What the Meltwater Cut

This was the last light of the first day, and it was the right way to end it.

Fjaðrárgljúfur runs about two kilometres and drops around a hundred metres, and the shape is the strange part: it doesn’t go straight, it meanders, the way a lazy river meanders across a flat plain. Except this one meanders in vertical rock. You stand on the rim and look down a corridor of towers that lean in and overlap, each one furred green, and the actual river at the bottom looks far too small to have done it.

It didn’t. The river at the bottom is what’s left. What cut this was meltwater coming off the ice at the end of the last glaciation, in volumes nobody has seen here since, working down through soft palagonite for a few thousand years and then stopping. The Fjaðrá is a tenant.

A river carved this, then left, and a smaller river moved into the hole.

There is a path along the top edge with rope and posts, and it is roped for a reason — the ground here erodes if you walk on it, which is not a theory. The canyon was closed to visitors for a while after it got famous and the moss on the rim got flattened by everyone standing in the same place for the same photograph. It’s open now, with the path formalised and the moss recovering, and the whole thing is a small lesson in how thin the surface is.

I stayed until the sun went off the far wall and the canyon went blue and cold. Then we drove twenty minutes to Kirkjubæjarklaustur, put the kettle on, and cooked in the dark at the campsite.