Iceland 1974

I started teaching at Suffolk University in Boston in 1970. As a struggling young college professor I soon suspected that I would never be able to afford trip to Europe. So when a chance came to join a hiking club tour of Iceland, my wife and I jumped on it. At that time I knew nothing about Iceland except that it was somewhere east of Greenland. We signed up for the tour, which took place for two weeks in late June in 1974. Since the tour took place only in southern Iceland, we decided to add a week in the north, car camping.

The tour was organized by George Ehrenfried for the Genessee Valley Hiking Club. He had made several previous trips to Iceland and chose his favorite spectacular hiking and photography locations for the tour. This was an ideal time of year in the far north with almost 24 hours of daylight for photography and a huge variety of migrating and nesting birds.

Highlights of the trip included waterfalls, intense green growth near the coast contrasting with black lava farther inland, glaciers (including the largest in Europe, Vatnajökull), volcanoes, the North Atlantic Rift (where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet and where Iceland’s parliament first met in 930 C.E.), craggy mountains, and a variety of geysers and other forms of thermal activity.

I brought with me two Pentax 35mm SLRs, one for black-and-white film and one for Kodachromes, and a 4x5" Calumet view camera for more leisurely black-and-white work. The latter I used only in the north, where we had more control over our own schedule.

On returning home I made one serious error which led to a near photographic catastrophe. I sent twenty-one rolls of Kodachrome to one Kodak processing lab all in one day. Of course the day they processed my films was the one very rare day when something went wrong and many slides in every single box arrived covered with some kind of crud. After a series of correspondence with Kodak, I sent the worst of them back so they could clean them as best they could. They also sent me several rolls of replacement film. The good news is that the worst of the crud was on less interesting slides, and almost all of the best images either were unaffected or cleaned up well. Since that time I never sent more than one roll to any lab on any one day (back when there were eight or so labs across the country, I often sent one roll to each lab on one day, and then waited a couple of days before sending more).

Recently I started selecting slides from old trips to scan so that I could preserve them from further fading and post the best ones on my website. I made selections from several trips, but for Iceland I was only able to find the rejects and near-duplicates. This puzzled me greatly, since I knew I had three carousel trays somewhere that I had used for at least three different public slide show talks about the trip. After much searching, I gave up and chose the best slides I could find from the rejects. But just before I started scanning, I discovered the missing slides in a file box in my basement.

I have selected 59 of these that appeal to me the most, and they are now up in a new color gallery on my website, under the title Iceland 1974.