the lava field. Actually, “top” is the wrong word: It was a massive tangle of ridges, like a stormy sea frozen in place, coated with rock, and then squished together.

These were absolutely stunning rock formations. More than the whimsical terrain of Skyrim I was reminded of the crumpled life-on-top-of-life set design in The Dark Crystal. Picking my way carefully, I had to concentrate intensely on keeping my sense of direction, because If I took more than two steps in a straight line I would tumble into one of countless steep fissures obscured by pillows of moss and lined with jagged rocks like broken glass.

As I drew closer to an established path, backtracking and jumping over gaps, it became very clear that this landscape was both too dangerous and too fragile for people to go hiking across like I was trying to do. The risk of cutting my leg open and falling into a hole just deep enough to stop my voice from projecting anywhere but straight up felt so great, it almost felt inevitable; as if the lava field was actually a labyrinth designed by some spiteful artist to keep misbehaving explorers trapped and confused … until it extracted a price in blood.

IN BLOOD! BOOHAHAH HAA HAA HA HAAA!!!

If I’d been a good tourist and read all the signs beforehand I would have known that being here was frowned upon. Every footprint compacts the soil and makes it harder for the meager plant cover to persist. I only realized my error afterward when I came back down along a sanctioned trail and saw the sign. Oops…

Thank goodness I got back safely. I’d been foolish. If I went missing, no one would wonder about me for weeks, and no one would go looking for me for months.

The trip back to the campground was trivial. Just walk along the trail, and grab the guide rope if you want. I did have one frightening moment: I came around the corner and saw the wooly butts of some sheep standing together and mistook them for a black bear. Finding a black bear in Iceland was completely impossible, regardless of the era, but my instincts were tuned for wandering in the California mountains. I laughed it off but it took a while for my heart to stop pounding.

Close to the ranger station I got a good look at one of the built-up water spigots feeding the pools. Years of mineral build-up and clouds of steam gave a clear signal that this water was very, very hot.

In the evening I re-packed my stuff for a smooth morning departure, and organized my photos. These ritualistic movements gave me time to revisit some earlier thoughts about communication and ecological change.

As recently as my father’s generation, the main problem with humanity on a global scale was that most people just had no idea what was happening out there.  Humans have been gobsmackingly ignorant of their impact for 99% of human history, and our ability to really make change on a global scale, and adjust to keep changes from backfiring, is a recent development.  Recent enough that we still don’t even know the scope of our problems or what we’re capable of. We’re discovering it as we go; as I live and write this.

This situation only exists because communications technology has improved at a pace comparable to our environmental impact. We have global-scale economies now, relying on fast global communication. We have “breaking news” available all the way around the planet. A producer of grain on one side of the world can get compensated for it by customers on the other side. But economics on this scale has also made us vulnerable to disruption by human conflict — especially conflict over land, and especially when that becomes open warfare.

The environment can bounce back from war.  Some of the worst battles of World War II happened on sites that reverted to farmland in a few decades. But humans, on the other hand, are fragile: Deprive us of food for a couple months and we’re goners. Block a couple of massive grain shipments from a few crucial ports on one side of the globe, and suddenly ten million people are in danger of starving on the other side. Any number of us could be held ransom at any time by a sufficiently armed warlord. The flexibility of our communications might allow us to adapt, but it might not. If that grain is held up too long and rots, some people, somewhere, are going to starve, and the commerce over the wires is just going to be about who specifically.

So, the same miraculous technology that might have rescued me if I fell down a ravine today drives a global economy that – like my own body – has enormous reach, and is also terribly vulnerable.

And, somewhere in the middle of this micro- and macroscopic view, our communications technology is responsible for making me – and tens of thousands of tourists around me – aware that Iceland exists as a tourist destination. I like to think of myself as an environmentally conscious person, but if I truly prioritized sustainability and the environmental sanctity of Iceland… I would not be here at all, right? If I truly worried about the fragility of a globally wired economy, why would I be feeding the demand for food and tchotchkes in Iceland — a place that would starve terribly if the shipping lanes were cut off? Is the point of coming here to realize that I shouldn’t?

It seems an obvious case of hypocrisy. And it would be, if we left the lid closed on our ideas about economy and conservation. But: If the overriding goal is to preserve, for example, this lava field from all human interference, a crucial stepping stone towards that goal is making humans give a crap about the lava field in the first place. And given that if you take the long view, the planet could shake us off like a case of fleas and keep trucking along for another 600 million years (at which point the sun will be bright enough to interfere with the carbon cycle of the planet, and all plant and animal life as we know it will be permanently extinguished regardless of what we do) … then the question of whether humans should give a crap about a lava field is very much open for debate when there are mouths to feed and lives to live here in the present.

So, putting pictures of a lava field all over the internet, busing people up to it, and then threading rope-guided tails across it so humans can admire it and feel humbled and refreshed by it and get attached to it … doesn’t seem like a bad move.

Because, frankly, it worked. This is an amazing valley and I’m glad I came here. And I’m grateful for the struggle Icelanders are waging to balance global interest and investment against the soiling of their own back yard by millions of curious feet. And all this has made me think about a bigger picture, just as it will do for others. Not everyone, sure. And maybe not immediately, or directly.

But it does work.