Back in the car for the short drive to Gullfoss. Foss = Waterfall, and Gull=Gold thus Golden Waterfall We were traveling though an expansive open plain and had not driven through a town since leaving Reykjavik. Just the occasional house far off the road. We were seeing lots of shaggy horses but no cows and Ambiana was on the lookout for some sheep. The overcast and rain into which we had awoken had given way to sun among clouds and blue sky opening up the expanse of the land.
To the North were a long ridge of high steep mountains. We saw our first glacier, LANGJOKULL, nestled among the peaks. So monumental a mass of ice and snow that it did not look real. We parked for free again in a large parking lot outside a gift shop/restaurant complex and headed past it to the walkway down to the falls. I recognized the car park below from the webcam I had been watching for the last few weeks but it did not do the FOSS justice.
Lit by the late afternoon sun sparking a rainbow in the torrents of rising mist when the falls came into view we all audibly gasped. Gull might as well mean “Absof%$#ing Amazing!” This definitely screamed ICELAND. Stunning. A wide rushing river, the HVITA gray with glacial silt flowing swiftly from probably the LANGJOKULL glacier we had seen driving in. The HVITA, swollen with glacial melt water, passes beneath a high bluff first falling over a monumental staircase cascades before dropping sharply 32 meters in a fury of froth and 4000 cubic feet per second of falling water into a deep narrow gorge running off at a right angle to the falls.
The Sun was fully out and painting a beautiful rainbow over the falls. This felt so real: the Sun, the colors, the foss chi. Carved out during the last Ice Age as the Planetary Ice Sheet melted and returned the Water to the Sea, this place is a Temple to the Sacred Mystery embodied by the World and All-That-Is.
Being-In-It-We all soak it up in our own way. Colleen and Ambiana danced. I took pictures. Jakobi began moving toward the falls. She was on a trail that hugged the left side of the bluff, traveling right by the sharp drop of the falls before arriving at an overlook above the drop and at the base of the staircase cascades. Mist from the massive amount of water crashing over the falls filled the air and we passed people walking back in soggy puffies as we passed into the water-soaked air, making our way towards the rocky outcrop beneath the cascades.
There we stayed awhile above the roaring of the falls with the rushing falling water all around us, feeling it in our bodies coming through the thrumming of the rock beneath our feet. A Place of Power for sure. Ambiana & Jakobi do not really remember all the times we took them to Niagara Falls but it must have stayed with them at some level because they felt as awed Coleen & I did. Well maybe not so much Jakobi :).
There was also a trail high above the river which we walked out to an overlook with the mountains and glacier to the North and the river and its waterfall to the South which we shared with some folk we had seen at the two previous spots.
Reading a sign I learned that in the early 20th century there were plans to build a hydroelectric power plant here at Gullfoss. A local farmer’s daughter, Sigríður Tómasdóttir, fought hard to preserve Gullfoss the way it is and even threatened to throw herself into the falls if the project went ahead. Through her efforts and the public response it begat the Icelandic State bought the land and declared Gullfoss a protected site in 1979.
By now it was 17:30PM, though you wouldn’t think so by the amount of daylight still left in the sky. We made our way back to the parking lot and got back in the car and drove an hour south past more shaggy horses and a crater where Bjork once played a concert on a raft floating in the center of the lake within it. An immense rain shrouded ridge loomed ahead and the distance rising up before us as we got closer and drove around, back into the rain taking the first rotary exit and traveling East on the Ring Road (Rt1) to the campground in the Icelandic town of HVERAGERDI.
