::our pack has returned::

Last weekend I had the fine exhausting honor of my fair city of Seattle hosting the 94th annual Icelandic National League of North America Convention for 3 days. These 3 people below, Julie, Sacha, and Sean are a small handful of the young proud Icelandic descendants (and strangely enough all distant cousins) I spent a six scary, exciting, and life affirming weeks of our lives with all over Iceland this past summer. This past weekend we could again laugh, drink, and share inside stories that nobody but us will ever understand. Six weeks of challenge after challenge, dirty laundry, smelly feet, sleeping bags in hostels, churches and cabins and so many language barriers. These images below were taken at Liberty just around the corner from my home in Seattle but look strikingly similar to my memories of us all having beers at Helgi og Valdi Cafe in the afternoons in Reyjavik and helping each other with our language homework.... "A wolf howls on the fjord, there are no wolves in Iceland, our pack has returned" -Sean Grisdale, Höfsoss, Iceland, July 18th, 2012

::there's no place like home::

Back cover : Front Cover : For the past month I've been plugging away designing a very wholesome labor of love. I was asked late last year to provide the Design and Layout for the printed program for the Icelandic National League of North America's annual conference that happens to be held in my fair city of Seattle this coming month! The theme of this years convention is "There's No Place Like Heima" Heima being the Icelandic word from home. Playing off the classic quote from the Wizard of Oz, Seattle being "The Emerald City" and Seattle and Reykjavik being Sister Cities. Not to mention the incredibly strong Emigrant ties between Iceland and Northern North America. The photo I chose for the full bleed wrap around cover is from the tiny town of Thingeryi in Iceland where I lived with some distant family earlier this past summer for 3 weeks. This photo was taken during the town's Midsummer Homecoming Festival at 11:30pm during the hilt of 24 hours of daylight in the summer months. I was standing on a picnic table drinking red wine from a box my Aunt(of sorts) Hrafngerður had brought while an Icelandic Leonard Cohen cover band was playing behind me. I had felt pretty displaced and intimidated for the my first couple weeks in this other country and in this moment when this image was captured, it was all sinking in and I felt truly at home.

::forces of nature::

For whatever odd reason I've never been that impressed with Waterfalls. To me they either seem "postcard cliche" or simple treacherous and dangerous. Some little segment of a dream I had last night inspired me to go revisit some photos I took while visiting Gullfoss Waterfall in southern Iceland this past July. It was so unbelievably hot that day in a country named after Ice; I was so grateful for the refreshing cold spray of the water against my face as the glacial water from the Hvitau River descended over an enormous cliff. I was almost tempted to wade out to the seemingly easily accessible rocks next to the shore to get a closer look but then I overheard a story about a German tourist several years ago who was swept to her death doing just that. At the beginning of the trail down to the fall you find a large, beautifully carved Granite monument dedicated to Sigrídur Tómasdóttir, known as Iceland's first Environmental Activist. In the early 1900's her father was offered a handsome sum from foreign investors to use Gullfoss and other Icelandic waterfalls for Electrical production. His famous quote was, "I do not sell my friends". With Sigrídur's continued effort, Gullfoss is now a protected national park in a country that sustains itself on renewable Geothermal power.