ICV life part three: Work

Ah yes, after sleeping and food comes work. The reason why we are here.

We normally work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, with a hour for lunch (5 minutes lunch, 55 minutes nap) and two tea breaks during the day. This includes walking to the worksite, usually around a half hour walk, but I think the record this year was 13km! We carry our tools in with us and often hide them near the worksite, bringing them back on the Friday. Each team also has a leader with them, often a different person for each project. Leaders are experienced volunteers who can teach the appropriate skills and are briefed on the work that needs doing.

The work we do is extremely varied and generally requested by a local park ranger. Chas, the volunteer coordinator/big boss, will visit the site to assess the work and in some of our more regular haunts such as Skaftafell, Landmannalaugar and Mývatn, the jobs are planned out before the volunteer season begins. In other cases, a ranger may simply call Chas and request some extra pairs of hands for the following week. Other work is reactive - a boardwalk breaks, or a path floods and requires urgent repair. Some common projects:

Step building

Steep sections of hiking trails are prone to erosion over time. They can become dangerous to walk on, and tourists will avoid tricky sections by going around them, damaging vegetation and creating visible 'desire lines' that others will then follow. A good solution is to dig steps into the slope, using rocks or timber, depending on the location and what can be found nearby. The steps should be comfortable to walk on - not too steep or shallow, close together or far apart. Most importantly of all, they should be stable!

Rustic timber steps in Thórsmörk - before and after

Landscaping/pitching

Sometimes paths become unclear and people start walking all over the place. All you need is a few big tour groups and suddenly it all looks very messy. In wooded areas, this can be rectified by weaving (literally threading long branches through sticks hammered into the ground) to cover up the areas you want to protect, and making the correct route more user friendly by adding the odd step, removing trip hazards and so on. In rocky areas, this involves taking any nasty looking or loose stones off the path and digging lots of ugly, pointy ones in everywhere else. Some people will still be determined to walk on them of course, but most will look for the easiest route.

A newly landscaped path - a sight to behold

Drainage

Hiking trails cannot survive without adequate drainage dug alongside and across them. I haven't built any drains myself, but I'm told that a good stone drain is an intricate job that can take several days' work to get right.

Boardwalks and bridges

The best way to keep people from sinking into marshy ground, or falling into streams.

General trail maintenance

Blocking off desire lines, chopping back overgrowing vegetation, clearing blocked drains, widening/narrowing the path, removing trip hazards and so on.

The key to all trail work, I think, is to make it look as natural as possible. It should blend in with the surrounding landscape (no metal staircases and guardrails please!) Wherever we can, which is most places, we use natural building materials - stones for steps and drains dug up from 50m away, timber for steps and small boardwalks felled from the surrounding forest that same morning. How satisfying!

Waymarking

A fun job - hike a trail, usually to somewhere pretty, and hammer in sticks along the way so that others can find it after you, and don't go wandering off trampling on the moss.

Waymarking - a grand day out

Lupinating

The technical term for killing lupin in places where it is not wanted.

A day in the life of a ranger

In some locations, the local ranger/s will take you out with them in their car to help out with tasks that need some extra manpower. Four of us recently spent a great week in Nyídalur, in the remote highlands, with two rangers. We spent a lot of time raking over tyre tracks left by off-road drivers, which would have been a huge job for just the two of them, as well as waymarking roads and trails, and diverting the flow of streams that had flooded the road.

Damn off-road drivers - takes seconds to damage, days to repair

It's always great to spend time with Icelanders, and the park rangers tend to be a pretty special bunch who are extremely passionate about their work. It is always a worry with volunteer work that you are creating projects for the sake of keeping busy or in order to be seen to be doing something, so it's really encouraging to hear the rangers talk about the importance of the work we do and to know that we are genuinely helping them out and making a lasting impact.