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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wanted an Osprey daypack to compliment my suitcase/backpack: the Osprey Farpoint 40. This would give me a total of 60 liters of carrying capacity.
I chose a 20 liter all-rounder, a pack suitable for travel as well as hiking and trekking. This pack needed to be versatile and able to be small enough to slide under an airplane seat but roomy enough to to carry my binoculars, camera, sketching kit, and a water bottle. This is the Osprey Daylite Plus.
When I got the pack home, I loaded it up when above said items and was happy to see that they all fit with room to spare.
I decided to take the pack out on a test hike on the Old Cove Landing Trail at Wilder Ranch State Park on the Santa Cruz County Coast. This is one of my favorite coastal hikes and it is also a great place to bird.
The Daylite Plus in Wave Blue at Wilder Ranch.
The Daylite Plus, loaded up, felt good on my back. I used the sternum straps but I didn’t need to use the waist belt. This pack will do nicely for my Icelandic rambles.
Spring was in the air on the Old Cove Landing Trail. Here are a few highlights.
An unexpected surprise was a singing male lazuli bunting. This is one of the most beautiful songbirds of spring.This sign has seen better days but it provides a perfect singing stage for the verbose Bewick’s wren.Two pigeon guillemots greeting each other. I assume this is a mated pair. Another sign of spring.
In 1990, right after high school graduation, I headed over to Europe with my best friend Erik and his older brother Pete on a backpacking, hitchhiking, Eurorail adventure.
I was kitted out with a Eurorail Pass, a youth hostel card, and an REI black and red external framed backpack. This was the type of old school backpack you never see anymore. The pack where you would attach your sleeping bag to the bottom with bungee cords. The type of backpack that makes you look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, especially when you are wear a poncho to fend off the English rain.
I remember at SFO watching my checked pack get stuck on the roller belt and seeing the buckle of my hip belt rip off. This is the worst part of the pack to lose because you carry the weight of a pack not on your shoulders but your waist. (My dad had to send a replacement buckle to me in England).
Times have changed and materials have improved becoming lighter yet stronger. While I have used a backpack for, well, backpacking, I have favored a carry-on roller bag for airplane travel.
As the European travel guru Rick Steves notes, no one ever returns from a European trip and wishes they brought more. The same applies to my past travel experiences. I always wonder why I brought that shirt or sweater I never ended up using. I’m always fine tuning my travel kit to find the right balance.
Iceland was a time to return to backpacking. Could I do it after 30 years? I was not 18 anymore. But the packs, clothing, and packing accessories are so much better than when I first backpacked Europe three decades ago.
After some research, I decided on an Osprey pack. I have an Osprey daypack and it is one of the most comfortable packs I own. Osprey was founded in 1974 in Santa Cruz (nice local connection) and well, the osprey is a cool bird! The original business was called Santa Cruz Recreational Packs on River Street. The building now is Down Works.
The Osprey pack that I chose was the Farpoint 40 which is the company’s most popular travel backpack. This tics all the specs to fit in an overhead compartment while providing a large main compartment to hold together your life on the road. How is this done?
The Osprey Farpoint 40.
Because the main compartment has no dividers, compression packing cube are essential for organizing items and compressing them to fit. In one medium cube I can fit one pair of pants and six shirts. In a small cube I could fit one pair of thermal underwear, five pairs of socks, and five pairs of underwear.
The main compartment of the Farpoint 40 with two Thule compression packing cubes and an REI dopp kit. The large mesh pocket to the left holds a rain jacket and pants (average rainfall in Iceland ranges from 50 to 100 inches per year).
Now how does this work on a 15 day trip? Most of my clothing is made of synthetic material which means they are quick drying. So every few days I wash clothes in the sink or bathtub and then dry them on my Sea to Summit travel clothesline and they’re dry in the morning. This saves a lot of space in my bag.
And it sure feels great to travel lightly and not be encumbered by a heavy, unwieldy roller bag.
Before going on any birding trip I like to sketch the avifauna I would be seeing. This helps me pre-visualize the birds I hoped to be seeing as well as putting my excitement onto paper.
Iceland straddles the line between North America and Europe and as such contains birds of the North Atlantic and Northern Europe as well as Arctic breeders. Some of these birds can be seen in the northeastern coast of Northern American but many of the European birds would be considered rarities on this side of the Atlantic.
For the featured spread I created circular icons of birds of Iceland; some of them I had seen but others would be lifers. I took inspiration from the beginning animation of the wonderful film Watership Down, where animals were stylized in an aboriginal form. I also created an Icelandic map that is also very stylized. The birds featured are: Arctic tern, northern gannet, gyrfalcon, snow bunting, think-billed murre, white-tailed eagle, razorbill, Atlantic puffin, common raven, rock ptarmigan, common redpoll, and the outline of a bird which I would never see.
The bird of Iceland that I would never see is the great auk. This large flightless alcid, the largest of the family, was once abundant around the northern Atlantic. This was the penguin of the Northern Hemisphere, although they are not closely related to the two toned flightless birds of the southern hemisphere.
The auk was a breeder to Iceland. The seabird was hunted for both it’s meat and warm down. This aggressive hunting dwindled the populations of a bird that could not fly away from it’s pursuers. It seemed like destiny that the largest alcid would be written into the pages of natural history oblivion.
Ironically enough when the last colony of about 50 auks was discovered in 1835, museums in Europe wanted skins to display which hastened the auk’s ultimate demise.
This happened on Eldey Island, 10 miles off the coast of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, where the last two existing auks where killed on June 3, 1844. In the struggle the capture the birds, the last great auk egg was stepped on and crushed. This is such a shameful chapter of human’s history in it’s interactions with the natural world. Shame on us that we will never see a great auk again.
Corvid Sketcher 