Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.08.2014, Side 34

Viðey
Skarfabakki
Elding
Old harbour
Harpa
www.elding.is
Other adventures
Sea Angling daily at 11:00 from 1 May to 31 August
Puffin Watching daily at 9:30 and 15:00 from 15 May to 15 August
Elding Whale Watching schedule – all year round
* From 15 May to 15 September
** From 15 June to 31 July

Make sureit’s Elding!
ELDING
WHALE WATCHING
from Reykjavik
Call us on +354 519 5000
or visit www.elding.is
Jan-Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov-Dec
EL-01 / EL-02 / EL-03
13:00 13:00
9:00 9:00
13:00
9:00
13:00
9:00
13:00
9:00
13:00
9:00
13:00
9:00
13:00
9:00
13:00
17:00* 17:00 17:00 17:00 17:00*
10:00
14:00
10:00
14:00
10:00
14:00
13:00
20:30** 20:30
From Elding (Ægisgarður) to Viðey
11.50 14.50
From Harpa to Viðey
13.30 15.00
From Skarfabakki to Viðey
From Viðey to Skarfabakki
13.30
From Viðey to Harpa and Elding (Ægisgarður)
11.30 13.30 14.30 17.30
10.15 11.15 12.15 13.15 14.15 15.15 16.15 17.15
13.30
Summer Schedule 15 May - 30 September
14.30 16.30 18.302
2.0
15.30 17.30
Really hidden treasure
off Reykjavik.
Well worth a visit.
“
Biffajk taken from TripAdvisor
Island
#videy
videy.com
533 5055
This was not always so. At the time of
Settlement, perhaps as much as 40% of
the island was covered by birch forests.
But the Norse settlers brought cattle and
sheep, and it’s quite a bit easier to graze
such animals on open land than among
trees. So, down went the trees. Within 50
or so years, the island was almost totally
deforested. And given Iceland’s volca-
nic and porous soil, erosion set in. More
and more erosion. By the 20th century,
the result was a wasteland—a photogenic
wasteland, it’s true, but still a wasteland.
However, due to planting and a less
prejudicial attitude toward trees among
farmers, Iceland is slowly but surely gain-
ing back its forests. “I used to say that if
the forest cover reached two percent
before I died, I would die happy,” Þröstur
Eysteinsson, Director of the Icelandic For-
est Service (Skógrækt ríkisins), told me.
It’s almost at two percent now, and he is
already happy.
That old joke about
Icelandic forests
Þröstur and I were wandering through
the island’s oldest forest, Hallorms-
staðaskógur (“Hallormsstaður forest”)
in East Iceland, near Egilsstaðir. Contrary
to my purposefully erroneous title, an at-
tempt to snatch the volcano and/or gla-
cier-craving reader’s attention, the trees
in this forest were not giant redwoods,
but they were the Icelandic equivalent—
eighteen-metre-high downy birch (Betula
pubescens). Veritable dwarves compared
to redwoods, but at least they’ve retired
the perennial joke that asks the question:
How do you get out of an Icelandic forest?
Answer: Stand up. Nowadays even a gi-
raffe could stand up and not get out of the
Hallormsstaðir forest.
I saw trees that were nearly 200 years
old and looked so gnarly and withered
that they might have been 1,000 years
old. Yet “gnarly” and “withered” are typi-
cal features of Betula pubescens even in
its pubescent state. If the trees had been
straight and firm, something doubtless
would have been wrong with them.
It was easy to see why Icelandic farm-
ers used to hate forests. Whenever Þröstur
and I left the trail and bushwhacked, we
found ourselves in an entanglement of
branches that seemed eager to reach out
and grab us. Not much fun if you’re trying
to round up sheep. I also discovered a pre-
viously undocumented feature of Icelandic
birch forests—they possess a growth habit
that specializes in untying shoelaces.
Immigrants
In and around the Hallormsstaðir forest,
I saw plantings of non-native trees. Here
was a grove of Siberian larch, and here
were several Alaskan lodgepole pines.
Here was a Norway spruce, and here was
a Sitka spruce. Here was a Scots pine.
Some of these trees seemed to be doing
very well, but others looked like they want-
ed to haul up their roots and go home. A
particularly sorry-looking Scots pine
seemed to be looking at me and saying,
“Would ye take me back to the Highlands,
laddie?”
In Iceland, the activity of planting is
trial and error, Þröstur said. For while a
boreal forest tree has evolved to tolerate
cold winters and warm summers in its
homeland, here it would have to grow ac-
customed to warmer winters and cooler
summers, along with strong winds. For
many trees, this is not as easy as it seems...
I brought up the controversial subject
of introducing non-native species. Þröstur
smiled. “After the devastation done by ag-
riculture on the Icelandic landscape, can
a few larch trees from Siberia be consid-
ered bad?” He added that the understory
plants associated with larch are more or
less the same as those associated with
Betula pubescens, which means that
larch, although a non-native tree, behaves
exactly like a native one here.
Falling on banksters
We ended up in a part of the forest next
to the ring road, whereupon Þröstur re-
cited the well-known poem “Hríslan
og lækurinn” (“The Birch Tree And The
Stream”) by the nineteenth century poet
Páll Ólafsson. In the poem, the poet en-
visions himself as a stream into which a
nearby birch tree is dropping its leaves
and, by doing so, caressing him. Þröstur
pointed to a particularly gnarly birch—the
very tree that had been caressing the poet
150 years ago! Only a few feet away, cars
and tour buses were roaring by, their oc-
cupants oblivious to perhaps Iceland’s
most famous tree.
Once upon a time the island’s for-
ests were dispatched even before they
reached middle age. Not anymore. Except
for occasional pruning and thinning, the
trees in those forests are now becoming
mature and, with maturity, they’ll end up
experiencing a natural death.
“A tree has never fallen on a person
and killed him in Iceland,” Þröstur told me,
“but I have high hopes that this will hap-
pen in the not too distant future, preferably
falling on a bankster…” There was a big
grin on his face.
---
The author would like to express his thanks
to Hótel Hallormsstaður and the Guest-
house Egilsstaðir for offering him accom-
modation during his exploration of the
nearby forests.
Visitors to Iceland seem to have no interest in the island’s forests. Instead, they delight in the
volcanoes, glaciers, hot springs and a midge-mobbed lake called Mývatn. Trees simply get in
the way of the view. Not only that, but as a woman from Los Angeles told me, “Hey, I can see
all the trees I want back home.” Yet if a glacier or active volcano would be considered exotic
in southern California, then a forest ought to be considered exotic in Iceland.
Words
Lawrence Millman
Photo
Lene Zachariassen
34 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 12 — 2014TRAVEL
In The Giant
Redwood Forests
Of Iceland
Can the Icelandic Forest Service
restore the nation's long-lost
tree cover?
Flights to Egilsstaðir provided by Air Iceland, book flight at www.airiceland
or call +354-5703000. Accomodation provided by Egilsstaðir Guesthouse.
Book by email at egilsstadir@egilsstadir.com or call +354-4711114.