Iceland: Westfjords Hiking
We just returned from an incredibly intense trip up to the Westfjords area of Iceland.
Saturday 8/15: Logistics and preparation
We caught a quick domestic flight from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður. We arrived around 6pm and spent some time futzing around getting our camping stove fuel situation sorted out. As a result we ended up missing the shuttle to town, and had to walk the 5k around the bay. The weather was cool and brisk and it was a nice walk, but as we neared town we just kept getting colder and hungrier. Every guesthouse we checked with was full to the brim. Eventually we gave up and decided to do the sane thing stop for a hot meal and a cup of hot chocolate spiked with Bailey´s before walking all the way back to the other side of town for the camping that is part of Hotel Edda, a seasonal affair that sets up on a secondary school campus. We opted for the cheap camping on the grass field option and spent a fairly comfortable night there. We chatted with a few other hikers who all had the same goal - to catch a boat the next day to the Hornstrandir peninsula. We also spent considerable time trying to stalk the one single internet terminal that was continually being monopolized by some chick who was bent on keeping up on her photo uploading and processing night and day.
Sunday 8/16: Kidnapped by Icelanders!
Our quirky school camping hotel turned out to have a quite nice breakfast buffet, which was a nice way to start the day. We packed up and walked back across town to the Info Center to get more logistics sorted. The man working there was very helpful and talked us out of trying to do a long route through the Westfjords and returning via another ferry/flight combination. The mileage looked completely feasible, but in retrospect I now see that it would´ve taken something like two weeks to hike that route, given that it would be mostly cross country hiking. The man working there was kind enough to help make a few phone calls for us to rearrange the plans we´d started to make. So, planning for just a round trip in and out of the same port we booked two places on the ferry between Heysteri and Ísafjörður. A key bit of foreshadowing: We learned that if you do not show up for your return ferry trip that they may initiate a search party to come looking for you, unless you can send some kind of word that your itinerary has changed.
We grabbed some last minute hiking snacks (Pringles!!) and water and boarded the ferry. We had a beautiful mild cloudy boat ride across the strait and landed in Heysteri. While on the boat, we pored over our hiking topo map and settled on an initial destination just a few easy miles over to the next fjörd to the former town of Sæból. We landed, futzed with gear for a bit, and around 4pm we set out on the somewhat marked trail along the coastal bog. We slogged through a squishy bog for a few hours before finally starting to ascend up the flank of a ridge where the trail got firmer and easier. Eventually we hit a nice broad section of trail, 3 ft wide and nearly paved with rockwork. We reached the top of the pass and started on our way down into a very pretty glacial valley. We kept looking for foxes, but never found any. Steep descent, but still a real trail and very reasonable. Around 8pm we were hungry and decided to stop for a quick trailside dinner. A church was down near the lake shore, off the trail a bit. Along the trail, we reached an old abandoned schoolhouse, all pretty in creamy white painted tin siding, with deep red windows and tin roof. Another little snack break, listening to a pack of foxes yipping in the background. The crafty polarfuchs taunted us with sound and sign and spoor, but we never did see one for the entire trip. According to Giovanni, a fellow hiker, they were really quite disappointing in person. "Just a little shitteh thing, really!"
As we got closer to the sea, the sun was setting around 10pm and we approached a green and white house. At first we thought it was just golden sunset light reflecting off of the windows, but as we got closer we saw actual lights on, heard a generator and realized there were actually people in there. The entire Hornstrandir peninsula was formally abandoned in the 1950s but many families still go back to their family homes during the summer for a few weeks. As the trail led us to the doorstep, people started spilling out of the house. A whole gang of about 15 merry Icelanders insisted that we come in and have coffee. And incredible barbecued lamb. And bearnaise sauce. And salad. And blueberries and cream. And red wine. And tequila shots. And some other liqeuer that tasted like cough syrup. We talked about all kinds of things. One of them was an engineer for Boeing and was quite familiar with the Pacific NW. Rosa the midwife patted my ass several times and made sure we knew that we should never call them Icelandic Ponies! No, no! They are Icelandic Horses! Another family member or friend or something offered us the use of their rental house in Ísafjörður on the night that we were due to return on the ferry, which we were happy to accept. Another warned us about the next day´s coastal hike, insisting that we wait until the very lowest of low tides and offered to take us around the point in their boat if we couldn´t make it. They all seemed awfully concerned, but we sort of shrugged it off because they didn´t seem like the type that hike much.
Sometime around 1am, we begged off and thanked them for their kind hospitality and staggered away to attempt to drunkenly pitch our tent in the dark in a grassy field by the beach. Reviewing the photos taken during the evening´s merriment resulted in nonstop giggling fits in the tent.
Monday 8/17: Death by Tidepools!
Surprisingly not hungover, we made a slow and lazy start this morning. It was pleasantly sunny and warm, although very buggy. Low tide was at noon, so we were not in a hurry to get started. We walked down the beach until we got to a tide pool area, then took boots off. I switched to my new water shoes (designed for kayaking with a nice secure strap and decent grippy sole) and canyonwren donned an old pair of sneakers. We started sloshing and wading along through boulders and pools. Slow, rough going. Thankfully the rocks weren´t as slippery as they could have been, although I still earned a pretty rough scrape on one ankle from a barnacle-coated rock. It was getting rougher and rougher, wading up to hip deep and clambering up and down and up and down over seaweedy rocks. We finally reached a large hollowed out cave with booming surf and a spectator seal in the water. And a 15-foot rusty chain leading up a pretty much vertical wall of basalt. There were decent handholds and toeholds, but ugh. We decided to take packs off for this one. I climbed up first and another hiker helped push up both of our packs within reach and I hauled them up to the top. Then she climbed up, and we continued on along a slightly precarious shelf. Later on, we reached a place where a long 50-foot rope led straight up the cliff on the land side, but it looked like we could keep going straight along the coast. We opted to not climb, and heard later from some other hikers that it was more of a local access rope and not part of our route.
Another few hours of slow going over boulders which finally dwindled down to rocks which finally dwindled down to pebbles and then finally! Beach sand at last! It was mid afternoon, and felt nicely warm around 70F. We decided to take a little break on a beautifully deserted beach, with icy glaciers and green hills in the distance. Of course, inevitably, this led to naked photos. I never thought of Iceland as having nude beaches, but it does now! After that much needed break, we suddenly realized that we still had another critical tide-timing crossing to make around the next little point, but the map promised that it would be nice and easy. And it was, thank all the gods. Just sand and boulders and some easy wading. Although, on the other side, we came across a moderately sized river inlet. canyonwren took off her pack and probed it, and had to turn back when the cold water reached an amygdala-tickling waist deep. We walked inland about a half mile and found a place that was only thigh-deep to cross. I stripped off naked to avoid getting clothes wet, and she took the naked backpack-carrying water crossing photos to prove it. We finally trudged across another long sandy marshy area and reached a bright yellow emergency hut at the former town of Latrár. There was a picturesque cast iron water pump leaning askew in front of the hut, and a green John Deere tractor on a little track off to the left. I took a photo, and then we moved on. (More foreshadowing.)
We turned inland and hiked up the edge of another pretty valley and found a nice place to camp for the night that would put us in a good position for the next day´s planned route over a nearby pass.
Tuesday 8/18: The Cliffs of Insanity!
So, we saw this route indicated on our hiking topo map that looked promising and would connect us nicely to form a decent circuit hike leading back to the port of Heysteri. We never did actually find a trail, although the odd cairn here and there did indicate that there was an actual route of some kind. The entire trip up the valley was spent routefinding and navigating, which was a lot of fun but slow going cross-country. We climbed up a steep pass to the cairn on top. The views out to the next fjord were incredibly beautiful, with misty clouds moving in and a cool breeze from the north. (Again, with the foreshadowing.) As we started our descent, the terrain began to look rapidly worse. Down the first fairly steep walkable section nice and slow, and then we reached a fucking cliff. We traversed back and forth a bit to get a good view of what we were up against, and eventually found the least dangerous option. canyonwren climbed down the steepest part of a 25 foot mossy rocky cliff. I had a 50 foot section of cord in my emergency stash in my pack, which I used to carefully lower down two fully loaded backpacks one at a time, and then a bag containing our precious cameras very gingerly. Then I climbed down that section. We put the packs back on and very slowly and carefully scrambled down another few hundred feet of steep scree. Finally we reached the bottoming out part of the U shaped bowl. We stopped for a much needed dinner break to settle our stomachs and our minds.
I have essentially no climbing experience, and froze a few times but was glad that each freeze was just a matter of about 10 seconds and then I was able to breath through it. canyonwren has a bit more climbing experience than I do and being lower down she was able to talk me through it and point out helpful details about which rocks were solid for stepping or grabbing. I was also quite pleased that I managed all of that with a full heavy pack. I feel so much stronger and healthier now than I have on past backpacking trips, when just walking on groomed trails with a loaded pack seemed incredibly difficult. After dinner, it was much easier going but still cross-country and slow as we traversed around the lobe of this hillside to a good camping spot for the night. The weather kept getting colder, and the wind kept getting mistier with droplets. For the first time ever, I actually pitched the tent with all guylines rigged out to really secure it in the wind. We brought all gear carefully into the vestibules and bedded down for the night. Our last day of hiking would just be a quick jaunt over the next pass, and then a gentle descent through the valley down to Heysteri to catch our boat at 4:30pm, with plenty fo time.
Wednesday 8/19: Navigation Fail
We awoke to the expected rain and wind. Instead of the light smattering of rain that cleared up, like the previous morning, it just kept getting stronger and harder. We managed to cook breakfast inside the tent vestibule and pack most of the tent up from the inside, putting on full raingear head to toe. Eventually we had to leave the cozy dry tent and venture forth. We saw a few other parties heading up the next pass and talked to one couple who had GPS in hand. We headed uphill, seeing the occasional cairn here and there. The rain and wind kept getting stronger and stronger. By the time we were climbing the steep scree slope up to the pass, the wind gusts were strong enough to almost knock us over. Many tiring steps and scrambling and occasionally having to brace and cling to the rocks waiting for a strong gust of wind to let go of my backpack. Instead of a nice clear saddle, we arrived to a high flat plateau up in the clouds. We continued from one cairn to the next, having to detour twice around two large snowfields to reach the next cairn. Each time we arrived to a cairn, we had to stop and wait for mist to swirl around enough to reveal the next cairn in the distance. At some point, predictably enough, we sighted on something that we thought was a cairn but was actually just a large boulder, and we veered off course. It seemed OK at the time, though, because as I looked at the topo map all I could see was a green descending valley, and as long as we followed the rivers down they would all join into a large river that led to Hestery. No problem, of course, just follow the water downhill.
We walked down and down and slogged through miles of puddles and soggy bogs and crossed several small waterways. We saw two lakes that were disturbingly missing from the map of valley that we were supposed to be walking down, but we convinced ourselves that they might be large sheet puddles from the rain. Or something. We kept consulting the map to assure ourselves of our route, and it kept almost matching. It´s all so obvious in retrospect that we were doing what Laurence Gonzales calls "Bending the Map" to make it match what we saw, instead of realistically and objectively observing our surroundings. And at this point it just seemed like all we could and should keep doing was to keep following the river down to the sea. Instead of letting up as we crossed the pass, the wind and the rain just kept getting worse, but at least it was at our backs and pushing us towards the sea. Eventually we hit sandy marsh terrain and were getting closer and closer to the sea. But the coastline just... didn´t look quite right. We reached the beach, looked left and saw an inlet, and looked right and saw a long beach with a house and a dock. Aha! That must be Heysteri... except... hmm, still not looking quite right. We trudged down the coastline, in a mildly hypothermic and certainly hypoglycemic addled state. We were still OK on time, and would be arriving at the dock in the distance before 4:30pm, in plenty of time for that ferry boat.
As we reached the settlement, we suddenly looked up to see a bright yellow emergency hut. That same bright yellow hut, with the rusting cast iron water pump in front. Looking to the left, there was the same green John Deere tractor. We had made a circle and somehow come back to that same hut at Latrár that we walked past two days ago. Finally, we had to admit what we´d been suspecting for miles... we were way off track and how the hell did this happen? Pulling out the map again, it was blindingly obvious. The pass we ascended earlier that day was not a neat and tidy saddle between two ridges, with one way up and one way down. It was a large high plateau, and instead of continuing straight and dropping into the valley leading to Heysteri, we had veered 90 degrees right and managed to drop down into a different valley that lead us back down to the other destination. And the map showed that this valley had the right number of rivers and lakes that we´d seen all along. FAIL.
We accepted defeat for the day. Game over, no boat. I walked up to the door of the shelter, sliding numerous bolts aside to crack open the vault, fingers numb and hands shaking. The shelter was a simple plain structure, with a table and two benches inside, and a tent pitched on the floor. One clothesline was strung with things hanging, and all kinds of gear, clothing, personal items, and dirty pots and dishes were strewn all over the place. What a mess, feral hikers had been here! Except, nowhere to be seen at the moment. I sat down and immediately ate an entire bag of walnuts and two packets of Gu, which stopped the worst of my shaking.
And then we began the long process of recovering. I strung another clothesline, and we started unpacking and assessing the situation. Thankfully the contents of my pack were pretty dry, just a little dampness here and there. My core torso was dry, I was only truly soaked from the elbows out and from the thighs down. God bless Arc´teryx and Gore-Tex, a-fucking-men. I was able to change into warm and dry clothing and start warming back up. canyonwren was in much worse shape, soaked from the waist down, with a very bruised ass from being knocked down by a gust of wind, and her entire pack and everything in it soaked. Thankfully there was some emergency clothing in the hut, most of it made of rough scratchy wool and the resulting effect was that she looked like a homeless Icelandic fisherwoman from the 1950s.
We pitched the tent, and started wringing things out and hanging them up to dry. We ruthlessly started to rearrange and tidy up the mess that we´d arrived to to make space for our things. The feral hikers who had left the hut in such disarray returned, soaked and cold from dayhiking. They were actually quite nice, and just hadn´t expected anyone else to show up to the same hut when the left all their things out. Within a half an hour another couple arrived, having slogged the direct route that day from Heysteri. canyonwren and I were decidedly the old crotchety ladies of the bunch, these other four people were all college aged kids from the US and New Zealand. Together we all started rearranging the hut and ended up with three tents pitched inside and 5 clotheslines spiderwebbed all over the place, completely full of soaking dripping clothing. Thankfully for us, both other couples had arrived with ample supplies of food and fuel. I´m normally such a compulsive food overpacker and for once I had restrained myself and budgeted just the right amount of food for the four days of hiking we had planned. We only had about a day of food left and just enough fuel to cook it.
There was an emergency radio of some sort in the hut, which only had instructions in Icelandic. I tried a few obvious intuitive things like holding down the green button while talking, and broadcast a message that we were in the hut and safe, but we would not be boarding the ferry boat that day. We really did not want anyone to initiate a search & rescue on our behalf, especially in the terrible weather. We could hole up in the hut and be safe. We had no idea whether the messages would be received, though. One of the other guys had a cellphone with just one bar of service, and happened to have the number of another hiker who would be taking the boat back from Heysteri that night, the boat we should´ve been on. He sent her a message communicating that we were here and safe, and we hoped for the best. Late that night, there was a pounding on the door. In popped Margret, a woman who was staying at the nearby houses for a few days. She had received a call from the boat operators, because they had indeed received the text message and knew we were there. She also gave us information about the weather (that the storm was going to continue on through Thursday) and that it would clear up on Friday and we could catch a boat that day.
Thursday 8/20: Holed up in a Damp Hut
For the next 36 hours, the 6 of us were cooped up inside the hut while the storm raged and howled outside. There was constant driving rain that was turned to sleet at times, and the wind was constantly strong with occasional gusts that shook the entire structure and made it shudder like an airplane in heavy turbulence. Later, I looked up the meteorological data and it confirms that the wind was around 50-60 mph for a day and a half. The hut was just a damp soggy mess, with constant condensation on every surface and a chilling cold. But, we were able to keep comfortable and in fact the day of rest just lounging around was actually quite welcome after the four days of intense cross-country hiking. Margret paid us another visit with more detailed information about the boat tomorrow that would come right to this little dock that we´d walked towards, and this boat would take us back to Ísafjörður and all would be well.
Gratitude. Between the six of us, we all had enough food and fuel to share and cook together. There were no assholes in the group. Nobody was injured, although one of the gals arrived incoherently babbling from hypothermia and so we were all taking turns to get her bundled up and ply her with hot liquids and food and chemical handwarmer packets. There was a good water source nearby, and an outhouse a few steps away from the hut. Everyone was sane, and in fairly good spirits and willing to accept this new adventure and just keep dealing with it. There are so many ways that it could´ve come out worse and we were all just very grateful and humbled by the experience.
Friday 8/21: Dry at last!
The storm finally broke overnight and the morning was clear and mild, not quite sunny but at least dry and breezy and cool. I took down the inside clotheslines and strung the cord back up outside and we moved all of the sodden clothing outside where it finally began to dry out. We spent the morning enjoying the mild weather, sitting in front of the hut, cleaning and drying gear and putting things back together. The boat arrived to the little dock in the afternoon and we enjoyed a quiet ride back to Ísafjörður flipping through gossip magazines and drooling over the recipe page on each that featured glorious Food Porn. At the top of the food pages was the title 'Namm Namm'. NOM! The universal language of food!
First things first, we stopped at the Tar House restaurant for an incredible seafood buffet. No less than 3 different Icelanders had recommended this place to us for excellent food, and they were right. We gorged ourselves silly, to the amusement and possible alarm of our tablemates who were looking down the long communal table at us and concerned about how ravenously we were scrabbling over our food. We were now here in town, two days later than we had agreed upon with the people who had offered us the use of their rental house. They had just given us all the codes to get into the place, but we didn´t know if it was booked to someone else that night. We waited until 10:30pm, assuming that by then anyone arriving to town on the evening flight or the evening boat would have been there already and checked in. We cautiously approached the house, knocked and called out, and it was empty. Oh, bliss! A warm, dry, empty, comfortable house with a private bathroom and soft dry fluffy beds. We both luxuriated in the hot water and got ourselves clean and comfy and dry for the first time in a week. Ahhh.
Saturday 8/22: Back to Reykjavík
This morning, we made our way to the airport in Ísafjörður (finally finding the shuttle bus this time) and showed up with big sorry eyes to the ticketing counter, explaining that we´d missed our flight two days ago and had been holed up in a damp hut in the storm. They were so incredibly low-fuss about it, and just charged us a modest fee (about $30 per person) to change our flights and in a half an hour we were back on a plane to Reykjavík. We arrived here and then made the same big sorry-eyed contrite apparition to the guesthouse. The guesthouse manager Stigur had been so worried that we did not arrive Thursday night as agreed upon, and had been looking at the weather on the internet and wondering whether he should contact the police on our behalf. He didn´t have any availability for us today but he was kind enough to call around and find another room for us in another guesthouse, no small feat today considering the large Cultural Night festival happening in Reykjavík this weekend which is booking up every last bed in the city. Again, we are blown away by the kindness and helpfulness of the Icelandic people we have encountered.
We´re now just relaxing in town for the day, enduring excessively loud rock music blaring into the internet cafe from the festival outside, and trying to sort out What Next. We probably don´t have time for the Laugurvegar circuit hike but we´re going to see about taking the bus out there and doing some dayhiking out of that area for the next few days.
Saturday 8/15: Logistics and preparation
We caught a quick domestic flight from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður. We arrived around 6pm and spent some time futzing around getting our camping stove fuel situation sorted out. As a result we ended up missing the shuttle to town, and had to walk the 5k around the bay. The weather was cool and brisk and it was a nice walk, but as we neared town we just kept getting colder and hungrier. Every guesthouse we checked with was full to the brim. Eventually we gave up and decided to do the sane thing stop for a hot meal and a cup of hot chocolate spiked with Bailey´s before walking all the way back to the other side of town for the camping that is part of Hotel Edda, a seasonal affair that sets up on a secondary school campus. We opted for the cheap camping on the grass field option and spent a fairly comfortable night there. We chatted with a few other hikers who all had the same goal - to catch a boat the next day to the Hornstrandir peninsula. We also spent considerable time trying to stalk the one single internet terminal that was continually being monopolized by some chick who was bent on keeping up on her photo uploading and processing night and day.
Sunday 8/16: Kidnapped by Icelanders!
Our quirky school camping hotel turned out to have a quite nice breakfast buffet, which was a nice way to start the day. We packed up and walked back across town to the Info Center to get more logistics sorted. The man working there was very helpful and talked us out of trying to do a long route through the Westfjords and returning via another ferry/flight combination. The mileage looked completely feasible, but in retrospect I now see that it would´ve taken something like two weeks to hike that route, given that it would be mostly cross country hiking. The man working there was kind enough to help make a few phone calls for us to rearrange the plans we´d started to make. So, planning for just a round trip in and out of the same port we booked two places on the ferry between Heysteri and Ísafjörður. A key bit of foreshadowing: We learned that if you do not show up for your return ferry trip that they may initiate a search party to come looking for you, unless you can send some kind of word that your itinerary has changed.
We grabbed some last minute hiking snacks (Pringles!!) and water and boarded the ferry. We had a beautiful mild cloudy boat ride across the strait and landed in Heysteri. While on the boat, we pored over our hiking topo map and settled on an initial destination just a few easy miles over to the next fjörd to the former town of Sæból. We landed, futzed with gear for a bit, and around 4pm we set out on the somewhat marked trail along the coastal bog. We slogged through a squishy bog for a few hours before finally starting to ascend up the flank of a ridge where the trail got firmer and easier. Eventually we hit a nice broad section of trail, 3 ft wide and nearly paved with rockwork. We reached the top of the pass and started on our way down into a very pretty glacial valley. We kept looking for foxes, but never found any. Steep descent, but still a real trail and very reasonable. Around 8pm we were hungry and decided to stop for a quick trailside dinner. A church was down near the lake shore, off the trail a bit. Along the trail, we reached an old abandoned schoolhouse, all pretty in creamy white painted tin siding, with deep red windows and tin roof. Another little snack break, listening to a pack of foxes yipping in the background. The crafty polarfuchs taunted us with sound and sign and spoor, but we never did see one for the entire trip. According to Giovanni, a fellow hiker, they were really quite disappointing in person. "Just a little shitteh thing, really!"
As we got closer to the sea, the sun was setting around 10pm and we approached a green and white house. At first we thought it was just golden sunset light reflecting off of the windows, but as we got closer we saw actual lights on, heard a generator and realized there were actually people in there. The entire Hornstrandir peninsula was formally abandoned in the 1950s but many families still go back to their family homes during the summer for a few weeks. As the trail led us to the doorstep, people started spilling out of the house. A whole gang of about 15 merry Icelanders insisted that we come in and have coffee. And incredible barbecued lamb. And bearnaise sauce. And salad. And blueberries and cream. And red wine. And tequila shots. And some other liqeuer that tasted like cough syrup. We talked about all kinds of things. One of them was an engineer for Boeing and was quite familiar with the Pacific NW. Rosa the midwife patted my ass several times and made sure we knew that we should never call them Icelandic Ponies! No, no! They are Icelandic Horses! Another family member or friend or something offered us the use of their rental house in Ísafjörður on the night that we were due to return on the ferry, which we were happy to accept. Another warned us about the next day´s coastal hike, insisting that we wait until the very lowest of low tides and offered to take us around the point in their boat if we couldn´t make it. They all seemed awfully concerned, but we sort of shrugged it off because they didn´t seem like the type that hike much.
Sometime around 1am, we begged off and thanked them for their kind hospitality and staggered away to attempt to drunkenly pitch our tent in the dark in a grassy field by the beach. Reviewing the photos taken during the evening´s merriment resulted in nonstop giggling fits in the tent.
Monday 8/17: Death by Tidepools!
Surprisingly not hungover, we made a slow and lazy start this morning. It was pleasantly sunny and warm, although very buggy. Low tide was at noon, so we were not in a hurry to get started. We walked down the beach until we got to a tide pool area, then took boots off. I switched to my new water shoes (designed for kayaking with a nice secure strap and decent grippy sole) and canyonwren donned an old pair of sneakers. We started sloshing and wading along through boulders and pools. Slow, rough going. Thankfully the rocks weren´t as slippery as they could have been, although I still earned a pretty rough scrape on one ankle from a barnacle-coated rock. It was getting rougher and rougher, wading up to hip deep and clambering up and down and up and down over seaweedy rocks. We finally reached a large hollowed out cave with booming surf and a spectator seal in the water. And a 15-foot rusty chain leading up a pretty much vertical wall of basalt. There were decent handholds and toeholds, but ugh. We decided to take packs off for this one. I climbed up first and another hiker helped push up both of our packs within reach and I hauled them up to the top. Then she climbed up, and we continued on along a slightly precarious shelf. Later on, we reached a place where a long 50-foot rope led straight up the cliff on the land side, but it looked like we could keep going straight along the coast. We opted to not climb, and heard later from some other hikers that it was more of a local access rope and not part of our route.
Another few hours of slow going over boulders which finally dwindled down to rocks which finally dwindled down to pebbles and then finally! Beach sand at last! It was mid afternoon, and felt nicely warm around 70F. We decided to take a little break on a beautifully deserted beach, with icy glaciers and green hills in the distance. Of course, inevitably, this led to naked photos. I never thought of Iceland as having nude beaches, but it does now! After that much needed break, we suddenly realized that we still had another critical tide-timing crossing to make around the next little point, but the map promised that it would be nice and easy. And it was, thank all the gods. Just sand and boulders and some easy wading. Although, on the other side, we came across a moderately sized river inlet. canyonwren took off her pack and probed it, and had to turn back when the cold water reached an amygdala-tickling waist deep. We walked inland about a half mile and found a place that was only thigh-deep to cross. I stripped off naked to avoid getting clothes wet, and she took the naked backpack-carrying water crossing photos to prove it. We finally trudged across another long sandy marshy area and reached a bright yellow emergency hut at the former town of Latrár. There was a picturesque cast iron water pump leaning askew in front of the hut, and a green John Deere tractor on a little track off to the left. I took a photo, and then we moved on. (More foreshadowing.)
We turned inland and hiked up the edge of another pretty valley and found a nice place to camp for the night that would put us in a good position for the next day´s planned route over a nearby pass.
Tuesday 8/18: The Cliffs of Insanity!
So, we saw this route indicated on our hiking topo map that looked promising and would connect us nicely to form a decent circuit hike leading back to the port of Heysteri. We never did actually find a trail, although the odd cairn here and there did indicate that there was an actual route of some kind. The entire trip up the valley was spent routefinding and navigating, which was a lot of fun but slow going cross-country. We climbed up a steep pass to the cairn on top. The views out to the next fjord were incredibly beautiful, with misty clouds moving in and a cool breeze from the north. (Again, with the foreshadowing.) As we started our descent, the terrain began to look rapidly worse. Down the first fairly steep walkable section nice and slow, and then we reached a fucking cliff. We traversed back and forth a bit to get a good view of what we were up against, and eventually found the least dangerous option. canyonwren climbed down the steepest part of a 25 foot mossy rocky cliff. I had a 50 foot section of cord in my emergency stash in my pack, which I used to carefully lower down two fully loaded backpacks one at a time, and then a bag containing our precious cameras very gingerly. Then I climbed down that section. We put the packs back on and very slowly and carefully scrambled down another few hundred feet of steep scree. Finally we reached the bottoming out part of the U shaped bowl. We stopped for a much needed dinner break to settle our stomachs and our minds.
I have essentially no climbing experience, and froze a few times but was glad that each freeze was just a matter of about 10 seconds and then I was able to breath through it. canyonwren has a bit more climbing experience than I do and being lower down she was able to talk me through it and point out helpful details about which rocks were solid for stepping or grabbing. I was also quite pleased that I managed all of that with a full heavy pack. I feel so much stronger and healthier now than I have on past backpacking trips, when just walking on groomed trails with a loaded pack seemed incredibly difficult. After dinner, it was much easier going but still cross-country and slow as we traversed around the lobe of this hillside to a good camping spot for the night. The weather kept getting colder, and the wind kept getting mistier with droplets. For the first time ever, I actually pitched the tent with all guylines rigged out to really secure it in the wind. We brought all gear carefully into the vestibules and bedded down for the night. Our last day of hiking would just be a quick jaunt over the next pass, and then a gentle descent through the valley down to Heysteri to catch our boat at 4:30pm, with plenty fo time.
Wednesday 8/19: Navigation Fail
We awoke to the expected rain and wind. Instead of the light smattering of rain that cleared up, like the previous morning, it just kept getting stronger and harder. We managed to cook breakfast inside the tent vestibule and pack most of the tent up from the inside, putting on full raingear head to toe. Eventually we had to leave the cozy dry tent and venture forth. We saw a few other parties heading up the next pass and talked to one couple who had GPS in hand. We headed uphill, seeing the occasional cairn here and there. The rain and wind kept getting stronger and stronger. By the time we were climbing the steep scree slope up to the pass, the wind gusts were strong enough to almost knock us over. Many tiring steps and scrambling and occasionally having to brace and cling to the rocks waiting for a strong gust of wind to let go of my backpack. Instead of a nice clear saddle, we arrived to a high flat plateau up in the clouds. We continued from one cairn to the next, having to detour twice around two large snowfields to reach the next cairn. Each time we arrived to a cairn, we had to stop and wait for mist to swirl around enough to reveal the next cairn in the distance. At some point, predictably enough, we sighted on something that we thought was a cairn but was actually just a large boulder, and we veered off course. It seemed OK at the time, though, because as I looked at the topo map all I could see was a green descending valley, and as long as we followed the rivers down they would all join into a large river that led to Hestery. No problem, of course, just follow the water downhill.
We walked down and down and slogged through miles of puddles and soggy bogs and crossed several small waterways. We saw two lakes that were disturbingly missing from the map of valley that we were supposed to be walking down, but we convinced ourselves that they might be large sheet puddles from the rain. Or something. We kept consulting the map to assure ourselves of our route, and it kept almost matching. It´s all so obvious in retrospect that we were doing what Laurence Gonzales calls "Bending the Map" to make it match what we saw, instead of realistically and objectively observing our surroundings. And at this point it just seemed like all we could and should keep doing was to keep following the river down to the sea. Instead of letting up as we crossed the pass, the wind and the rain just kept getting worse, but at least it was at our backs and pushing us towards the sea. Eventually we hit sandy marsh terrain and were getting closer and closer to the sea. But the coastline just... didn´t look quite right. We reached the beach, looked left and saw an inlet, and looked right and saw a long beach with a house and a dock. Aha! That must be Heysteri... except... hmm, still not looking quite right. We trudged down the coastline, in a mildly hypothermic and certainly hypoglycemic addled state. We were still OK on time, and would be arriving at the dock in the distance before 4:30pm, in plenty of time for that ferry boat.
As we reached the settlement, we suddenly looked up to see a bright yellow emergency hut. That same bright yellow hut, with the rusting cast iron water pump in front. Looking to the left, there was the same green John Deere tractor. We had made a circle and somehow come back to that same hut at Latrár that we walked past two days ago. Finally, we had to admit what we´d been suspecting for miles... we were way off track and how the hell did this happen? Pulling out the map again, it was blindingly obvious. The pass we ascended earlier that day was not a neat and tidy saddle between two ridges, with one way up and one way down. It was a large high plateau, and instead of continuing straight and dropping into the valley leading to Heysteri, we had veered 90 degrees right and managed to drop down into a different valley that lead us back down to the other destination. And the map showed that this valley had the right number of rivers and lakes that we´d seen all along. FAIL.
We accepted defeat for the day. Game over, no boat. I walked up to the door of the shelter, sliding numerous bolts aside to crack open the vault, fingers numb and hands shaking. The shelter was a simple plain structure, with a table and two benches inside, and a tent pitched on the floor. One clothesline was strung with things hanging, and all kinds of gear, clothing, personal items, and dirty pots and dishes were strewn all over the place. What a mess, feral hikers had been here! Except, nowhere to be seen at the moment. I sat down and immediately ate an entire bag of walnuts and two packets of Gu, which stopped the worst of my shaking.
And then we began the long process of recovering. I strung another clothesline, and we started unpacking and assessing the situation. Thankfully the contents of my pack were pretty dry, just a little dampness here and there. My core torso was dry, I was only truly soaked from the elbows out and from the thighs down. God bless Arc´teryx and Gore-Tex, a-fucking-men. I was able to change into warm and dry clothing and start warming back up. canyonwren was in much worse shape, soaked from the waist down, with a very bruised ass from being knocked down by a gust of wind, and her entire pack and everything in it soaked. Thankfully there was some emergency clothing in the hut, most of it made of rough scratchy wool and the resulting effect was that she looked like a homeless Icelandic fisherwoman from the 1950s.
We pitched the tent, and started wringing things out and hanging them up to dry. We ruthlessly started to rearrange and tidy up the mess that we´d arrived to to make space for our things. The feral hikers who had left the hut in such disarray returned, soaked and cold from dayhiking. They were actually quite nice, and just hadn´t expected anyone else to show up to the same hut when the left all their things out. Within a half an hour another couple arrived, having slogged the direct route that day from Heysteri. canyonwren and I were decidedly the old crotchety ladies of the bunch, these other four people were all college aged kids from the US and New Zealand. Together we all started rearranging the hut and ended up with three tents pitched inside and 5 clotheslines spiderwebbed all over the place, completely full of soaking dripping clothing. Thankfully for us, both other couples had arrived with ample supplies of food and fuel. I´m normally such a compulsive food overpacker and for once I had restrained myself and budgeted just the right amount of food for the four days of hiking we had planned. We only had about a day of food left and just enough fuel to cook it.
There was an emergency radio of some sort in the hut, which only had instructions in Icelandic. I tried a few obvious intuitive things like holding down the green button while talking, and broadcast a message that we were in the hut and safe, but we would not be boarding the ferry boat that day. We really did not want anyone to initiate a search & rescue on our behalf, especially in the terrible weather. We could hole up in the hut and be safe. We had no idea whether the messages would be received, though. One of the other guys had a cellphone with just one bar of service, and happened to have the number of another hiker who would be taking the boat back from Heysteri that night, the boat we should´ve been on. He sent her a message communicating that we were here and safe, and we hoped for the best. Late that night, there was a pounding on the door. In popped Margret, a woman who was staying at the nearby houses for a few days. She had received a call from the boat operators, because they had indeed received the text message and knew we were there. She also gave us information about the weather (that the storm was going to continue on through Thursday) and that it would clear up on Friday and we could catch a boat that day.
Thursday 8/20: Holed up in a Damp Hut
For the next 36 hours, the 6 of us were cooped up inside the hut while the storm raged and howled outside. There was constant driving rain that was turned to sleet at times, and the wind was constantly strong with occasional gusts that shook the entire structure and made it shudder like an airplane in heavy turbulence. Later, I looked up the meteorological data and it confirms that the wind was around 50-60 mph for a day and a half. The hut was just a damp soggy mess, with constant condensation on every surface and a chilling cold. But, we were able to keep comfortable and in fact the day of rest just lounging around was actually quite welcome after the four days of intense cross-country hiking. Margret paid us another visit with more detailed information about the boat tomorrow that would come right to this little dock that we´d walked towards, and this boat would take us back to Ísafjörður and all would be well.
Gratitude. Between the six of us, we all had enough food and fuel to share and cook together. There were no assholes in the group. Nobody was injured, although one of the gals arrived incoherently babbling from hypothermia and so we were all taking turns to get her bundled up and ply her with hot liquids and food and chemical handwarmer packets. There was a good water source nearby, and an outhouse a few steps away from the hut. Everyone was sane, and in fairly good spirits and willing to accept this new adventure and just keep dealing with it. There are so many ways that it could´ve come out worse and we were all just very grateful and humbled by the experience.
Friday 8/21: Dry at last!
The storm finally broke overnight and the morning was clear and mild, not quite sunny but at least dry and breezy and cool. I took down the inside clotheslines and strung the cord back up outside and we moved all of the sodden clothing outside where it finally began to dry out. We spent the morning enjoying the mild weather, sitting in front of the hut, cleaning and drying gear and putting things back together. The boat arrived to the little dock in the afternoon and we enjoyed a quiet ride back to Ísafjörður flipping through gossip magazines and drooling over the recipe page on each that featured glorious Food Porn. At the top of the food pages was the title 'Namm Namm'. NOM! The universal language of food!
First things first, we stopped at the Tar House restaurant for an incredible seafood buffet. No less than 3 different Icelanders had recommended this place to us for excellent food, and they were right. We gorged ourselves silly, to the amusement and possible alarm of our tablemates who were looking down the long communal table at us and concerned about how ravenously we were scrabbling over our food. We were now here in town, two days later than we had agreed upon with the people who had offered us the use of their rental house. They had just given us all the codes to get into the place, but we didn´t know if it was booked to someone else that night. We waited until 10:30pm, assuming that by then anyone arriving to town on the evening flight or the evening boat would have been there already and checked in. We cautiously approached the house, knocked and called out, and it was empty. Oh, bliss! A warm, dry, empty, comfortable house with a private bathroom and soft dry fluffy beds. We both luxuriated in the hot water and got ourselves clean and comfy and dry for the first time in a week. Ahhh.
Saturday 8/22: Back to Reykjavík
This morning, we made our way to the airport in Ísafjörður (finally finding the shuttle bus this time) and showed up with big sorry eyes to the ticketing counter, explaining that we´d missed our flight two days ago and had been holed up in a damp hut in the storm. They were so incredibly low-fuss about it, and just charged us a modest fee (about $30 per person) to change our flights and in a half an hour we were back on a plane to Reykjavík. We arrived here and then made the same big sorry-eyed contrite apparition to the guesthouse. The guesthouse manager Stigur had been so worried that we did not arrive Thursday night as agreed upon, and had been looking at the weather on the internet and wondering whether he should contact the police on our behalf. He didn´t have any availability for us today but he was kind enough to call around and find another room for us in another guesthouse, no small feat today considering the large Cultural Night festival happening in Reykjavík this weekend which is booking up every last bed in the city. Again, we are blown away by the kindness and helpfulness of the Icelandic people we have encountered.
We´re now just relaxing in town for the day, enduring excessively loud rock music blaring into the internet cafe from the festival outside, and trying to sort out What Next. We probably don´t have time for the Laugurvegar circuit hike but we´re going to see about taking the bus out there and doing some dayhiking out of that area for the next few days.