Atlantica - 01.06.2004, Page 41

38 A T L A N T I C A
There’s something primal about de-
scending to the depths of a dark, myste-
rious cave. Our ancestors used to hang
out in them, seeking shelter from some
Spielberg-imagined man-eating dino-
saur. Since prehistoric man didn’t have a
luxurious house with central heating to
relax away a storm, a cave was the next
best thing. And with no movies to go to
on a wet Saturday afternoon, they took
to cave painting.
Because of our collective history, it
makes sense that the sport of caving is
growing widely popular among adven-
ture enthusiasts.
“Because they were there,” is why
ophthalmologist Árni B. Stefánsson
became interested in exploring caves.
But his passion for going underground
runs far deeper, which is why he’s now
promoting the gargantuan undertaking
of building a viewing platform inside
Thríhnjúkagígur (Three Peaks), a lava
cave located within the Blue Mountains,
20 km southeast of Reykjavík.
Wait a minute. An eye doctor wants to
build a what? Yep, you read correctly: a
viewing structure inside a cave.
BOTTLENECK
The Thríhnjúkagígur cave is so close to
Reykjavík that you can actually see it
from the capital, on a sunny day, of
course.
Cavers enter this lava cave through a
small hole at the surface. The cave
plunges roughly 120 m to the first level,
after which there is another 80 m pas-
sage to the southwest that reaches a
depth of about 200 m.
For a mental picture of Thríhnjúkagígur
cave, imagine tracing your hands down
the inside of a wine bottle. You have the
skinny neck, which grows wider the far-
ther you descend into the bottle.
When Stefánsson first descended to
the depths of the cave, back in 1974,
“The disappointment was overwhelm-
ing. I had expected to see vast forma-
tions, but what I found was just a quar-
ry.”
It wasn’t until a trip in ’91 that
Stefánsson truly understood the allure
of Thríhnjúkagígur cave. As he was low-
ered down, hanging by a rope, he took
in the enormity of it all.
“I felt like a spider dangling from a
barn ceiling,” he says, sitting at a desk
in the centre of an exhibition of his cave
photographs, which ran last spring at
the Tourist Information Office.
He was about 60-odd m down from
the opening, in the neck of the bottle,
when he thought to himself that this
precise point would be the perfect place
to build the viewing platform, or as he
calls it, “a balcony”.
“It’s here you see the vastness, the
formations, and you feel your own
smallness,” he says, emphasising the
final part of the sentence.
NO PROBLEM
Some might think building a balcony so
tourists can view the inside of a cave is
a bit strange, an environmental mistake
at the very least. But Icelanders are very
much behind the project, which
Stefánsson insists will help protect the
cave by increasing our connection with
the environment and enabling us to
realise the humbling immenseness of
nature.
The project is in its infancy. And
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