WATERFALLS OF ICELAND NIAGARA WITHOUT THE KITSCH

 

They say, if you were to count every waterfall in Iceland from the smaller cascades over rocks to Dettifoss, the waterfall with the highest volume of water in all of Europe, the number would reach over a thousand!  This in a country that could easily fit into central Texas!  If I were to show you all the waterfall pictures I took, you would practically feel like you were being water-boarded!  I promise I won’t do that but oh, what an impressive sight they are. 

I had gone with pre-knowledge of the tectonic sites there, that there would be rifts, and bubbling mud pots and steaming rivers, but the number of waterfalls and how spectacular they were took me by surprise.  We took a 10 mile, round trip, hike up a river bed that included, and I am sure I missed some, 26 waterfalls in the span of 5 miles!  Why don’t our local rivers do that? Why is it we may hike 5 miles, or more to see one waterfall?  Ah, because of the different geology in our countries.

I was ready for rifts; Iceland is the above water view of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.  Here you can see what it looks like to have two huge continental plates pulling apart from one another. Iceland owes its existence to the fact that for millions of years the North American plate has been pulling apart from the Eurasian plate, creating new land from the magma oozing up through the rift.  Consequently you have spreading valleys, erupting volcanoes, rivers that boil, and, as it turns out, tons of waterfalls.

Picture a river peacefully going along when it encounters a rift valley. The water will plummet over the rift creating a waterfall, and if that river keeps crisscrossing that rift, as it does along this hike, then you can be treated to 26 waterfalls in the space of 5 miles! 

No two are exactly alike either, some are wider, some are at right angles to each other, many make rainbows, some allow you to climb behind them but what they all have in common is none of them have accompanying souvenir stands. Yay!  No waterfalls in a snow globe, (maybe that would be hard to do!) but they are simply unfettered by commercialism and one can hope that will continue.  Perhaps this delights me because my husband is  from Buffalo and I have probably been to Niagara some 30 times and commercialism is its middle name.

Iceland, interestingly, is new to tourism.  Ever since the 2010 eruption of that unpronounceable (as are most places) volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, which disrupted air travel to and from Europe for weeks, tourism has increased.  It put Iceland on the map and I guess the thrill of not knowing if your tour bus would be swallowed up by lava drew the tourists like lemmings.  Add a pretty unstable Europe at the moment and it seems to be the “go to” country at the moment.  Hopefully “waterfalls in a snow globe” won’t be a thing of the future and it will stay as Eden-like in it’s beauty as it is now.

About those unpronounceable destinations, you would be surprised how hard that makes it for your memory to put a name on where you have been.  “Foss” at the end of a word means waterfall, so that helps a bit, but still, I couldn’t tell you which “foss” was which for the 17 letters with only a vowel here or there before it easily confuses a mind like mine.

Bottom line, a country whose land is lifting in some areas, pulling apart in others makes for unforgettable scenery.  Next time, we can talk about how geology is the explanation behind what I thought was unusual.  Gulls and other sea birds were often inland and not by the sea at all and it turns out geology can explain that too. 

Till then, earth scientists, think about your own area and there will be some geologic reason why it looks that way it does.  I always say, if I had only come to Texas some 250 million years earlier I would have still been at the beach! 

A trip north to Maine ends up in Iceland!

iceland image

When I said I was heading north to see my family, I had no idea HOW north it would end up being!  Just shy of the Arctic Circle kind of north!! It is, of course, a long story.  So long in fact that let’s consider this to be a series- the “Iceland Series” for I could never capture the wonder and non-stop superlatives that Iceland is in one essay.

Consider this then as Part 1- How the Trip Came To Be

My middle daughter is presently teaching at West Point and she had a few weeks leave coming to her before she had to prepare for the incoming class.  Never one to stay at home, or be content with something local she decided she would hove off to Iceland and anyone that wanted to join her was welcome.  I was at first trying to be the good Nona who offered to watch grandchildren back in Maine while the sisters and their Dad went, but in the end the oldest daughter preferred to stay in Maine. She had been travelling and hosting me for the last several weeks AND the bountiful raspberry bushes in her garden were coming due so, ”Thanks, but no thanks.” 

At first that threw us all, “You would rather pick raspberries than come to Iceland?!“ But in the end it made sense, and it turns out, she was reacting just like an Icelander.  We took one of those free tours of the city while we were in Reykjavik and the guides explained that after such long winters they revel in the time that they CAN be out so, no meetings are planned in the summer, no theater presentations, nothing that is inside is offered for no one would come!  They would concur with Kristina that she should stay and enjoy the beauty of her summer in Maine, which, in some regards, is a little like Iceland. Cold and they have puffins!

Consequently, I got to withdraw my offer of a stint as Mary Poppins and go myself.  Yippee!  I used to do slide shows, school auditorium programs, on different topics and one was on Plate Tectonics. I had always said the only place to see the Mid-Atlantic Ridge above ground was in Iceland.  So to actually see it first hand was a major excitement for me!  And it lived up to its billing; bubbling mud pots, rivers that steamed, rifts in the earth, lava flows that went on endlessly, a geologists dream!

So, the lucky participants were: my husband, my other two daughters, one, soon to be son-in-law and myself.  We flew in from different quarters, met in Reykjavik airport , rented a 4 wheel car and set off on a 10 day adventure around what would be one of the most jaw-dropping, heart-stopping, Glory-of-God at every turn, countries I have ever seen.  AND the cleanest!   Having all geothermal and hydropower means zero hazy pollution. 

Plus a country with more sheep than people means no billboards (sheep can’t read) no strip malls, (sheep don’t shop) no trash (sheep don’t buy coffee and toss the cups out later) no real crime (sheep don’t carry guns-well even the police here don’t carry guns). You get the picture, the utopian society we might have if only we had more sheep than peeps!

That then is how a person escaping the heat of Texas had her wish for cooler temperatures fulfilled.  A high of 63 in August!  Swimming, picnicking, eating out at café’s, this is as good as it’s going to get.  Icelanders are hearty people, Viking stock and they live up to it!  Of course there are the omnipresent hot pools and hot pots so it’s not a hardship to dawn a suit in jump in. In Iceland there is more danger of boiling than freezing.  That part is definitely not Maine-like.  My father-in-law once saw jellyfish in the ocean at Maine and mistook them for iceberg pieces!

Let that be Part 1.When time permits (I am still on the road heading back to Texas, where 105 temps await me) I shall return for Part2 whose title is yet to be chosen. Here is  a travelers tip: if you go to Iceland bring some device that will keep your jaw in place for jaw-dropping scenery is the order of the day.  But that will be a tale for another day.  Now I have miles to go before I sleep, and after two days of car breakdowns and needing to be towed and 7 hours in a Pep Boy lounge in Nashville, I am a bit behind schedule.  

Till then, pretend you are an Icelander and get out and play!

In Defense of "Burger King trees"

As a naturalist who lives to take students for nature hikes in the woods, I have a few catch phrases I always seem to use. One is “Burger King trees” to mean any old snag that is riddled with holes, either by insects or woodpeckers.  The implication is that a dead tree is “fast food” to these animals, a quick place to pick up a lunch of carpenter ants, termites, bark beetles etc.  Trying to let people know how important these old lifeless trees are to wildlife is probably a fact all you wise readers already know.

 In this blog though I would like to talk about what you can glean from the different kind of holes you see, who hammered what and why.  The reason this topic came to mind is when I was in ME with my grandchildren I would walk the dog in the woods across the way each morning before anyone was up.  There were so many wonderful examples of “BK” trees that I took these pictures with the intent to share the knowledge with all of you, so lets look at them now.

A dead tree may still have some bark on or it may be stripped away.  If you see perfectly circular holes in either bark or the deadwood underneath you are looking at the work of an insect; possibly, a beetle or some ants.  Carpenter ants leave a lot of sawdust behind but smaller ants, not so much.  Their jaws have strong mandibles for chewing through the wood but I couldn’t find any explanation anywhere of why the holes are soooo perfect.  

Bark beetles, who lay their eggs under the bark of trees, leave a circle in the bark, but, if the bark is peeled away, what you will see are a series of carved tracks.  They always remind me of Indian carvings, where the separate larvae went their separate ways eating the wood as they went.  Those tracks dead end into a more circular spot where the now-fattened grub went into a pupa and then ,after weeks, wham, flew out through another hole in the bark as an adult beetle.  Different species of different bark beetles leave different tracks, some very wide from larger grubs, some almost spidery from minute ones.  Either way they are very cool to see.

If you come upon a more hammered hole, than I bet you can guess, THAT is the work of a woodpecker.  The spectacular, practically prehistoric,

 Pileated Woodpecker lives in Maine and leaves huge rectangular shapes where he has been dining on carpenter ants.  It is THE largest forest bird on our continent with an impressive bill for hammering away, a neck long enough to let him get a distance from the tree before he whams it and  a tail and feet that anchor him in place while he is doing the whamming. 

  And why he doesn’t suffer the same fate as football players do from “one to many hits to the head “is because he is adapted for this sort of abuse.  The skull bone at his front and at his nape is riddled with air pockets that help absorb the shock.  Someone calculated that the Pileated woodpecker hits the tree at about 15mph and does so up to 12,000X a day! 

His beak has a longer top than bottom but the bottom is very strong and they say it takes the blow and redirects that energy towards its lower jaw and not the brain.  Amazing.  Smaller woodpeckers make smaller holes but in general their hammering produces a jagged hole than the perfect circle left by an insect. 

So get out there and check out your dead trees.  Of course they could also be the equivalent of Air B&B’s for the likes of raccoon and opossum, owls and wood ducks and even flying squirrels. Flying squirrels often chew around their opening where the other animals do not. If you really want to know if you have a flying squirrel, and how exciting would that be! then look around the ground for nuts that have been chewed on opposite sides, also in a perfect circle.

Have we ever talked about “nuts and chews” and who eats which nut which way?  Not sure, but many other topics to cover first. I have been traveling and time to write has been hard to come by but topics are surely backing up in my mind.  I think the next one will have to be about the morning commute, bird commute that is, that I witnessed each sunrise at my friends house in Rhode Island.  Till then, if the tree isn’t threatening your house, please let a dead tree lie!