Speak, Memory
Many miles away from the capital of the most sporadically settled country in Europe, where the ocean shatters on the black sand beaches, and where a one-antlered reindeer digs its snout into the snow, there’s a sense of quiet acceleration – unfelt by those impervious to history, lived by those whose memory reaches far enough into the past.
The ancestors of Einar Rúnar Sigurðsson have eked out a living in the Öræfasveit region since the 14th century at least. Maybe since the time of the settlement. For hundreds of years, his people have raised animals in the area, making do – even after a historic natural disaster spoiled the scenery, turned the livestock to deadstock, and prematurely recalled the ethereal material of many an unsuspecting Catholic.
Although hardships akin to the 1362 Öræfajökull volcanic eruption failed to persuade his forebears to cease with the sheep farming, something else eventually did. Three decades ago, the confluence of various inauspicious forces, globalisation, falling demand, bumbling bureaucrats, etc., ultimately rendered animal husbandry unviable.
Einar Rúnar Sigurðsson’s ancestors have eked out a living in the Öræfasveit region since the 14th century at least – maybe since the time of the settlement.
The way Einar tells it, speaking softly from inside café Kaffi Vatnajökull (which he owns and operates with his wife Matta), the dying years of his family’s “business” revolved less around tending to sheep and more around managing a steady accumulation of debt. But, as the old saying goes, when God closes the gate to a sheep pen – He sometimes gestures toward the open window of a running tractor.
“There was no money to fix the machinery,” Einar explains, “so the old man sold his sheep quota and settled his debts. He then made use of the only functional equipment left: the tractor and the hay cart, and began offering guided tours to Ingólfshöfði,” a nearby cape named after Iceland’s first permanent settler.
Einar was employed as a ranger at the time but would occasionally assist his father in designing ads for the latter’s new tour-guiding enterprise. Only a year or two later, Einar tendered his resignation as a ranger, reasoning that since the old man could do it, “surely, he could, too.” It’s the rationale underpinning the collapse of most dynasties.
As he muses about the absence of a milk jug, having offered my companion and me coffee, Matta reminds him that there’s a global pandemic circulating – and that having such things lying around for common gripping and handling is not exactly kosher. “I swear, it’s like dating a two-year- old sometimes,” she says and laughs. “Like dating a caveman – an ice-caveman!”
The final epithet is a reference to Einar’s claim to fame, the reason we’re visiting: he is, according to reputable sources (most notably famed Arctic landscape photographer Ragnar Axelsson), the person to talk to if one is interested in ice caves. Einar’s been exploring them for 25 years.
As Matta continues her gentle ribbing, the man himself smiles in an unoffended manner; besides the expansiveness of his beard, which encroaches almost upon the territory of his eyebrows, overhanging a pair of clear blue eyes, there’s nothing exactly troglodytic about Einar. He’s sharp of mind and rather slight of build and seems quite well informed about the state of the world.
The Wild, Wild West
The tallest mountain in Iceland, Hvannadalshnúkur, sits in Einar’s “backyard,” as he likes to say. In 1891, his great-grandfather, Páll Jónsson, became the first person in history to summit the mountain’s 2,106 metres [6,909ft]. Einar, too, has always been drawn to it.
At a time when black-and-white cowboy films were first appearing on Icelandic television, the idea of Hvannadalshnúkur became, in the mind of a young Einar, inexplicably intermingled with the concept of “the Wild, Wild West.” He imagined that if he were to reach the summit and peer down the other side, he would find cowboys and Indians shooting it out in the wilderness. When he finally followed in his grandfather’s footsteps in 1989, then 21 years old, he was disappointed to see only plains and a crater.
Although he didn’t come across the Wild West at the top of Hvannadalshnúkur (which he has since climbed over 300 times, a world record, no doubt), he did discover the spirit of the American frontier in the Icelandic tourism industry. In 2006, he offered his first advertised trip to an ice cave. Business was slow at first, but the tourist boom that followed the 2010 volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, and viral photographs of the Crystal Ice Cave, soon inspired a sort of gold rush.
“At first,” he says – as we drive east in Einar’s jeep toward the Sapphire Ice Cave, having lapped the dregs from our glazed coffee mugs – “I was the only one offering guided tours. Then there were two. Then three. Five. Ten. These days, it’s around 30 companies in all.”
“Last month,” Einar continues, “there were days when you had 40 trucks parked near the trail. Four hundred people trying to squeeze into the cave at the same time. It takes away all the charm,” Einar observes, somewhat ruefully. In addition to the sometimes-crowded environment, many experienced guides are also disturbed by the lack of professionalism. There are no laws, either enacted by the government or enforced by Vatnajökull National Park, that require those who offer guided tours to ice caves to possess a licence.
“Some companies do make demands, and the Association of Icelandic Mountain Guides hopes to implement a certificate system, meaning that guides would need to have the proper training to be allowed to accompany travellers into the caves. All the guides have basic glacier training, of course, but the ice caves require specialisation. The Association has recently begun teaching a course on ice caving, which I’ve been overseeing, and hopefully, by next
winter, such training will have become mandatory.”
Einar qualifies this statement with the caveat that such requirements seem always on the cusp of being implemented, but then another year passes without any meaningful changes. “I find that the
guides themselves are eager to learn and register for these courses, even if they aren’t required to do so.”
When asked about his own qualifications, Einar refers to his long history of search-and-rescue work in the mountains; to courses he’s taken with the Association of Icelandic Mountain Guides; to years exploring the ice caves by himself; and to the wisdom passed on from other mountaineers who studied in Canada.
Wishful Thinking
Having bounced our way through a winding country road, we exit Einar’s jeep and attach our crampons. The December air is cool and still as we set off on our 30-minute trek to the cave. As we walk, the conversation turns to the changing climate.
Three years ago, on August 19, 2019, the Ok glacier in western Iceland was officially declared dead. Its passing was commemorated with a plaque, authored by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason:
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.
Not far from the parking lot, a boulder languishes in an open field of snow. Einar points out that that same rock was, just a few years ago, situated inside an ice cave. Some 800 metres [2,625ft] on, there’s a hillside bridge underneath the open sky that was the site of another former cave. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Einar’s pointing these markers out is his way of lamenting a changing climate – but it’s more complicated than that. Not that he’s sceptical about global warming, just that he believes that the melting of the Icelandic glaciers has a lot to do with the ash.
“The glacier retreat quickened after the eruption in 2010, for example, because the dark colour of the ash absorbs greater heat than the white of the snow,” he clarifies.
“There’s all this talk about the dying glaciers, but I sometimes think how my ancestors would have felt returning to Earth after all this time. They would be surprised by the size of Vatnajökull.” Einar explains that around the time of the Protestant Reformation in Iceland, farmers in Skriðuklaustur in East Iceland would send their servants to the south coast, through the Highland, to catch fish. “That would be impossible today,” he notes.
As I muse upon the motivation underlying Einar’s scepticism, he admits that perhaps all of it is just a simple matter of wishful thinking.
Collapse
As we draw close to the Sapphire Cave, which Einar discovered and named back in 2015, he tells us about his one brush with near disaster. “It was in January of 2010. I was accompanying a group of travellers to an ice cave in the easternmost part of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier.”
When his party arrived at the destined hollow of the Earth, Einar grew suspicious of the integrity of the left side of the cave’s mouth – and entreated his people to hew close to the opposing flank. They had only just gathered within the cave when that dubious side of the mouth collapsed.
“It was an exceedingly uncomfortable feeling,” he admits, but also a fine lesson to learn. Since then, Einar has grown more extreme when it comes to safety and, like all persons who have acquired some skill in a given field, more keenly aware of his limitations. (He no longer brandishes his shotgun to blast off loose chunks of ice.)
No one has died on a guided tour of an ice cave in Iceland. “But there are a few travellers who have met their maker exploring caves on their own,” Einar states. In 2006, for example, a 37-year-old German tourist named Oliver Meisner passed away when an ice cave near Hrafntinnusker mountain collapsed. A year later, a 52-year-old Spanish national, Jesus Martinez Barja, died in an ice cave in the Kverkfjöll mountain range. Einar almost witnessed one death himself.
It was in February of 2014. He was accompanying two clients to the glacier for ice climbing. The three of them stopped by at the so-called Waterfall Ice Cave, and Einar said hello to another guide who was there with a German photographer. “I knew the German, who was quite open and vigorous, and said hello, but he remained oddly quiet. I didn’t think too much of it, chalking up his reticence to all the noise.” (There was a glacier river running through the cave.)
Einar continued onward with his two clients, and when they finished climbing, they headed back down the glacier – when Einar’s colleague came running toward them, gesticulating wildly. “‘He just stood up and fell into the river and disappeared into the darkness,’ the man yelled!” Einar stayed with the man’s body, which washed up on the riverbank farther down the glacier, and waited for rescue workers to arrive.
“During the autopsy, it became clear that the man had suffered a heart attack. I later learned from his loved ones that the male members of the family tended to collapse in their sixties. It was simply his time to go.”
The enchanting blue ice
The Sapphire Cave, which has been around since 2015, is almost empty when we arrive. A small group of tourists has ventured into a tunnel at the end of the cave, and Einar is annoyed to find that someone of their party has left a walking stick and a backpack lying around on the cave
floor.
He sets up his tripod and begins snapping pictures: the long exposure teasing out the enchanting blue of the cave, which is less visible to the naked eye. He reveals that ice caving has served to rekindle his passion for photography; on the south wall of his coffeehouse, there are pictures from the ice caves of Vatnajökull, and a book of photographs, spanning ten winters, entitled The Crystal Ice Cave and authored by Einar.
As I dig around among the rocks and pebbles for historical artefacts – a hopeless task, it turns out – a guide emerges from the tunnel with his group of tourists. Einar immediately inquires if the stuff on the cave floor belongs to them. “You shouldn’t leave these things lying around; it’s a nuisance.” Despite his irritation, he later reveals that there has been more collaboration of late among the various guides that frequent the caves.
As Einar continues to take pictures, I discover that the funny thing about an ice cave is how quickly the mind transmutes the exotic and somewhat frightening substance of the phenomenon into something so familiar as to quickly give rise to carelessness: thoughts of an unexpected collapse – a stupid way to die; orphaned children, the divvying up of one’s meagre possessions – are almost immediately supplanted by a desire to venture deeper and deeper into the darkness of the cave.
It’s a worthwhile experience, although the cave itself, one finds, is merely another pleasant chord among other enjoyable notes (the trip, the nature, the history) that constitute the symphony of the whole joyous excursion.
Before long, we’re whizzing back toward Kaffi Vatnajökull in Einar’s jeep, as he – adding to his already impressive world record – has some things to take care of before his ski trip to Hvannadalshnúkur tomorrow.
