A moss marathon at Grábrok
We left the comfortable house at Snæfellsnes behind us and exchanged it for a week of wildcamping behind the Grábrok crater. And of course the wind was hauling over the field yet again as we were trying to get our kitchen tent up - only to die down as soon as we had made our camp.
Our monday started up nice and quiet with some litterpicking, although I did get some serious gagging reflexes when I picked up the wrong tissue - amazing how people seem to ignore the nice and clean toilets just down the road and use a hole in between rocks as one instead. Happy to switch over to picking up moss instead for the rest of the day.
Grábrok is a beautiful place, but has loads of scars in the moss from old hiking trails and desire lines. We started out with getting big chunks of moss from the lavafield across the road, so we had the big scars next to the trail covered up immediately. With spades we carefully dug out squares of moss and put them on big wooden boards for transport up the crater. When we were on our second, pretty heavy load and just about to cross the road, a car honked and made an emergency stop. An Icelandic woman jumped out and started screaming at us, about how we were doing stuff that was absolutely illegal. It took me a while to make it clear to her that we were actually trying to fix things, but it is good to know that there are locals around that keep an eye out and that are not afraid to tell actual moss-stealing tourists off.
Luckily we didn't have to do many runs with these boards of moss, as they were incredibly awkward to carry uphill. We changed over to the moss-shredding technique soon, as we also did in Snæfelsness last year. Here, you pluck pieces from the moss, shred it into its individual threads and put it in big bags to carry it over to the site where you'll plant it. And to plant it, you just spread the moss out, press it down and hope it doesn't blow away or die before it grabs on to the soil. We saw some patches that the ranger, Tóta, had planted last year, and this technique seems to work pretty well! So over the course of the week, we probably dragged about 600 kg of moss over the road and up the crater. I was pretty happy when we finally put the last bag of moss down whilst trying not to get blown off the crater.
The wildcamping was pretty fun, and very quiet for sure. Our only neighbours were the sheep, and our water came from the nearby river. And about 3-4 times a day we would all get into the car and drive to the nearest bathrooms, at Mathieus restaurant Hreðavatnsskáli, probably the most welcoming restaurant in the country. We went hiking on some of the evenings, found the nearest pool, and Tóta took us out exploring in the longest lavatube in Iceland. Our last night was a very stormy night. Luckily Mathieu had invited us for some goodbye-beers (thanks again for that) so we didn't get too cold. We did almost blow away the next morning when we needed to take down our tents and the meshtent. It wasn't like we weren't already very experienced with that, so we managed to pack everything before it would get taken by the wind, and we soon were on our way to the Westfjords!
Our campspot for the week
Grace having to push the gas-button down for our full cooking-session..
Grábrok-style dinner
Lupin lupin lupin..
Our first moss-loads
Cosiness during the moss shredding
Photobomb in progress
Two puffins killing each other at a cliff-edge
My orange army of moss-pluckers
Visiting the ice-men in the lavatube
Selfie-time at the glacier
Thibaud and his moss
