Icelandic Rocks

A glacial rock found along the Hvita River in west Iceland.

In 2006 I followed one of the best rules of travel: Be spontaneous and follow your true desires. Without telling my wife where we were going, I planned a trip abroad to a place I had wanted to visit for a long time: Iceland.

There are a number of reasons why I wanted to go there - it's very different from where I live (although I later learned there are also many similarities), its most famous assets are natural wonders (waterfalls, glaciers, volcanic landscapes, bird life), and it has qualities I like in place: cold and remote (I learned this is very true the hard way).

Even before I told her where we were going, my wife, being my wife, said, "it's somewhere cold, isn't it?" She was right. I had actually checked average temperatures for Reykjavik in late May when we would be there and it appeared we could expect temperatures in the low 50s (around 10c) unless...

...Unless we happened to visit during an unseasonal cold wave which, to my wife's chagrin, we did. During our first two days in Reykjavik we fought bitter winds that blew snow flurries around Reykjavik with the following days not much warmer. Later we learned that we had come to Iceland during the coldest late-May temperatures in one hundred years.

After a night from hell (ask me about it some time) which climaxed with us stuck in the snow on a remote mountain pass at 4:30 in the morning, we ended up in the hamlet of Reykholt which is a few hundred kilometers north-east of Reykjavik and just west of Langjokull, Iceland's second largest glacier.

After a much needed two hours of intense, deep sleep in the driver's seat of our rented Volkswagen Polo (not the car to take to the Icelandic hinterlands, trust me), I awoke and checked us into the Foss Hotel in central Reykholt. If you are interested in Norse mythology and Icelandic saga heritage (I know you are out there!!), this is the place to stay. The hotel is decorated with all things Norse and includes a Freyja "honeymoon room," an outdoor hot spring and stairwells and corridors plastered with images of Freyja, a Norse pagan godess, and Icelandic poetry with accompanying runes.

Freya and Svipdag as illustrated by John Bauer in 1911.

The poems were like Icelandic medieval haiku minus the 5-7-5 metrics. I really liked them so I will reproduce several of them here:

Beorc (Birch) No flowers, no fruit, yet the birch is beautiful, its clustering leaves near the sky.

Rad (Riding) Riding seems easy at home though on the long road the horse feels hard as stone.

Ac (Oak) The oak is on earth for us, feed pigs the acorns. Make a good boat.

The other attraction of Reykholt is that it is home to Snorri Sturluson, Iceland's greatest Saga writer, poet and 11th century historian. So if you are into Snorri, again, Reykholt is your place. But if you are looking for action, excitement and nightlife, you might try New York, Bangkok or Shanghai.

Running wild near Reykholt, west Iceland...Baaaaaaah!

Reykholt, as far as I saw, consisted of the hotel, an Esso petrol station, a church, a statue of Snorri, and some greenhouses that appeared to be growing tomatoes. The greenhouses and the hotel, like most of the country, use renewable energy (geothermal, hydroelectric) to generate their power and heat (80% of Iceland's overall energy consumption is from renewable sources according to an article in the most recent Iceland Review).

Central Reykholt: a petrol station, a road and wisps of geothermal steam.

Like almost all of Iceland, Reykholt is geothermally active and as such there are wisps of steam rising from every crack and crevice in the earth. The area around Reykholt is mostly low expansive hills dotted with huge, largely unseen farms and lots of sheep and lovely Icelandic horses.

No wonder Icelanders are proud and protective of their horses: they're gorgeous.

After a much needed hot breakfast and a shower, I decided it was time for a family drive east toward the nearby Langjokull Glacier. There were some well known waterfalls nearby and, despite the ominous name of one of them (Barnafoss, "children's falls," said to be named for two children who were swept to their deaths from a natural arch near the falls), I wanted to visit.

The drive from Reykholt was, after the decidedly difficult driving and drama of the night before, very easy. The two lane road (a highway) runs east toward the glacier and falls and rises smoothly with no surprises or sharp turns. Unlike many roads in Iceland, this stretch of road was smooth and could be driven without fear of sliding into the abyss. Like virtually all of Iceland, traffic is not just light, it is non-existent. You can easily drive in Iceland for an hour or more and not see another car (or sign or town or...gas station).

One detail I recall clearly from that drive was that on the radio one of the local stations was playing Frank Zappa's Dancing Fool which is a pretty cool song to hear while driving in the Icelandic wilderness.

Along the way, perhaps 15 km west of the massive Langjokull Glacier, I saw a good place to pull off the road for a better look at the Hvita River which flows off the glacier. It was still cold and windy outside and so my wife and 20-month-old son happily remained inside the car while their odd-ball husband/father went out to inspect the riverbank.

The Hvita River at Barnafoss (left), glacial till on the river bank (right).

What I found were rocks. Lots of rocks. As you might imagine, 950 square kilometers of slow moving ice does some pretty amazing things to the earth below it and as a result, the rocks just downstream from the glacier are themselves pretty amazing.

The rocks on the banks of the Hvita (White) River may have been just "poorly sorted" glacial till, but to me they were like gems. These were really fantastic rocks of all sizes, shapes and colors - some smooth, some rough, some striped. Like a hungry child clutching candies from a jar, I picked up and pocketed rocks that struck my fancy.

Some of the rocks were the color of toast or oatmeal, others were purple, green or red. There were small tan pebbles, column-shaped miniature bricks and one palm-sized rock that is my favorite, which had two roughly flat faces with a third rounded end that was colored a combination of mustard yellow with patches of slate grey, maroon and brown. I have never seen a rock like it and I still never tire of holding it.

"Poorly sorted" glacial till from Langjokull Glacier (my "favorite rock" on the right).

I took perhaps two dozen of these glacial river rocks with me that day. I carried them all the way from Reykholt to Geyser (home of the "original" geyser) to Gullfoss, Selfoss, Grindavik, then on to Reykjavik, beyond to England, from London to Oxford and around the Cotswolds, back to Iceland, then San Francisco, Honolulu and finally home to where the rocks sit now.

Some of these rocks are in front of my computer monitor -- I am looking at them right now. Others, like my favorite mustard colored rock, are on the window sill beside my bed. I see them every day and often pick them up.

Icelandic glacial till comes in purple, orange, red, gold, tan, pink, grey and the color of honey, oats and burnt toast.

Aside from the memories and experience of visiting Iceland itself, they are my most treasured souvenir from that trip. In fact, they are virtually my only souvenir.

There is another Icelandic rock in the collection that I did not pick up. Amongst these glacial rocks from the Hvita River, is one small, mostly smooth pock-marked black rock, only about the size of a small plum pit, it is a bit of volcanic rock my wife found near Gullfoss, one of Iceland's largest and best known waterfalls.

Gullfoss is an amazing sight. The sheer volume of water and the angle from which it is viewed are remarkable. To see Gullfoss alone would merit a trip to Iceland, I think, and so to have a small bit of rock from there is something special.

Gullfoss ("Gold Falls") is one of Iceland's most remarkable sights and Europe's largest falls.

These wonderful rocks from this stunning island are something I enjoy seeing and holding quite often. Rocks are wonderful things and so it is nice to have them scattered around the house and garden, there to be held and admired at any time. Picking up rocks as souvenirs can be rather laborious and, of course, puts one at risk of going over airline luggage weight allowances, but to have a beautiful rock from an amazing place is to have a piece of geologic history and a bit of the power and wonder of that place to revisit and ponder years later.

A rock, like a picture, a map, a song or a story, can take you back to a place you've been or perhaps some place you hope to return to someday.