Posts tagged snowmobiling

There aren’t many places in the world where you can experience complete silence, but on a still day, the center of Iceland is one of them.  There are very few animals, no rustling of leaves, and certainly no human disturbances.  Someone said that the nearest petrol station was 234km away.

When the sun goes down across the tundra, the darkness can be seen rising along the horizon.  It looks as if visibility is decreasing into a fog, or that your eyes are getting really blurry, but it’s really just darkness coming up.

It’s also incredibly difficult to know what time it is in Iceland.  At the summer solstice, the sun never goes down, and in the winter, it can be dark all day. The sun sets 7 minutes later every single day, so you can get really thrown off.  We found ourselves up until 4 or 5 am when we guessed it was only 11 pm or so.

The massive amounts of snowy terrain also make it difficult to tell where you are, so when you are out riding a snowmobile it’s important to have a safety plan and know what to do if you get lost…

The center of Iceland is a massive playground for the Vikings… we did some snowmobiling and pulled each other across the lakes on our skis until we found some good runs to shuttle each other back and forth down…

Siggi our Viking mountain guide from South Iceland Adventure…

The mountain hut doesn’t have running water in the winter, but does have a pretty cool solar panel so we didn’t have to use candles all the time…

If you enjoy skiing untouched snow, you know there is no better feeling than getting out in the backcountry far away from civilization.  Today, South Iceland Adventure took our crew for the experience of a lifetime. 

If you want to get a whole camera crew to the top of a volcano, the only way is by superjeep.  These things are setup for serious expeditions and had no problem taking us up the Tindfjoll Volcano in the Thórsmörk mountain range.  (Named after the Norse God Thor).  

Our South Iceland Adventure guides brought up a snowmobile for us so we could find some amazing settings for the Climate Unchange film.  Sure enough, the weather broke and we had an unbelievable day… our crew from Bladesman Productions were thrilled.

At the top of this ridge, we shot some awesome ski and snowmobile scenes.  Imagine the most amazing untouched bowl, with a perfect windblown snow cornice to drop in off of.  Forget lift access skiing… we just had our guides pick us up in the snowmobile at the bottom and dropped back another dozen times… 

At this point we were absolutely speechless, but of course there was more to do and we topped it off by jumping off a massive waterfall on the way back to our base into a 4*C lagoon.  South Iceland Adventure calls it their Wet, Wild, and Fun canyoning tour, and it was certainly all of that… 

Unreal.