Day 200-exploring Surtshellir

   July 22-200 days behind us?!  And, only one week to go?!  We are finding it hard to believe that our time here is really coming to an end.  Believe what me may, though, reality is what matters.  So, we started packing stuff up today, which is not easy, because it means that we now must start to make the difficult decisions about which items are important enough to pack and which ones we can leave behind.
   We did take some time out from doing this and the laundry to have some fun, though.  Stefán, Sally’s colleague and the father of Joslyn’s friend Jóhanna, invited us to his farm back in April to guide us through some caves.  We had been unable to take him up on the offer in the intervening time, but Shan saw him on a hike a couple weeks ago and we finally figured out that we could do it this week.  Stefán teaches finance at Bifröst, the location of which works well for him, since his family farm is located at the upper end of the Hvitá river valley to the west of campus.  His father died a couple years ago, so they sold the family’s sheep and his mother subsequently moved to Reykjavík.  However, they still own some hay fields, and Stefán and his brother were at the farm this week to mow and bale the hay.  They will try to sell it, but there is not much of a market for hay in Iceland.  Some urban dwellers need to buy hay for their horses and the drought in the north may lead some farmers there to buy hay as well.  However, most farmers produce enough hay for their own sheep.  The limiting factor for the farmers is the space in their sheep houses, since the sheep remain inside them all through the winter.  A farmer who can build a bigger building can almost invariably run more sheep.

Sally talks to Stefán in front of the Kalmanstunga farmhouse. It
and the sheep house on the left date to the early 20th century.

   “When the Sun shines, make hay,” but it was cloudy and rainy today, so Stefán had time to show us around the Kalmanstunga farm, which his great-grandfather bought over a century ago.  The farm dates back to the Settlement Era and Sagas relate that it was originally established by an Irish settler named Kalman.  The hayfields have been divided between two branches of Stefán’s family, but the farm’s property in the highlands is held jointly by the families.  These holdings are quite large, even by Icelandic standards, encompassing some 60 square miles, including Eiriksjökull glacier, which is the only privately owned glacier in the world as far as Stefán knows.

Eiriksjökull.

   Stefán guided us through portions of Surtshellir, which is the longest cave in Iceland.  It is a lava tube on Kalmanstunga and has a history that dates back to Saga times.  Its name derives from the legend that the monster, maybe a troll, names Sutur lived in the cave.  The Sagas claim that outlaws lived in the cave 1000 years ago.  While these stories may not be entirely accurate, there certainly are medieval records of outlaws living in the caves.  One portion of the cave has been set up as living quarters for at least a couple centuries and the midden pile of sheep bones was many feet tall until tourists started arriving and taking bones as souvenirs.

Stefán leads us into Surtshellir.

The ledge that Stefán is on leads to a side branch.

The side branch wyed. The left-hand branch appeared to have a second flow of lava in it.

We also explored the right-hand branch a short distance until it was blocked by rockfall.

The "bone cave" is another side branch
that is across the main cavern from the
first side branch that we explored. It
was given this name because the pile of
sheep bones here used to be over five
feet tall. The shards of bone are all
that are left, but some of them might be
1000 years old!

Stefán shines his light on a rock fireplace next to
the bone pile. The ground where he is standing is
flat and surrounded by a rock wall. These
structures predate his family's ownership of the
cave and may have been originally made by Saga
Era outlaws 1000 years ago. Since the eruption
that layed down this lava occurred in the 900s,
it is thought that the cave might have been quite
a warm haven for its earliest inhabitants. 

  

This opening in the rock wall leads to a pathway back into the side branch, which eventually emerges above-ground. This escape route would have been very handy for the outlaws. 

Stefánshellir, really just another section of Surtshellir, had these beautiful dropsteinn on the ceiling.  These formed when lava started to drip down from the ceiling and then hardened after the lava tube emptied. These dropsteinn were only a few inches in length. Stefán showed us pictures from Kalmanshellir, which is a much more remote cave on the farm that is closed to the public. Some of the dropsteinn in this cave are over six feet in length and some have grown up from the floor as lava dripped and immediatly froze.



The most popular entrance to Surtshellir is into a portion that is called Ísahellir, or ice cave. When Stefán was young, ice covered the floor of this portion of the cave for some distance. As Iceland has warmed, the ice has shrunk in size to a few small patches like the one next to which Alex is crouching.

   Stefán explored these caves extensively as a tween and then hired out as a guide for bus tours to the caves in his teens.  The caves are still popular and there were a half dozen cars parked at the entrance during our visit.  Alex asked if Stefán could close public access to the cave.  He thinks that his family could decide to do that, but the multiple access points and the fact that it lies along a public road that runs through his farm would make any such closure very difficult to enforce.  The county government certainly likes that it is available for tourists and has put up public information signs at the entrance, which were new to Stefán, who only gets over to the caves once or twice a year any more.

Spencer tries to pick the nose of Hraunkarl,
which means lava man.

Sally and the girls examine another
interesting lava flow formation.

  

           After our cave tour, we returned to the farmhouse and had coffee and desserts with Stefán and his mother.  After spending a very enjoyable afternoon with Stefán, we finally headed back down the valley to Bifröst.  Emma, Pálmar, and Þórsteinn came over when we got back and we ate chili dogs for supper.  We played two games of Settlers of Catan (Pálmar finally won a game!), they left, and we got some work done before going to bed.