Eldfell Diner

Eldfell Diner

The story of the eruption of Eldfell on the island of Heimay and the near destruction of Vestmannaejyar is too well documented and photographt to be repeated here.  Except to note that it began on my twelfth birthday and by that age anything volcanic was an obsession.  To me, it was clearly a war between mankind and nature, where there were no casualties, and yes, not to downplay the destruction and hardship on the people living there, no lasting damage to either party that can be thought of as controversial.  (Do we really need to go into examples where that battle has been indisputably lost by nature and there's never going back, it's simply unrecoverable?  Let's not.)

Hard work and sheer luck actually created a stronger Vestmannaeyjar fishing port and most of the population returned and cleaned up the place and except for a huge red mountain on the east side of the island and massive hraun, blocky basalt lavaflows now covered in thick green moss, is there little evidence to the average tourist of Eldfell's wrath. John McPhee, a favorite non-fiction writer of mine, has an excellent account of this in his book The Control of Nature. The tephra and ash has long been removed and the island is as lush as ever.  Save Eldfell itself.

I hiked up to the summit of Eldfell, some 200 meters, on a properly markt trail and got sidetrackt on a side trail that turned out to be a non-sanctioned shortcut up to the top.   It was climbing straight up and on a steep gravel sand dune, and only halfway up did I realize this wasn't the main trail.  I was winded but there was no going back.

At the top.  The sky was so blue and cloudless and the sun warm.  What a view!  I could see the mainland clearly, the cliffs of the plateau of the Eyjafjallajökull icecap on the right, the sandur and floodplain of the Markarfljót on the left and for the first time and very clearly and not crowned with a cloud, the lonely mountain Hekla, the most dangerous and disastrous volcano on the island.  Popular hiking there, an overdue eruption, a 30 minute warning tops.  (I kept the photo here "original size" so you could actually see the mountain.)

Lonely mountain in distance is Mt Hekla, finally a view of it not shrouded in clouds! 

Eldfell is a huge gravelly sand dune of red tephra and is quickly eroding, red with rust, and at the top, only a bit of hard lava stone capped the mountain.  I found it friable, parts easily broken off.  This will quickly erode into the red gravel too.  All in just 40 years. At the bottom of the mountain, both to the north toward the town and to the east to the sea, the black and gray and blocky and moss green hraun spread out evenly, not yet covered by the tephra gravel.  A clear demarcation if only by the color of the rock.

Of course, I was going to get a handful of the gravel, and dug in and scooped up one, and shook the sand out between my fingers.  Wow, this gravel is hot.  But it was dug up on the north side of a boulder.  But it never gets this hot in Iceland ever enough to warm this up.  But this gravel was hot enough to hardly hold in my hands very long.  But this was gravel just inches under the surface.  I was somewhat frightened to be honest.  This kind of under the surface heat I'd only come across while soaking in hot water streams, where you could scald your fingers if you dug down even half your hand.

Was I was really uninformed about Eldfell today and volcanoes and lava in general.  As it happens,  Vestmannaejyar gets all of its hot water, extracted from steam, from water that's percolated down from surface rain, heated from the still very very hot insides of the mountain.  It will be decades and decades before the core of Eldfell will be completely, if ever, cooled.  Lots of stories I found online: cooking brats in the gravel was the funniest.  Holding a 40°C stone found at the top was another, and countless other stories about how hot it is inside this now dormant? but it's not dormant but still very much active: an active volcano is one that has erupted in the last 10.000 years. This is a volcano 40 years after the eruption.  It could go off again at anytime.

On the way down from Eldfell, I came across a picture of the village before the eruption.  It wasn't taken at the same spot where the posted board was, so my picture doesn't quite match, but you should get an idea.  Everything of that part of the village you see is under 16 meters of hraun lava flow you see in the other picture, hraun now lush with moss and grass and purple lupine.  As the trail meanders through the hraun, every so often you come across a marker, to indicate that some meters or so below this spot is a house, giving its name, the names of all the inhabitants, their birthdates and deathdates, and those of their children born there and spouses and their children's children also born there, and their spouses as well, some of course were still living today.  Some markers had old photographs of the original inhabitants.  They hadn't died there, mind you, as no one died during this catastrophe; it was only a memorial of the place and the persons having lived there.  It felt awkward.   

All those funny after-the-fact wish-I'd-thought-of-that that one has.  I had the time to sit up on the top of Eldfell for an hour and just enjoy being in the warm sun and fantastic view, and wait for an egg I'd buried deep in the gravel to hard boil.

View from Eldfell, facing east.  Iron-rust Eldfell, green mossy hraun and the blue Gulf Stream.
The Gulf Stream hits Iceland dead on.  Heimaey Island never gets snow.