Month: June 2023

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Viking Longship Islendingur

South, just across the bay from Reykjavik, is a ship that I wanted to see and sketch.

This is the replica of a Viking longship named Islendingur. The longship is now out of the water and preserved indoors at the Viking World Museum in Keflavik.

The Islendingur is a replica of the Gokstad longship. The Gokstad ship is a 9th century ship that was found in a burial mound in Sandar, Norway. It is one of the largest preserved Viking ship in existence and is on display at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway. The ship was found on Gokstad Farm in 1880. The oak ship is 78 feet long and almost 17 feet wide. The Islendingur is almost an exact replica of this iconic ship.

In the summer of 2000, to celebrate the millennial anniversary of Lief Erikson’s discovery of North America (500 years before Columbus), the Islendingur set sail, retracing the original route of the famous Norseman. The boat was built and piloted by a descendant of Erikson.

The wooden ship travelled 4,200 miles, stopping at over 24 ports along the way to New York City.

The beautiful form of a Viking longship.

I picked a spot on the starboard side of the longship in the upper gallery and sketched it into my Icelandic sketchbook. I started with the iconic dragon’s figurehead on the bow and sketched the curvaceous oak hull.

On the deck of the Islendingur looking towards the bow. I had the ship all to myself!
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The Last of the Great Auks

One location I wanted to visit was about 20 minutes from Keflavik International Airport but without a car, it seemed a remote possibility that I would see the island where the last great auk lived.

As it turns out, we had some extra time on the last day of my WINGS Iceland tour and our guide thought we would spend some time at the volcanic bit of land closest to Eldey Island.

We pulled into the black sand parking lot between a lighthouse and the Atlantic. Near and just off shore are large kittiwake breeding colonies. A little further off shore were lines of murres, razorbills, and puffins. Add to that, there were a movement of Manx shearwaters heading north. And beyond the bird movement, nine miles from shore, is Eldey Island.

Eldey Island, nine miles off the coast of Iceland.

This is the last place the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) occurred on Planet Earth. This large flightless auk once lived on both sides of the northern Atlantic.

By the early 19th century, the auk population had been severely reduced because of predation by humans.

Because the auk was becoming so rare, naturalists wanted to collect the auk before it disappeared from the earth, paradoxically pushing the great auk to extinction.

One of the last bastions of the great auk was Eldey. It was here on June 3, 1844 that the last two great auks were killed and one of the captors stepped back and crushed the last great auk egg sending the large flightless seabird into oblivion.

The extinction of the great auk is commemorated by a large sculpture by Todd McGrain, which I sketched (featured sketch).

The white on top of the island are all northern gannets. This is Europe’s largest gannet breeding colony.
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Whale Watching: Húsavík

It seems like a no brainer not to visit the island of Iceland without going out on the waters surrounding it. So we left out of the port of Húsavík in northern Iceland on a whale watching trip.

Our ship was the Sylvia, a fishing boat built in 1976. It felt good to to have vessel under my feet that was slightly younger than I am. Our to guides where biologists from Portugal but our captain was purely Icelandic.

We headed out of port under gray skies and light winds. A rain system had passed through the previous night and it looked like a good day for a three hour cruise, a three hour cruise.

As we left port we passed a large cruise ship. Black guillemots where in the harbor and once out of the harbor, gulls, terns, and fulmars circled the boat. Further out and we began to see our first lines of puffins crossing our bow. We had to get a little further out in the fjord to see our first cetaceans.

On the hunt for cetaceans. The crew provided use with dry suits, hence we all appeared to be part of the crew.

Our first cetacean of the cruise was a lifer for me, a small pod of white-beaked dolphins! Well this was a great start. Let’s see if we could get some whales!

It was not too long before we saw the bushy blow of a whale. We headed towards the blow and we saw the first whale of our trip, a humpback whale. On the rest of the cruise we saw about five other humpbacks, with amazing looks at the whales and their unique flukes.

A real treat was seeing two humpbacks swimming parallel to the Sylvia.
What a great look at the humpback’s blowholes as it foraged at the surface.

After seeing about seven different humpbacks we headed back to port. As we neared Húsavík I looked off to the southwest and saw a dark bird with white “wing lights” flying towards. “Skua!”, I shouted. Once the passengers figured out that a skua was not a whale but a pelagic bird, they suddenly lost interest. But I, and my fellow bird nerds enjoyed the great skua flyby!

Coda: There are three nations that still actively whale, one of which is Iceland. Shortly before we set out on our whale watching trip er learned that Iceland had put a three month moratorium on whaling. Hopefully this will lead to a permanent ban.

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Vikings: Children of the Ash and Elm

Iceland and Vikings are shorn together in their mutual historys that it is tough to separate the one from the other.

The Age of the Vikings spanned for just three centuries, from about 750 to 1050 CE, but their historical shadow casts itself into the modern era. And like shadows, the representation of “Vikings” is shrouded in darkness and the “true” Vikings culture is overshadowed by stereotypes and half-truths.

Can we really known the group of people we call “Vikings”? Well no, but can we cut through the stereotypes and see the “real” Vikings? The answer is yes but lazy thinking with keep the repeated straw men in amber.

When one travels to a new land and culture the onus falls on the individual to educate themselves and the past culture of the land they will be stepping into. For me I started to read “ A History of the Vikings: Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price.

The use of the Viking name can be found far and wide, in this case the Viking Ski Club at Donner Summit.
The name “Viking” appears everywhere in Iceland, including a very drinkable lager beer.
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Stone Spirits and Ragnar the Homing Pigeon

We birded Snæfellsbær National Park and I did two sketches to commemorate the visit. At least one sketch is semi-bird related.

One sketch is of a stone troll that was built as a memorial to a young man who died of exposure up in the Icelandic mountains.

The statue represents the Deity of Mt. Snaefell and was sculpted by Ragnar Kjartansson in 1985.

About 50% of Icelandic people strongly believe in “hidden” people. As the name implies, these are people that exist but are seldom, if ever, seen. A list of the hidden people sounds like a reading of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: dwarves, elves, and trolls. (It is no wonder because JRR Tolkien was heavily influenced by the Icelandic Sagas and myths). So the stone troll was very much in keeping with the ethos of the Land of Fire and Ice.

Throughout Iceland it was not uncommon to see small houses build out in the countryside. They were usually in a field usually near a house or road and always with an open front door. These houses are built as a home for the small hidden people. Icelanders believe!

The other sketch is of an unexpected visitor to the Snæfellsbær National Park Visitor Center. The homing pigeon appeared one day and the staff gave him the Icelandic name “Ragnar”. They feed him a bit of seed and he occasionally comes indoors. Hopefully he will avoid the attention of the local Arctic foxes that also visit the visitor’s center.

Ragnar, the wayward homing pigeon that has taken up residence at the visitor’s center. He was very tame and allowed close approach which was the giveaway that Ragnar was not a wild pigeon.
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The Former Whales of Long Marine Lab

One joy of sketching is to return to a previous subject but sketch it from a different perspective. Such is the case with the whales of Long Marine Lab in Santa Cruz. (Former cetaceans, that is.)

Long Marine Lab is part of the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and is a research and educational facility for marine biology. The campus also features a small aquarium (the Seymour Marine Discovery Center) that is open to the public. The biggest draw for me is the biggest creature that ever lived on Planet Earth: the blue whale. The Discovery Center has an incredible blue whale skeleton on display flanking one side of the museum.

I had sketched the massive blue whale skeleton and the smaller gray whale skeleton before but I wanted to sketched them in a different way. For the blue, I stood directly in front and sketched it head on, as if the largest creature on Planet Earth was swimming towards me.

I have been lucky enough to see blue whales in the wild from pelagic boating trips. Most of these trips have been in Monterey Bay. I remember the first time I saw this massive cetacean on a trip out of Monterey Harbor with my father in the late 1980s. My high school biology teacher at the the time didn’t believe blue whales could be seen in Monterey Bay, until I showed him the photos.

Song sparrow using the vertebrae of the gray whale for a singing perch.
Gray whale skeleton with the Seymour Marine Discovery Center on the left and Big Blue on the right.
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Sugar Bowl

I am a product of skiing. My parents met at the South Bay Ski Club and spent time at the club’s lodge on old Highway 40 in Soda Springs, California. They even honeymooned at another ski resort, Mammoth Mountain, although during the summer.

Highway 40 is historic and follows some of the path over Donner Summit the the ill-fated Donner Party traveled. It also parallels the original path of Central Pacific’s Transcontinental Railroad.

Just west of Donner Summit is a historic ski resort: Sugar Bowl. This resort was opened on December 15, 1939 and the single person chairlift was the first in the state of California and only the second in the nation. This is one of the oldest ski resorts in California (the first in the state in fact) and laid the blueprint for others that followed. It also was the first resort on the west coast to install a gondola, named the Magic Carpet.

The shed off of Highway 40 where the Magic Carpet gondola shuttles skiers to the Sugar Bowl Lodge. In the background are Mt. Lincoln (left) and Mt. Disney.

The ski area has made it onto the silver screen when in 1924, Charlie Chaplin filmed part of the Gold Rush on Mt. Lincoln, standing in as Alaska. When the film was released in 1925, it was the highest grossing silent comedy of the year.

Much has changed at Sugar Bowl since the days when I skied there as a child. Judah Lodge was built as the main lodge for the resort making the gondola an afterthought.

On a recent jaunt to Donner Pass I pulled into the the Gondola parking lot and looked out at the resort with Mt. Lincoln and Mt. Disney in front of me. I sketched the view in my panoramic sketchbook with my brush pen. In early June, the resort was closed for the season after the record snows of the winter of 2023.

The Donner Summit area and this stretch of Highway 40 has a deep meaning in my life. My parents met here and later our family spent time together here. It is a location of deep history from the Native Californians, the immigrant trail to the Donner Party to the Transcendental Railroad and to birth of California’s winter recreation at Sugar Bowl.

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Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History

On my first full day of summer I headed 50 minutes south of Santa Cruz to Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula.

This is a return trip (it had been a while) to the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History.

I arrived early and sat in the park across the street to sketch the 1932 Spanish Mission Revival museum. To the right was a statue of a female gray whale named “Sandy”, built in 1982.

“Sandy” in the foreground and the museum in the background.

The museum opened at ten and after paying my $10 admission I walked into the gallery, greeted by a grizzly bear standing up on it’s hind legs. The grizzly is the extinct State Mammal of California. This specimen came from Alaska.

The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History is full of animals: insects, amphibians, reptiles, fish, mammals, and birds, lots of birds. But all of them are dead. This is a mount museum where the visitor are surrounded by taxidermy. Some very lifelike but others a little comical.

This taxidermy golden eagle looks like someone squeezed it a little too hard.

This is a sketchers paradise because it provides lots of subjects, none of which are moving anytime soon. After sketching the exterior of the museum, I added a California condor from the bird hall. These magnificent and rare birds can be seen a short distance from PG on the coast of Big Sur.

My spread in progress from the Monterey Native Plant Garden in the back of the museum.
The black-footed albatross can be seen in the Monterey Bay, usually on a pelagic boat trip. A Northern California coast pelagic trip is not the same without a sighting of this iconic species.

One avian mount that I was looking forward to sketching was the extinct passenger pigeon. In Washington I had seen “Martha”, the last passenger pigeon at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History so I was looking forward to sketching PG’s pigeon.

I looked and looked but I could not find the passenger pigeon. I thought it might be in the pigeon cabinet between band-tailed pigeon and rock dove. Nope. I even asked the lady at the desk and I got a blank stare. You think such a noteworthy mount would be well known to museum staff. Nope. None of the docents knew where it was nor what it was.

A consolidation was the mount of the Carolina parakeet, long extinct. The last individual died in 1918 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

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Merino Wool: The King of Threads

Merino wool is expensive, but it can save you money in the long run.

How can paying $25 for a pair of Merino wool socks save you money? Well, because of the anti microbial properties of Merino, your socks don’t stink after you wear them.

In fact you can wear them two or three more times before washing them meaning you don’t have to bring as much clothing while traveling. Less to pack means you don’t check your bags and considering the exorbitant fees on airlines nowadays, you end up saving!

And if your Merino wool socks happen to be made in Vermont by Darn Tough (like some of mine) you get a lifetime guarantee (your life not the socks!) These socks are built to last. Now that’s money well spent!

Also Merino dries much quicker than other fabrics making sink, shower, or bathtub washing much easier. Washing in the afternoon means dry garments in the morning.

The same is true with any material made from Merino wool. I plan to pack two short sleeve shirts, one long sleeve 1/4 zip shirt, a sweater, and a Merino buff. Merino fits into my less is more packing mantra for my Icelandic saga.

My Smartwool long sleeve 1/4 zip and short sleeve T-shirt and my Wool & Prince short sleeve tee (front).

I may be rocking the same outfit a few days in a row (with no ten years olds pointing it out) but I’m here on vacation not at a fashion show.

The Story of Merino

Merino wool comes from the domestic sheep established in the Extremadura region of Spain. It was at one time illegal to export the sheep or it’s wool outside of Spain. Offenders faced certain death! Eventually these restrictions were loosened and Merino was exported around the world.

Today Merino wool is produced in many places including Australia, China, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

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Long in the Tooth

In late May, something interesting washed up on Rio Del Mar Beach in Aptos on the shore of Monterey Bay. It was not your standard bit of driftwood, a dead marine mammal, or a piece of flotsam from Japan.

In fact the jogger who found it did not know what she found, so she took a picture of it and did what most of us seem to do nowadays: she posted the picture on social media. Someone who did know what it was saw the post and that person was Wayne Thompson, the Paleontology Advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. He identified the object as a tooth from an extinct mastodon!

When they returned to the beach the tooth was gone. So a search was begun to find where the molar tooth has gone through national and even international media. The efforts soon turned up the tooth. A local man saw the tooth on the beach and took it home. He saw that this was being sought after and he called the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.

The tooth was put on display at the museum for three days on the first weekend in June. And that is where I saw the tooth and sketched it.

The recently found mastodon molar in a box, on display for three days at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. I sketched it on the second day.

When I first stepped into the museum, it was much busier than usual. In front of the mastodon display stood the man himself, Wayne Thompson, being interviewed by a local news station. He told the reporter that the tooth was probably washed down Aptos Creek during the record rains of 2023 and then washed up onto the beach. This was a big story. I was told that NPR would be visiting the museum on Monday.

Mastodons are related to the wooly mammoth and the modern elephant. The Pacific mastodon (Mammut pacificus) once roamed the land that became California between five million to 10,000 years ago. So the tooth was an incredible and rare find. In fact the name mastodon comes from ancient Greek meaning “breast tooth”, referring to the nipple-like appearance on the crown of the molars.

Mastodons disappeared from North and Central America about 10,500 years ago. It believed that the mastodon was driven to extinction by early human hunters.