Rafting with Trolls

Photo by Jehad Nga for the New York Times

Here's my story about rafting the East Glacial River in Iceland from the the New York Times. There's also a slide show of the trip with photos by Jehad Nga

IN Reykjavik, where the late-night bars hum with hypnotic beats piped in at a low volume and the women are lithe with high cheekbones and upturned noses, a visitor to Iceland might for a moment forget his proximity to the trolls of Middle Earth. But venture out of the city and you'll find a hinterland of geysers and volcanoes and steamy pits of gurgling sulfur. Cross into the lava desert or the geothermic badlands and you'll understand why the island's people - descendants of Vikings, most of them - talk freely of elves and the "invisible people."

I figured I could not reach Middle Earth by car, so a group of us set out to descend as the hobbits might: in a small raft crashing and weaving its way down the East Glacial River - one of the northernmost stretches of white water on the planet. When summer comes to Iceland and the sun hangs in the sky for 21 hours a day, the glaciers and snow fields begin to thaw and the rivers swell. Just below the Arctic Circle, the island is frozen solid more than half the year. But for a few fleeting months - June, July, August - the glaciers start melting and a small window opens for the rafters among us.

I love summers in the far north, when the never-ending light frees up remote, foreboding places for aimless explorers like me who don't know where we'll be sleeping next but would prefer not to figure it out in the dark. I'd been a river guide in Utah and Alaska, but was as surprised as anyone to learn that Iceland - plunked mid-Atlantic between Greenland and Scandinavia - produced runnable rivers at all. While there is better white water closer to home, I was drawn to the sheer unlikeliness of riding a surge of glacial melt toward the ocean. Technically all rivers are the same: whether you're in the Grand Canyon or on the Bronx River, water simply flows downhill and pours over rocks. But every river has its own personality, and I keep combing wild places looking for enough juice to float me downstream.

So it was that a friend and I drove north out of Reykjavik toward the East Glacial River. It was the day after the summer solstice, and along the island's western flank, summer was in green glory: patches of fireweed exploded on the hills, and newly shorn sheep sunned themselves in the grass beside red-roofed farmhouses. After a day of poking around dirt roads, we coasted into a stunning valley of farms hemmed by mountains, with the tiny village of Varmahlid on its floor. We spent the night in log bungalows circling a geothermal soaking pool, watching the sun set down the valley at, according to my clock, 20 minutes past midnight.

Our group assembled the next morning, and 10 of us - a local farmer who was driving, guides from Nepal and Finland and seven paddlers from the United States - rattled up the river valley in a little van, a rubber raft lashed to a trailer behind. The road to the river had lost its snowpack just two weeks before, so we wound out of the valley along a bumpy two-track with puddles in its ruts. Above us a layer of fog was lifting off the green and treeless slopes.

At the river's banks, we pulled dry suits over our necks and waded out into the current. The water numbed my hands, but lapped harmlessly over my feet, which were sealed in the rubber suit. And then we were floating, spinning in the current, glancing off gravel bars. In just a few minutes the walls of a canyon rose up sharply and we were swallowed into a series of steep gorges.

I've been down a lot of rivers but never one quite like this. The water was sky blue and luminescent and otherworldly. Mossy springs dripped from the canyon walls, where an occasional scrappy tree or shrub pushed up between from cracks in the rock. Overhead the cliff walls leaned toward the center, threatening to close up and seal out the narrow strip of sky. We passed gnarled, dark caves from which I was sure an elf might an any moment emerge. At times the gorge narrowed to about 10 feet wide, and the brilliant water surged and swirled in whirlpools as it rushed along, without beaches or slack water. That day, we were alone on the river.

The rapids came quickly and our guide, a 23-year-old Nepalese named Anup, barked out orders - "Back Paddle," "Forward," "Right Back" - as we plunged our paddles into the froth. I thought I heard a trace of Kiwi accent from the New Zealanders who had taught him to raft.

"It's been cold," he said, "and the water's lower than usual."

As if to prove this, on the next falls our boat scraped over a barely concealed rock before dropping off. The canyon continued to narrow, its walls a mix of sheer rock and grassy steps. Anup pointed to a lone sheep perched on a steep piece of grass. The animal had climbed down past a band of rock to feed, but had been unable to scale back out. Our guide said the sheep had been trapped in the pen for almost a month now.

"One of these days I'm going to go rescue it," he said.

The key rapid was the Green Room, a triple falls rated Class IV that plunged into a churning pool of phosphorescent green. We beached the boat in an eddy above the rapid and walked along the rocks to scout, then watched the kayakers make their runs and get tossed upside-down at each drop. After we took our places and pushed off from shore, Anup drove us through the first drop toward the larger falls, a 10-foot falls beside a pyramid of rock blocking half the channel.

"Hit the deck!" he called, and we crouched in the bilge, dropped off the falls, bounced up sideways, stalled in the recirculating water, then surged free. Anup called a turn and we straightened up to run the last drop, splashing to the bottom with the crew intact and the boat upright.

We rounded a bend and came upon our driver and another old farmer hunched over a table at the side of the river. We pulled to the shore and tied off, and at first it was not clear how the two men had gotten there. I saw a steel cable running down a steep and loose gorge. Neither of them young, the men had braved injury and lowered themselves into the gorge armed with thermoses of hot chocolate, two dozen fresh waffles, a jar of homemade rhubarb jam and a tub of hand-whipped cream. They had spread the provisions out over a wooden table that they kept stored at this spot.

We gladly accepted the chocolate and lathered cream over the waffles. The second farmer was the quintessential Scandinavian, with wisps of blond hair over a high forehead, a knit sweater and ditch boots.

"Did you make these waffles yourself?" I asked him. He averted his eyes and smiled a bit nervously. Almost everyone in Iceland speaks English, but older farmers out in the countryside are generally an exception.

"His wife makes them," the driver told me. "But today she was sick and couldn't come."

I asked the farmer if his wife had an easy time climbing down the gorge, adding some pantomime for effect, and he nodded without much enthusiasm. He gave the impression that high-angle waffle delivery into the netherworld was not his idea of a morning well spent.

As the canyon began to open, the rapids diminished, and the claustrophobic confines became less unfriendly. Sun broke through the clouds, and a clear waterfall poured in from above. I hadn't expected to be swimming in the river, but Anup pulled into an eddy with good jumping possibilities. So I, along with a 15-year-old boy, scaled a 20-foot buttress and leapt into the river. The cold water bit my hands and face, but snug in the dry suit, the rest of my body was oddly comfortable as I dog paddled back to shore in the glacial melt.

We drifted into the confluence with the West Glacial River, and from there the walls widened and the current slackened. In half an hour we reached a tiny dock on the bank, beside a homemade trolley track with a sled, onto which we hoisted the raft and kayaks. We climbed a flight of wooden stairs, and just as quickly as we'd dropped into Middle Earth, we emerged into a scene of picture-book pastoral quaintness. Sheep dotted the green hills, and a farmhouse stood neatly on the flats.

Our laconic driver sat at the controls of an old International tractor, which had been converted into a winch to hoist the raft up on the trolley. He pulled a lever, and up came the raft with our guide riding on top. Back in the recognizable world of open skies, you could look right across the top of the gorge without knowing it was there. The earth's churning mystery was hidden beneath the surface, and this green outcropping, surrounded by sea and perched above the carving waters, was a warm and welcoming place.