The Iceland effect
I can of course still hear his Icelandic accent while I sat against a heater at the window, looking outside eating breakfast…
“If you don’t like the weather, you can just wait ten minutes.”
I would not say it is often that here we have this ‘four seasons in one day’ type of weather, but this may be as close as I have seen in some time.
I always have loved interesting weather, and as satisfying as 30° on a beach of pure blue skies is, that is not everyday for the rest of my life.
One of the things I do love about living relatively far north is the extreme changes in climate and environment. The difference of 15 sunlight hours between the winter and summer solstice thrills me just as suffering through a 27° summer afternoon in a kayak or a walk through a forest covered in hoar frost at -35° does in the winter.
Inside of those seasons here, consistency still reigns. And that’s why whether it is in Iceland, or here, that to experience some icy patches over puddles, brutal winds, warm sunshine on my face, and a close call with a downpour all in a few hours feels like such a perfect miracle of nature. What beauty and power.
It’s so easy when I go back to British Columbia to visit, to be in the lush, old growth rainforests there and feel this almost condemnation of the forests around Yellowknife for their stunted growth, lack of vibrant greenery or heavily green forest floors.
The trees here just take a hundred years to grow and a hundred years to die
It’s like I just forget about all the beauty the reindeer lichen and mosses on the forest floor here hold, the majestic quality of the tall grasses blowing in the winds, the incredible colours even in the middle of summer before autumn really takes hold. It is all incredible. It’s just very different. Anywhere you step in nature, it is over some of the oldest exposed rock anywhere on this planet - a few billion years.
How beautiful to consider all what this rock has seen, or the reindeer lichen which is barely the size of your hand and has been growing for hundreds of years, the stories it all could tell, everything it has experienced. If you really think about that. How unbelievably special.
Skaftafellsjökull, Iceland
All of these massive boulders, how they are placed and balancing on one another, how every crevice has formed, all by the ice when this was glacial carved. Imagine to see glaciers covering this place, like we still see, for now, in Iceland. It seems so surreal, and something I am appreciating so much more than I ever have before.
