A drizzle of snow tumbles from the sky amid weak sunlight and blundering clouds as we leave Laugafell Hut behind us and plod the road southbound. At least, I am plodding. Our zero yesterday, though sedate, didn’t feel especially restful and I am a little resentful of being coaxed from the warmth and into motion. After a few hours of plodding my energy returns and I can even find fun in the puzzle of rock-hopping across rivers without getting my feet wet. A puzzle that neither Keith nor myself fully manage.
The weather continues to degrade throughout the day, and what little service we were able to gather yesterday revealed more bad weather on the way. Not just the kind of bad weather that’s unpleasant to be out in, but the sort that’s dangerous. Unfortunately we have neither the food or funds to just wait it out. The season is ending, flights are booked, and sitting around at another backcountry hut wouldn’t provide any assurance that the weather would improve any time soon.
As I sit shivering in camp too cold to gather water to cook dinner properly something about this trip feels like it is ending. A feeling made all the more ominous by the press of drizzling, shivering, silencing clouds which descended upon us in the last hour of hiking. I realize now that the weather in Iceland is going to be like its own character, no longer weather but Weather. A character standing in defiant opposition to the expectations that I had for this trip. Expectations that Weather is making known were unrealistic.
This has been a cold and wet summer, so many people have told us so. And apparently mid-August is far closer to winter in this part of the world than in other regions I have traveled to. As I shiver my way to sleep I can hear Weather outside our tent lashing and rending the wind across the moon-scape terrain. I guess, I think, that that’s the heartbreak of big projects and novel dreams, sometimes they don’t work out.
stories from the wild