Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/769056
I first "met" Snævarr via email, having reached out to him after seeing his pictures of enormous brown trout that he had posted to the Internet. Only 25 and an engineering student in Reykjavík, Snævarr's an amateur scientist who after a stint as a volunteer bird-bander, conceived the notion of conducting his own trout- tagging survey on his family river. The Ranga is a glacial stream, like almost all free-flowing waters in Iceland. It descends from the mountains north of one of Iceland's only remaining large forests, over the boundaries of Bót, where it becomes private family property with no fishing leases for seven miles. In spring, which can extend even into June, glacial runoff washes juvenile Arctic char out of the highlands west of the farm and into the lower river, where they fall easy prey to Snævarr's huge browns. and generally passed father-to-son or father- to-daughter for the past 1,200 years. One of those original families settled at a place called Bót (pronounced "boat"), a large, ranch-sized stretch on the shores of the Ranga River near the modern-day aluminum-smelting town of Egilsstaðir in East Iceland. Bót is a green and rolling place amidst a mostly stark mountain landscape. Its fields are small and hard-won, crisscrossed with trenches as deep as a man is tall, which provide the drainage necessary to turn peat bog into grassy meadow. Icelandic sheep graze against the walls of the century-old farmhouse in the "home field," excluded from the small garden by a fence protecting the tallest tree for miles around. At least one of the early settlers of this place was the ancestor of my friend Snævarr Örn Georgsson. it turns out, is mostly desert. That's a weird concept to get your head around, especially for such a beautiful country, but it's true. When the first Viking settlers landed their open boats on the North Atlantic island in the 9th century, they found a bathtub ring of green, low-canopied forest scrub only a few miles thick, surrounding a volatile central highland—an elemental place largely consisting of ice stacked on top of fire, mostly unsuited even for sheep farming. Those settlers—more farmers than warriors, in truth—cut down the forest (thus knocking over the first domino in a millennia of deforestation and erosion) and quickly claimed all the arable land for themselves. These original farms all remain well-known emplacements today: each named, bounded by low sheep fences or stony Viking cairns, 130 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S Iceland, Jorgegaygago/isTockphoTo.com