on strange ground: an icelandic adventure

38 | Greenbrier Valley Quarterly

This past fall GVQ contributor Jake Maynard traveled to Iceland for three weeks of hiking, writing, and general traveling stuff. While there he decided to hike the

49-mile Laugevegur Trail—one of Europe’s most famous hikes.

On Strange Ground: An Icelandic Adventure

JAKE MAYNARDMAX VAN BELLE

gvquarterly.com | 39

On Strange Ground: An Icelandic Adventure


THE WARDEN AT THE BACKCOUNTRY CAMPGROUND IS NOTHING LIKE THE QUIET AND FASHIONABLE ICELANDERS I’VE MET OVER THE PAST FEW DAYS. This lady is a Viking. She is wearing a helmet with horns and a long animal-skin tunic. An enormous knife is sheathed to her belt. She carries a wool shall to wrap around herself if the weather turns cold. She is large and graying and pretty. When she speaks, her English is clear and informal with a clipped Scandinavian accent. She tells me that I can set up my tent anywhere I can find space. Yes, she says, the water is fine to drink. Yes, it is supposed to get cold tonight. And yes, she adds, there is supposed to Aurora Borealis. “The gods are up to something.” She tells me. I look hard into her face, but I cannot decide whether she is serious. I am ten miles into The Laugevegur Trail—Iceland’s most famous long hike—with a Belgian rock salesman named Max. Max and I met yesterday in the

valley of Thorsmork ( Thor’s woods) at the Southern end of the trail. His English is fair and we are heading the same direction. So, in the spirit of safety and comradery, we decided to join up. We’re setting up our tents at a backcountry campsite on the side of the mountain comprised almost entirely of stone. The soil is thin and the flora is sparse; there are mosses and lichens and, in the wetter areas, patches of heath and wildflowers the size of your thumb nail. I put my tent on one of the few flat places carved into the slope of the mountain, next to a narrow brook. On the far side of the stream, a mother ptarmigan preens herself while her chicks flutter near the water. They are downy and brown, half the size of my fist. The hen is muddled white and brown. Christmas-red tufts of feathers line her eyes like eyebrows. Ptarmigans are basically living food trucks for raptors like gyrefalcons and the arctic fox—Iceland’s only native land mammal. The landscape here is harsh and critters are few. I don’t think it at the time, but I am lucky to watch them so easily. For a number of reasons—the main one being to protect local plant life—Iceland discourages the kind of wild, pitch-your-tent-anywhere camping associated with American wildernesses. So, despite the vast remoteness of the landscape around us, Max and I set up on this slope along with twelve other tents. Just above us, on the flattest part of the mountain, is a hut where, for sixty bucks a night, you can sleep shoulder

to shoulder with other smelly hikers. Outside of the hut are a few picnic benches, which is where Max and I go after our tents are set up. At the picnic table, I eat my dinner in courses: peanut butter smeared on a Clif Bar, peanut butter smeared on caramel cookies, instant ramen noodles. We talk with a group of novice hikers from Toronto on a guided trip; a shy and wolfish solo backpacker from Oregon; and an Australian-by-way-of-Denmark who works as a physicist. The sky is clear in all directions, a rarity for Iceland, and it makes all of the hikers chatty and happy. Folks gather on the side of the mountain to watch the setting sun turn the sky to the color of grapefruit. From the top of the mountain at Emstrur, I can see to the valley of Thorsmork, one end of the trek. From there, we hiked across a rocky plain, over two ridges, through two rivers, up a canyon, and stopped here at Emstrur. We’ll hike for two or three full more days before arriving at the trail’s geothermally-active ending at Landamannalaugar. The sun falls completely and I crawl into my tent and sleep. Sometime in the night, I wake up and feel the pinch of the cold on my nose and cheeks. I crawl out into the rich darkness outside. It is moonless but the sky is filled with more stars than I thought existed, splattered out across space. There are no Northern Lights. There is no man-made light in any direction—only the swelling of the night. Overhead, the Milky Way is so thick I can almost taste it. In the morning there is frost everywhere. My breath has frozen to the walls of the tent in fine sheets. When I turn to dress or dig through my pack, little crystals fall down onto me. Outside the mountainside is cased in frost, all the tents icy. So I shiver and stand around and make some oatmeal, and within half an hour the sun has risen fully above the mountains and the world comes back to life. Max and I are some of the last folks out of the campsite, but we have the trail to ourselves. Our South-to-North route, we learn, is the far less common way to hike the Laugevegur Trail. So when we do cross other travels, it’s brief. After an hour or so of hiking, Max and I have crested the mountain at Emstrur and are heading down to the flat lands below. With every few paces, I notice how the ground begins to change under our feet. Yesterday’s sharp grey stones give way to coal-colored sand, soft and thick under my boots. The rocks become fewer as we descend the mountain and pass through a gully that opens up into the Emstrur Desert.


Clockwise from top: The Salt Cave and Spa is built directly into the hillside on Rt. 92; The Salt Cave itself, with over 16,000 pounds of Himalayan Salt and zero-gravity chairs for relaxing during your 45-minute session (photo by Josh Baldwin); Massage tables are lined with biomat. Opposite: Replicas of ancient

cave drawings adorn the walls of the Spa’s main lobby.


Back in 2008, Iceland’s economy famously tanked—due in part to some bad investments by Icelandic banks. For the next few years, the nation scrambled to reform its government, stabilize its financial markets, and diversify its economy. A lot of Icelanders turned to tourism, looking to capitalize on the country’s landscape, heritage, and proximity to both mainland Europe and North America. (To fly from D.C. to Iceland only takes about five hours.) Aggressively marketing Iceland as a destination has worked. By some estimates, Iceland hosts about eight times as many visitors as it did before their economic bubble broke. Most of the tourists stay just a few days, lounging in hot springs and visiting the country’s many waterfalls. Outside of the capital Reykjavik—which is a regular ole’ European city with fine restaurants and museums—Iceland is very rural, even by American standards. Past the city and its suburbs, fewer than one-hundred thousand Icelanders are dispersed over an island about the size of Ohio. The majority of those folks live in small towns on or near the ring road—a narrow two-lane highway running around the island, over lava fields and around fjords and past shockingly green pastures and clobbering waterfalls so numerous they can numb you to their beauty. The country’s interior, where I am hiking, is rugged and remote. The only interior roads are dirt tracks that run through the mountains and often require fording rivers that run down from one of Iceland’s fifteen or so glaciers. (Slightly more than ten percent of Iceland is covered in ice.) We’re walking down one of those rough roads now, where the hiking trail coalesces briefly with the road before diverging toward different mountains. For

Marius and Adriana Grecu, owners and proprietors of The Salt Cave and Spa. (photo by Josh Baldwin)

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the last two hours, we’ve plodded through the flatness of the desert. The sun today is full and it has to be above 50 degrees outside—balmy for the maritime near-arctic autumn. Max and I alternate between talking about our lives in our respective countries, telling dirty jokes, and saying nothing other than wow and look at that. Max tells me that he works at a Belgian company that imports and exports stone for building projects, countertops, etc. His job is to photograph and sell stone. Nature photography is a passion, though. He saves up his vacation time and takes one long backpacking trip a year. Near the end of the desert, we cross two rivers. The second is thigh deep. It works like this: we take off our wet and stinking boots and tie them around our necks. Then one of us uses Max’s trekking poles to cross at a spot with a weak current and low water. Meanwhile, the other takes pictures and laughs. Then the hiking poles are thrown back across the river, and the process repeats. The second crossing of the day is so cold that it burns and I shout words that would embarrass my mother. From the bank of the river I can look upstream to its source, one of the many tongues of Mýrdalsjökul, Europe’s largest glacier. After five miles, desert concedes to rolling hills of lush meadow grass. We’re miles away from the nearest power line or paved road, but we come upon a sheep shed and paddock. This is completely common in Iceland. During the summer, farmers allow their sheep to roam deep into the backcountry where they can find the best grasses among the tussocks. In the fall, farmers ride horses or ATV’s into the wilderness and round them up. This is a community event; groups of farmers work together to find all the sheep in a certain area. They sort out the whose-sheep-is-whose after the fact. As we hike across the hillocks, we start to see more sheep—lounging near rivers or standing awkwardly on hillsides or cliffs. Sheep farming has essentially shaped Iceland, both economically and ecologically. When Viking-era settlers arrived in the 800s most of Iceland was covered in woods of stunted birch and alder. Centuries of extensive grazing has produced the treeless, windswept Iceland that we see today. The sheep seem unaffected when the sky clouds up and a cold wind blows in. We start to cross a little river—the last of the day—but, somehow, one of Max’s trekking poles ends up in the water. Maybe it was a bad throw. Maybe it was a

poor catch. Either way, I follow the pole into river, boots and all, and fish it out while Max presses his hands to his face and hollers, “You didn’t have to do that. Why did you do that?” in his lilting French accent. I jokingly tell Max that, as an American, I’ve been looking for a heroic thing to do all day. We take a break while I dump the water from my boots and change my socks. Then we hike the rest of the way to Aftavatn, our next campsite. Water squeaks from my boots as I walk.

Here’s a fundamental difference between Max and I: he is an organized, efficient, and well-prepared hiker. He has maps.

Lots of ‘em. They’re stored in a plastic pouch that he hangs around his neck. He has extra shoes for river crossings. In his pack, he carries an ultra-compact first aid kit and equipment to clean his camera equipment. He also carries swimming goggles, just in case the wind kicks up sand when we hike through the desert. In contrast, I didn’t even know that this hike included crossing a desert. My sleeping pad, cooking fuel, and thermal underwear came from the FREE basket at a campground in Reykjavik. Mull on that a while: underwear from the FREE basket at a city campground. His preparedness comes in handy when we arrive at Aftavatn (Swan Lake). All that water in my boots has given me blisters the likes of which shouldn’t be described in this magazine. But Max has special waterproof blisters bandages that he graciously offers me. Aftavatn is a long lake, symmetrical and strangely rectangular, and flanked by two long ridges. The camping area is at the head of the lake near the estuary that feeds it. The wind blows down the lake so strong that I after I struggle to set up my tent, I secure the windward side with a low wall of two dozen rocks. My feet are aching and stiff, and my face is chapped from the sun and the wind. Max and I eat noodles

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We’ve already done nine miles today, but Landmannalaugar is waiting. We set off against a driving wind that slows as we begin to descend through a field of shimmering obsidian boulders.


and rice and I crawl into my tent before the sun sets. In one of the tents near me, someone is trying (and failing) to play a harmonica. When I wake up in the morning, I find that the wind has ripped the rainfly of my tent. One of the socks that I hung to dry overnight is missing. Blown out onto the tundra, no doubt. By mid-morning, we’re nearly at the top of Jökultungur, the highest mountain pass of the hike. The trail is improbably steep. We’re moving fast, scrambling up the steeper parts like goats. I feel incredibly rugged. I feel like a conqueror. I feel tough, connected with my primal self. I look up and see a family coming down the trail—father, mother, two daughters. The youngest looks to about ten years old. Her hiking gear is all purple or pink and her pack is almost as big as she is. They’re hiking nearly as fast as we are, laughing and speaking in German as they go. After another hour, we’ve reached the top of the mountain and everything is laid out before us—the lake, the green hillocks, the desert, the rivers with their broad gravel bars, the mountain at Emstrur. On the horizon glaciers shine like bright blue fillings packed in the teeth of the mountains. Awe can be a strange, ambivalent feeling. It can make you childish, giddy and sad. That’s how I feel up on the mountain, looking at the big weird country below us. Elated and a little melancholic. We keep moving, passing some hippies from New York hiking with little guitars strapped to their packs. We pass an English couple that tells us that we can probably make it to the next campsite by tea time. I confess to Max that I don’t know when tea time is. He’s not sure either (Belgians prefer coffee) but we think it’s around two. After crossing a strange black plateau dissected by dozens of little, snow-filled canyons we arrive at the hut at Hrafntinnusker. It looks a lot like an average cabin, but set at the edge of Mordor. The landscape in all directions is black and fuming. A few hundred yards from the hut is a house-sized crater that boils sulfuric steam into the sky. The camping area, just below the cabin, looks fortified as if for war. Surrounding every tent site is a ring of stacked stones—some as tall as three or four feet—to serve as blockades against the constant wind. The hut warden, who is wearing a t-shirt and has round, wind-burnt cheeks that obscure his age, tells us that we are only eight more miles to the trail’s end at Landmannalaugar. There is one of Iceland’s best hot springs. There’s also a store that is run from the back of an old school bus. They sell pastries, coffee, and beer. It takes Max and I all of five minutes to decide not to camp in Mordor. We’ve already


done nine miles today, but Landmannalaugar is waiting. We set off against a driving wind that slows as we begin to descend through a field of shimmering obsidian boulders. There, just over the ridge from the safety of the hut, a Japanese hiker died a few years ago when a mid-summer blizzard struck. Next we cross a snow pack almost half a mile long and pass a group of Icelanders hiking with a German shepherd—his paws covered in little boots to protect him from the obsidian. We continue downward, passing hikers more often, until we begin to see signs that we’re nearing Landmannalaugar. Here the ground fumes and kettle pots of milk-blue water boil on the side of the trail. The rhyolite hills are many-colored; some are the tone of desert sand while others are as red as Mars. All of them striped in strange green-blues and flecks of black lava rock. This is all, of course, a product of Iceland’s complex geology. Of this I know little. But the gist of it is this: Iceland is, in geologic terms, a baby. It lies directly between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, and was formed only 16 million years ago from geothermal activity below. The whole country is under constant earthly tension as the two tectonic plates creep away from each other. We make our final descent down into Landmannalaugar, where some of the dirt below our feet is warm to the touch. Tiny fumerals shoot puffs of sulfur all along the trailside. Max jabs his trekking pole into the earth and steam rises from the hole it creates. The last mile of the trail runs through an ancient and maze-like lava field and we arrive, at last, at the campground and hot springs. The hot spring is basically a bathtub-warm creek with a gravel bed too hot to sink your toes into. Sheep graze around the stream banks. We soak for two days, drinking coffee and eating Icelandic carrot cake. Max negotiates a ride out of the backcountry with a French couple who have rented a SUV. It takes two hours on washboard dirt roads before they leave us at a bus stop on the ring road. Max and I eat gas station hot dogs and talk about what to do next.

on strange ground: an icelandic adventure

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