Iceland III: Climb every glacier

♪ ♫ ♬ FOOOORD every FOOSSSSSS ♪ ♫ ♪ ♬

On the second day of our tour, we climbed a friggin’ glacier.

I mean:

First things first.

We woke up to a clear and beautiful day.

With a cat outside our window no less!

Travelling to Iceland in October is a bit of a gamble. On one hand, you’ve got more chance of seeing the lights than in the longer-dayed months, but on the other hand, you’ve got the onset of the cold – and potentially wet weather.

We ended up having a magnificently lucky run of it. It was windy in parts, and a bit cold- particularly in the hours spent outdoors at night trying to capture the lights. But we mostly got clear skies, and were only blessed by Foss water rather than rain.

Enter Day Two of the Tour.

The Itinerary was supposed to start with more Foss, but because we’d been speedy enough the previous day and seen them already, we went straight to the Glacier to start our climb.

After a short bus ride to the glacier foot, were handed over to a couple of glacier climbing experts (an actual couple, who had just spent a long jaunt in New Zealand climbing those mountains), and spent a bit of time faffing around getting our safety gear sorted.

Trendy!:

And then we headed on out, towards the salt and pepper sprawl in the distance.

Our group trotted quickly across a frozen black beach (risk of falling rubble, keep on moving forward!) ….

.. and then we started climbing up…

There was another pause, which involved accessorising our already-beautiful helmets with fancy footwear (crampons).

And which subsequently involved a lot of stomping into frozen sand.

And a little bit more posing:

And then we climbed a bit more.

Glaciers are a pretty big part of Iceland’s landscape, covering about 11% of the whole country. Most of this however is due to one large chonky boy-, which makes up 8% by itself.

We didn’t head up Vatnajökull, but instead climbed Sólheimajökull, which is a tounge-y outlet glacier from the larger icecap Mýrdalsjökull.

I was.. not able to keep any of the names of any of the things we visited in Iceland in my head for more than two seconds. But suffice to say, all the little fingers of the larger glaciers have their own names, as well as the glaciers themselves.

The subdivision makes a lot of sense when you consider the overall size of the mass!

We wandered around the ice a bit, sometimes hearing some nice glacier facts, sometimes hearing of the glacier risks, and sometimes listening to the nice crunch crunch of our stompy feet stomping.

At some point, all the glacier stomping made us thirsty, so we stopped for a drink.*

*Sameer did not drink, because one of our bus buddies was a bit too licky of the ice upstream.

I did really like that there was a bit of focus on climate change throughout the hike, including a descriptive sign at the base of the glacier and some warnings from the guides.

Sólheimajökull is retreating at about 60m a year, which is made particularly obvious given its proximity to the river inlet.

I’m not completely sure that the majority of our group was pro climate change belief, but they all nodded along and said the niceties.

I’m also not sure I appreciated the guides adding in some extra facts about how water has feelings. But the need to keep my eyes on my feet prevented too much eye rolling.