A Week in Iceland - Time on Feet // Ep 06
Wow This place is incredible! Inhospitable, but incredible. Welcome to Time on Feet, the series where I document our travels and adventures. In the last episode I showed you highlights from the 3 weeks that we spent in Colorado, and after just a week back at home, we packed our bags once again for 2 months of travel in Europe, starting with a week in Iceland where we were hiking and camping while hosting a group trip in partnership with Trova Trip. Like many places, Iceland has been experiencing more extreme weather patterns and this July was said to be the wettest in the last 40 years, but despite the wind and the rain, we managed to make the most of it so I'll show you highlights from all of that now. And thanks to Salomon and to Coros for their continued financial support this season and for sponsoring this video.
It's hot! Audrée and I arrived in Reykjavik a couple of days early to get settled in and to begin adapting to the time change, and since I had a race coming up I got a chance to see quite a bit of the city on my 30 km long run and to get a preview of the Icelandic wind. In addition to the turn by turn navigation built into my Coros Vertix 2S here, I've begun making heavy use of the live view feature which shows a recording of your run so far along with a route if you have one loaded over a map, which is really handy especially when running in a new place. Since we weren't lucky enough to see a real lava flow we also visited an indoor lava show to learn more about how Iceland was and continues to be formed.
Lava enters this room at 1,100 degrees celsius or 2,000 fahrenheit. It's so hot! So then this here is something called Pele's hair, even though that top layer became solid a couple minutes ago, underneath has lost virtually no heat at all. And soon it was time to meet up with our group to start our adventure, Well we just arrived at our first campsite and uh you get to learn how to pitch these tents.
All right so we've arrived at our first campsite for our first night here on our tour and uh we're all just trying to figure out how to set up our tents for the first time, fortunately there is a little video, little QR code that takes you to an instructional video that was included, so shouldn't be too difficult. Best thing to do is to follow somebody else. That's right, let's see who gets their set up first hey! Is this a race? Not really but kind of, kind of. It's always about competition.
Yeah who's going to win who's going to win? It's looking good. Yeah as long as there is no volcano underneath the tent you're happy. Oh you guys are pros you've done this before. We have it vertical even though it is not set up for the directions.
So Sean and Elizabeth here are joining us for the second time, they were uh with us in Patagonia with Trova Trip as well, so quite cool to have them back again. We then prepared to get up early the next morning to continue on our way. It took about 50-60 years for Iceland to be considered fully settled and that was maybe a population of 20,000 people back then. So we are at the site of a volcanic rift where the Eurasian and the North American tectonic plates meet and it's said to actually be the only place on Earth, on dry land anyway, where these two plates actually meet, although technically they don't actually touch, there's a, what's considered a micro plate in between the two, so while they say that you can at one point have your foot both on the North American plate and the Eurasian plate, it's not entirely true. In this valley here you can see this is a micro plate that separates the two and I believe that's the Eurasian plate way off there in the distance, it's still pretty cool and now we're just going to make our way over to this waterfall over here. We had two more stops planned for the day, including Iceland's most famous waterfall.
It's trying so hard! We're so lucky it stopped raining. Yeah. Quick, set up the tents! So we've arrived at our campsite for our second night, it's on the site of a farm here, there's some horses just over there, it's quite beautiful, views of the surrounding mountains, we're preparing for some weather tonight, you can already feel the wind picking up so we found a sheltered area here in the backyard and we're staking everything down, and we're also preparing our packs for tomorrow, for our first day of hiking.
The next morning we transferred to a much larger bus, for reasons that would soon become very clear. That's the rain, the precipitation, yeah Monday is pretty good, yeah so it's switched again between Sunday and Monday, steady wind yeah. Yeah. Okay so we've arrived at our campsite, at our home for the next few days and there's some weather moving in, and there's some bad weather in the forecast but we're going to make the most of it. Oh, oh wow! We might get a triple! This is our drying station with Sean and Elizabeth, everything's damp but it's looking good, making good progress on dry socks.
Oh good. So we're back from our hike and we got a break in the weather, actually we got some sun so we're able to dry out some of our clothing and get our tent set up and now we're just starting to prepare dinner, it's close to 5:00, we're going to have an earlier dinner tonight before the next weather system moves in, we're going to take advantage of this weather here and we're going to do some barbecuing. I also had time to squeeze in a short run joined by Sean who was also training for an upcoming race. So it's Sunday morning and we just finished making our breakfast here and we are now preparing to go for a hike, it is sunny right now but it's been raining off and on and it's forecast for some heavier rain and wind later this afternoon, there's another system moving in so our goal is really just to try to get done our hike before then, so we're definitely going to hope for the best but prepare for the worst on our hike here.
Okay here we go, now we climb. Some super cool rock formations up there, this is all volcanic and I suspect those caves are mostly water erosion seeping through the rock and then weakening the rock layer and you get these huge boulders that drop out that we're seeing at the bottom. wow wow Another rainbow, what's that our... 18th rainbow? 19! This place is incredible, inhospitable, but incredible.
What do you think? This is great uh dragon habitat. Yeah so they filmed some of Game of Thrones here specifically some of the dragon scenes were here I think so this is indeed good dragon habitat. So we got a view of the glacier over there just peeking through the clouds and this is a massive glacier and apparently there's a volcano underneath this, very active, in fact they're expecting an eruption any day now and up here is another huge glacier, not quite as big as that one back there but still pretty massive. So this is right about where Sean and I got to last night when we turned around on our run and the wind gusts were just crazy coming over the side so we'll see what it's like today and if it's not too bad we're going to keep going at least to the top of this climb up here. Yeah yeah yeah which one which one do we look at? Okay so we're turning around now, pretty gusty up here just about 4 or 5km further along there is a hut that's part of a, I think a two-day hike that most people do staying at one of the two huts over here, both independently operated.
A group of us then went out for a run along a trail that we'd seen in the canyon below during our hike. All right we're about 3 km in, we think we found the end of the canyon, on Gaia looks like this is where it turns pretty sharply upward, pretty sure there's a little waterfall here or a spring we're going to take a look. It's like a plumbing system! That's right. Amazing, you know just slide down, no big deal.
That'd be fun. But after a long day of hiking, little cups of wine. Thank you, Cheers.
Skol. Oh hey shorts! It's good weather day! That's optimistic. So it is Monday, mid morning, we got a little bit of a later start today and the weather has significantly improved as has the forecast for the rest of the day, so much better views of the surrounding glaciers and unfortunately the bridges that would take us across the river are still out, the tractor broke down that was supposed to set them up, they had pulled the bridges because they were worried about a flash flood from all the rain the last couple of days and they weren't able to set them up again, so we're still on the same side of the river today, we were going to go over the other side but that's okay cuz we're going to go up a different route here and summit a big mountain that we've been looking at, should be a nice challenge for us and I think we're going to have a much better view today of the glaciers up here as well. That's what we came for.
Yeah Well that was a really cool summit, up to about 800 meters, and now we can see across there the trail that we did yesterday over to the left and then to our right here at the trail we're going to drop down and climb back up towards the glacier. Well we just made it up here from a different direction to basically where we stopped yesterday and it's like night and day, there's absolutely no wind today and so we're going to continue, we're going to do an out and back towards where the huts are on this trail, so up this slope um at least up to that viewpoint up there so that we can hopefully see the two mountains that were formed recently in an eruption back in 2010. That's really amazing, look, fresh lava. Yeah that's got to be new hey.
This is so cool. And they just put the trail right through it. Okay so we made it and this here is a lava field from the the eruption back in 2010, you can tell it just hasn't had time to weather down, totally distinct from everything we've seen here in Iceland, then these two summits over here, these smaller peaks are brand new mountains, these were both created in 2010 so unlike some places we visit where the mountains were made you know 100 million years ago and shaped over time these are brand new! So you can just see the difference here in the lava between the old and new.
They say lava takes a good 10 years before it's safe to walk on, it's been of course about 14 years now and so they've built a trail through here but until then what you have to be careful of is the surface can cool, but there can still be lava tubes and warmer lava underneath, so it's possible to post hole into it which obviously would be a bad thing. See the moss is just starting. Yeah little lichen, it's really cool, I feel like we're on the moon, I really do. You can see why they did some of their lunar landing practicing, their training here in Iceland. Well our views were short-lived, the clouds have moved in once again and it's getting a little bit later in the afternoon so we're going to turn around now, take a different route back down the valley, should be well sheltered in case the rain does move in but that was definitely a rewarding day, we got to see new mountains, we got to walk on new lava and we got some amazing views of the glacier. So it's our last day in the park and really just a half day, our bus arrives at 3:00 to take us back and so we're just going to go for a few hours here, a shorter one, but probably a challenging little climb up here, there some steep switchbacks a few hundred meters up to this mountain right up here, we've passed by this now twice in both directions and today we're finally going to climb it.
Nice one! More technical, slightly more challenging terrain to end off the week. So Iceland proved to be quite an adventure and for us it was definitely just the start, we are for sure going to go back to explore some other areas of Iceland and to fastpack that hut to hut route that we' hiked a part of. And immediately after that trip we flew to Switzerland with a short layover in Oslo so that I could start my race, the Swiss Alps 100 just 2 days later.
And since then I've basically just been laying low here in Annecy, France while Audrée fastpacked the Tour du Mont Blanc with a group of women over 6 days, but we will tell you all about that in the next episode of the series, so be sure to subscribe and to sign up for my newsletter as well if you haven't already, and by the way we recently launched a Discord community and this is exclusively for our supporting channel members as a way for you all to connect and for us to answer your questions and engage in more in-depth conversations around everything from training and racing to fastpacking and travel. You can become a supporting channel member by clicking the join button from within a web browser.
2024-08-31 17:27
