Hólar!

Iceland isn't known for its forests, so it seems funny that all of our practical work so far has involved trees in some way shape or form!

We escaped the ash cloud in Reykjavik on Tuesday, and after a ten hour drive through some stunning scenery, arrived at the tiny village of Ásbyrgi in Jökulsárglúfur national park in north-east Iceland. Ásbyrgi is famous for its massive horseshoe shaped canyon, carved out by glacial floods over thousands of years, and our job was to get their campsite ready for the summer. This mostly involved dragging away large sections of overgrowing trees as the park ranger cut them down, loading them onto a trailer and then unloading them and sorting them by size at the other end. The branches were pretty enormous and I would love to know how many kilos we shifted over the two days!


Since then we have relocated to a village called Hólar in central north Iceland, which is home to a small university (only a few hundred students) that specialises in equestrianism, aquaculture, and rural tourism. The rest of our team arrived on Friday, so we now number 19 at the campsite, and we are two days into our practical training week. Yesterday we went out into the pine forest nearby in small teams and learnt how to fell trees (before you wonder what conservationists are doing cutting trees down, they were densely packed together and thinning them out will do them some good!). We then sawed up the logs into equal lengths and used these today to repair damaged sections of the hiking trails around Hólar, building steps in steep sections, and bridges across streams. It's been hard work, but good fun at the same time and there is something really quite special about realising that the piece of material you need is too short, and simply popping into the forest to fell a tree and saw yourself a new piece. No chance of jumping in the car and doing an emergency B&Q run around these parts!


So, so far, so good. We will continue with our training for the rest of the week, finishing our trail projects and going out and about in the mountains to learn about using GPS and surveying work. After that we will head down to Skaftafell in the south as the ash situation is looking better, and will split up into smaller teams to tackle various projects that need doing. There are lots of great people in the team and we are having a good laugh, despite the rather chilly weather (we can practically see the arctic circle from here after all!) and a few people, myself included, getting colds and coughs. Working and living outside takes some getting used to, but my spirits are high and I'm looking forward to the rest of the week!