Month: January 2021

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Iceland: Chasing Waterfalls

I snapped close to ten thousand photos over the course of not-quite-two weeks travelling around Iceland in 2014, and disproportional number of those pics included waterfalls.

for whatever one photo is worth:

Skógafoss is a huge waterfall on the Skógá River in the very southern bulge of Iceland. It was one of the first big waterfalls we saw on our trip along the ring road of the island and notable not just because it is an impressive waterfall, but having climbed up the slick and narrow path to overlook the crest I saw something even more interesting.

A trailhead.

On my visit I wasn’t carrying much more than a camera bag, but others sharing the trail with me were lugging much more substantial loads. Backpacking gear. Obvious overnighting equipment. Crampons. Warm clothes. As I turned to climb back down after snapping my photos, they were hopping over a low barrier and setting out on a serious backpacking trip.

The Fimmvorduhals Trail (as I researched later) is one of many incredible adventures in Iceland. From what I can tell it is part of an extensive hiking and backpacking network in that country and people come from all over to walk them.

To be perfectly honest, until I saw those people trekking outbound from where we had stopped for a tourist break, it had not occurred to me that there might be some seriously awesome backpacking to be had in Iceland. We were going to explore by car with the family including my (at the time) seven year old and her grandparents.

To be even more honest, it hasn’t left my mind as a backpacking trip I’d love to take on. Sooner than later. Had there not been a global pandemic, it was actually an idea I’d floated with a friend for this upcoming summer to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It inspired me to see those people setting out, and a pang of jealousy has always stuck like a splinter in my brain that I got back into an SUV and drove on while they set off into the wilds for something far more epic.

This picture, then, as simple and beautiful as it looks is actually hiding a personal point of interest for me: it’s the trailhead of one of my bucket list hikes.

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Gaige’s Famous Inside-Out Grilled Cheese

Some day I’ll dig into my second-favourite cooking topic after cast iron, and write some posts about sourdough bread.

In the meantime, know that my classic sandwich loaf sourdough serves as the base for a mouthwatering recipe that blurs my passion for cast iron cooking with fresh bread and delicious lunch foods.

A grilled cheese sandwich on a cast iron gridle.

It’s a simple hack for your grilled cheese, but add a bit of grated cheddar to the buttered outsides of a classic grilled cheese sandwhich (bread, butter, cheese and heat.)

2 slices of sourdough bread
1 tablespoon of butter or margarine
1/2 cup of grated cheddar cheese

Grill as normal. (My normal is on a hot-hot cast iron griddle.)

If you’ve got a soft spot for fried cheese, the crisp exterior of your sandwhich will warm your heart (and probably clog your arteries … did I mention that this is a sometimes food?)

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Recalling Quarantine Ultra

I hadn’t forgotten about it. At the time it was just a goofy online race. But I was there.

This morning I was flipping through the digital pages of the December 2020 issue of Outdoor magazine. A sentence on an article titled “Unprecedented” caught my eye.

Something something backyard quarantine ultra something something.

Sunday Runday, and I was reminded of a chilly Saturday morning in early April 2020. I logged into a zoom meeting on my iPad. I laced up my shoes, pulled on my mitts and running toque, and swiped through screen after screen after screen of thumbnail video feeds from around the world.

The Quarantine Backyard Ultra was the idea of someone in Calgary, a few hundred kilometers south of where I live. It was this Alberta thing, we’d invited the world, and a bunch of my running crew signed up. Along with about 2,400 other runners.

Sure. I’d thought. A nice way to do something, anything, now that we were a couple weeks into a fresh pandemic lockdown.

We’d figured we were quarantine veterans then. Little did we know that nine months later I’d be sitting here, pondering yet another solo run on a Sunday morning, and thinking nostalgically back on the early days of social isolation.

I quit after a mere two laps. About fourteen kilometers of running. Not because I couldn’t have done a third, but because the Kid had made pancakes for me and they were steaming hot and ready to eat when I’d finished my second lap. Had I known how big this thing would be, I would have pushed for three or four laps I think.

Days later — yes, really days — a small subset of runners were still clocking laps. One lap every hour on the hour. I would log into the feed to watch for a bit, but livesteaming a stranger racing on a treadmill is only actually interesting in the abstract sense. The winner logged 63 laps and four hundred and some kilometers.

Nine months later I’m reading about this race in a magazine. I’ve heard it’s been written about all over the place. It was a thing.

The Quarantine Backyard Ultra sparked imaginations because of many things; the notion of it, the lengths some people went to push themselves, and the sheer goofiness of running a race around your own neighbourhood with a video conference as a finish line. But it also gave people a bit of hope. That’s what I got out of it, at least.

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Comics: Backpacking with Kids

When my daughter was younger I wrote, illustrated and shared an online web comic about fatherhood. It documented some of the quirky things we did and used some of the funny things she said as the heartbeat of the jokes.

The comics are mostly still (mostly) online at www.piday.ca but to save readers from trotting over there to hunt through the relevant ones, here is a short triple-strip series I made shortly after one of our backpacking trips.

Of course there is a much longer story behind this brief comic trilogy.

It involves a kid who was a little worried about being eaten by a bear on top of a mountain and parents who (were just following the rules and) added to that fear by locking our food in a hard, steel bear locker while we slept a hundred meters away in a soft-fabric tent.

As it turned out, on one of our short day hikes we chanced upon not just the ranger station but the ranger himself who (being a great example of being an above & beyond public servant) gave us a tour of the ranger shack, told the kid about how they tracked bear movement for safety, and handed her a BC Parks pin for her jacket.

And she left pretty certain that if the ranger would be out there watching her back for bears, though informed me that if the ranger fell through that Dad would be on the hook to wrestle the bear.

Thankfully, it was a bear-free trip and my honour was spared for another day.