SAGA SHOP - Haust I Fall 2019

48 Icelandair Stopover World Heritage Site in June as part of Vatna- jökull National Park, the Askja region is essentially a natural gravel field. The would- -be astronauts took advantage of it by splitting into teams and playing soccer to unwind after training days, using rocks to mark the goalposts. The astronauts traveled on Land Rovers, much like today’s travelers—the roads haven’t improved much. The most common tour to Askja is via Herðubreiðalindir on Route F88, east of Lake Mývatn. Some three hours on the rocky road, crossing two rivers, will eventually lead to a middle-of-nowhere campsite at the Drekagil canyon. Three cabins line the canyon mouth like the mansions of a James Bond villain. The newest wooden house is from the Vatnajökull National Park, with a very casual information desk open whenever the ranger is not out and about. “Some people think we’re a coffee shop or a restaurant. That would be a tough business up here,” says park ranger Sigurður Erlingsson, who’s stationed at the hut every summer. Moon Walking in Nautagil When I visit on a sunny day in July, the Dreka- gil base camp has steady stream of visitors. One German couple is drying bright beach towels at the campsite. They’ve just completed a hike to Víti, a crater lake fed by geothermal hot springs. Some 3,300 ft (1,000 m) above sea level, the stunning crater offers a warm but muddy bath. Just next to Víti is the Askja caldera, the largest in the volcanic belt, stretching a total of 112 miles (180 km) north of the Vatnajökull glacier. The last eruption was in 2014, lasting six months and producing a lava field the size of Manhattan. But I was headed away from the scenic route to a neighboring canyon, one that was without a name when the astronauts visited half a century earlier. It is now called Nautagil, a play on words and language honor- ing the history: naut —as in “astro- naut ”—means “bull” in Icelandic. Sigurður, the park ranger, joins me on this special “Moon walk” through the canyon. We walk up a steep slope for a better view over the area. “I like to think these tracks are from the NASA years,” he says, pointing to a faint but broad line in the landscape. It’s possible: The cold and desolate landscape takes incredibly long to heal, explaining the hefty fines for any off-road driving. I try to locate some of the photographs from the time and wonder why this site doesn’t see more visitors. Its significance to the actual Moon landing is maybe small, yet it’s a rare opportunity to step back in time, like holding an object from the mission. From the Moon to Mars On July 24, 1969, Apollo 11 landed back on Earth with a geological sample—a slice of the Moon. The resemblance to Iceland was superficial. NASA had originally drawn the parallel from images taken by a space probe orbiting Earth’s satellite years before; the lunar Highlands (seen from afar as the lighter surface regions) looked like Iceland’s desolate interior. For decades to follow, Iceland was off the map for NASA until sci- entists began planning a new mission. To the fourth planet from the Sun: Mars. This past summer, scientists from NASA spent two weeks in the Hig- hlands testing the prototype of a self-driving rover truck set to explore Mars in 2021. Another team is expected to follow, but for the underground. Iceland and Mars, beyond similarities in rocky terrain, both have lava tubes, caves formed when the lava moves beneath the hardened surface. Iceland’s longest caves are formed this way and can be easily accessed from the ground. Scientists hope lava tubes can serve as shelters for equipment (or humans?) on future Mars missions. Exploring the Human Side The Moon landing has a human side even more powerful than the scientific details. The ambitious Exploration Museum, located on the main street in Húsavík in North Iceland, celebrates Iceland’s contribution to the Moon landing in a gallery space also showcasing early Viking explorations, Polar explorers, aviators and seafarers —people who set out into the unknown to obtain new knowledge. The museum’s founder Örlygur Hnefill Örlygsson, moonlighting as a filmmaker, sets out to explore the meaning of the Moon landing in the new documentary feature Cosmic Birth . He intervi- ews many of the spacemen who visited Iceland at the time and even revisits the area with some of the American legends. “We went to the Moon and discovered the Earth,” Örlygur cites when introducing William Anders who took “Earthrise,” the famous pho- tograph of the Earth from the lunar orbit. Anders, who used a color-film Hasselblad camera, knew Iceland from the time he was stationed at the US Navy base in Keflavík some years earlier. He recalled the fun times trekking and exploring the Icelandic wilderness. One of his pals, an adventurous type from Ohio, asked if the area where they were training had any good rivers for fishing. In fact, it had some of the best in the country, and the two of them arranged to borrow some rods, as Anders remembers: “Armstrong and I had a lot of fun fishing.” Deep in the high- lands, the crater lake Víti in Askja rewards travelers with a hot bath and sulfur smell. Photo by Egill Bjarnason.