Thousands of years later...

... the fires are once again lit.
The title today is one of the slogans of the Urkult music festival. It looks back to a time when stone-age people first lived nearby, 8400 years ago. Around 6000 years ago they started to carve figures onto the smooth rocks around the rapids. At that time the land was 70 meters lower than it is now so this rapid was where the river flowed into the sea, (which is now 100 km away!) It seems that people both lived here and gathered in larger groups at certain times of the year. Salmon and elk (European moose), boats, tools and people all feature in the 2,600 carvings, a few of which you can see here. They are coloured red to make them easy to see but since one of the archeological finds was a store of red ocher maybe they looked like this when they were new!
Directly above the falls is a huge dam, part of the drive to produce cheap electricity in the mid 20th  century. So this water roaring down the falls is the so-called "tourist water", showing how it was once was. Come here after August 15 and the falls will be reduced to a mere trickle.
People are winding down from the festival. Most have gone home but there are still a lot of folks around. Today there were many swimming just below the falls. Two brave (foolish?) swimmers swam out into the current and were swept downstream a way, then nearer the shore swept back up to their starting point by the returning eddy. I was happy for them because walking back up the river on the stones in bare feet (bare everything actually) would have been very uncomfortable.
We went back up to the festival area for a lunch of Thai food and a chat with our friend Karen, then headed home and started the usual post-trip clear up...