Category: Iceland

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Walking Iceland Day 3 – Falling Water

We wake to a morning of patchwork clouds and harlequin farms and turn our feet to the south and walking. We walk past the end of the pavement, past the last house, past the end of the road, past innumerable sheep roaming freely in the hills. And for all our passing we are never passed in return, the day sliding silently by without cars or fellow hikers. 

At 3pm, as the sun sluices through gaps in the tumbling clouds our road turned trail tilts beneath my feet and the climb into the highlands begins. 

The once broad glacial valley begins to pinch in on itself as water pours from the hills in a torrent. At one point I spy no fewer than 17 waterfalls plunging down towards us. 

The definition of falling water is present in all its imagined permutations and I try and invariably fail to capture them with my camera. The sun scatters itself across the vibrant green hills as the clouds chase each other across the sky. 

Our camp tonight is just above the collection of all these waterfalls on the banks of a torrential river. Tomorrow we continue our climb into the highlands from where all this water began its fall.

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Walking Iceland Day 2 – First Steps

Glacier carved with broad sloping sides, the valley leading south from Akureyri is a hallmark of a prehistoric  time when ice covered this land. Cut through with tributary valleys it is easy to imagine great heaves of ice roaring and rumbling their way towards the icy waters of the Greenland Sea. In these moments the land talks to me, whispering its forgotten days, before man, before witness. It echoes the ache in my own chest, the desire to know more, to see behind the roads and signs and into a land which more than one person has told me is full of nothing. But I know that can’t be true, isn’t true. I know that Iceland holds so many stunning vistas and secret beauties and my step this morning is buoyant at the thought of it. 

The anticipation pulls me onward while my anxieties drift towards the back of my mind, reluctant to be shaken loose. I’m a little bored during our 20 mile road walk today and I wonder if I’ve grown tired of thru hiking already and what that says about me and about this trip. The tendonitis in my foot is bothering me and I worry that I won’t be able to make it through the hike, that my body will fail my ambitions. Though I suppose the anxieties that come with setting out on something big and new and uncertain are natural. It has taken so much just to get to the starting line of this trip, and now that we’re here there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to finish this hike, something true of all thru hiking.

I’ve been yearning for the exploration of this trip, even the difficulties that come with stepping off the beaten path. But it’s harder to envision happiness than disappointment sometimes. It takes concerted effort to focus on the good and the now and the person that I get to share this experience with. But I’m trying to become that person who sees the good more readily. And in writing this post I’m doing just that.

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Walking Iceland Day 1 – Longing

The plane banks low through the clouds revealing the pastoral patchwork of farms outside Akureyri, Iceland’s second largest town and the start of our thru hike across the interior of the country. Over the next three weeks Keith and I plan to walk south across the island nation, ending in Skogafoss, one of Iceland’s most iconic waterfalls on the southern coast. My chest flutters full of butterflies as we come in for a landing and the one thing I have been aching to do is finally here: it’s time to hike.

Getting to this point has been months of logistics and details. From the creation of our own route to planning how we will resupply ourselves across 200 miles without a grocery store or restaurant in sight, nothing about this hike has been given easily. When I first conceived of this hike it wasn’t with an eye towards planning but instead with a question born from a longing to know what was inside Iceland.

On my previous two trips to the country I had driven her coast and now longed to see what lay inside this wild and captivating land.

Our hike for today consists of six miles on a bike path heading south out of the city until the buildings start to fade and the grazing pastures full of fluffy white sheep dominate the landscape.