Posts tagged south iceland adventure

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…

This morning we started our expedition to the center of Iceland.  Our guide from South Iceland Adventure shared a ton of stories with us about this trip going wrong.  100 mph winds, people venturing from the car and freezing to death, snow-blindness and white-out conditions can happen this time of year near the Hofsjökull glacier.  The forecast looked promising, but we did see temperatures swing from -15*C to +15*C in one day.

Hofsjökull is the country’s largest volcano.  

We started the day with some traditional Icelandic food.  Our guide Siggi told us it’d give us lots of energy for the mountains… after we told him how good it was, he told us it was horse…

Hanging out with our Swedish mountain guide Emma…

Untouched terrain towards the Hekla fissure volcano…

Crossing a cravasse…

As we rolled into camp with one final river crossing to go, we saw the sunset over the mountains and the Northern Lights- Aura Borealis at the same time.  It was an unbelievable show by mother nature…

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.

Today was the best day in Iceland yet.  We were really hoping to get clear skies to film, and when we did it was simply spectacular. 

Driving down the road, the skies broke and we immediately jumped out of the superjeep to start flilming as the clouds lifted above these cliffs.

The great thing about Iceland is that there is amazing scenery everywhere—the farms in the countryside are full of structures like this an even some Viking ruins, which made for some pretty good shots on film.

Today we also had our first real superjeep experience on the black beaches of Iceland.  It literally looked like the surface of the moon; kilometers and kilometers of black sand and windblown dunes. We could only imagine what the crew of this old US Military plane crash could have been thinking when they saw where they were. 

After the scenes at the black beach, we headed up the Katla Volcano on Myrdalsjokull and the cloud ceiling lifted perfectly for us.  We did some amazing time lapse shots at the summit looking over the Eyjafjallajokull volcano and celebrated an awesome expedition so far.

A huge thank you to South Iceland Adventure and Wardour and Oxford Global Consultancy for sending us out here in the name of Climate Unchange.