Quote: Can you imagine a long fjord off the North Atlantic Ocean, the sides steep with high mountains that in July still have a bit of snow? Can you imagine swans swimming free on the ocean? I can. I can remember what I saw in this amazing place. Not just amazing because Mother Nature created it, but amazing because people manage to live there 12 months a year. Very lightly populated until this century, and now just a village; the place is so clean, so untouched by civil destruction. A road, yes. Even an airstrip. I watched planes land and take off again. No thank you, I'd rather walk out of town if the choice was that or fly. But the airport connects the villages along the fjord to the rest of Iceland as the sea seldom could. The sea was too harsh for any kind of easy travel.

Now I understand that the road has been made a little safer by a 3 part tunnel, but it's still a long drive out. The mountains are so rounded by millions of years of wind and weather. They're not the wild mountains of Alaska. They look almost easy to climb--they're not. They're higher than they look. In winter the often send down avalanches of snow that sometimes kill people in the own houses.

and..... no trees.....not any along this coastline. Mountains, wind, water and now and then a tiny village.

From journals Isafjordur, Iceland by ship