A short drive back into Vik this morning allowed us to see the salt stacks and walk along the black sand beach for a few minutes before we got on our way towards skaftafell.
It was about an hour and a half drive and I drove today.... Through wind, snow, sleet and rain. As we turned one of my favorite corners on route one here, the sky started to clear a bit and the sun came out! Luckily for us, it appeared right when we got to the glacier. There are three glaciers in a few mile radius here and we went to the third one first because Aaron said that we could walk up right above it and it was a great view. We took the drone and my camera bag and hiked up a short distance, about 5-10 minutes. As we were setting up the drone, we realized we never put the memory card back in and I ran back to the car and grabbed it. Flying the drone is really neat. It was super windy so we were very concerned about it and the footage came out well but you can see the choppers moving in some of it because of the wind. Still awesome though!
Lunch time came and we made our organic peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the hood of our car and ate them looking at the glacier. We later found out that Jackie chan is filming a movie on this glacier... It would have been cool to run into him!
We decided to drive back to the skaftafell glacier visitors center because there were two hikes we wanted to do that we didn't get to do last year because it was too snowy. There is a lot less snow this year and it's warmer but the wind is still vicious. Kelsey and Eric met us at the visitors center and we all hiked to a waterfall together a few miles away.
Then we trekked out to the skaftafell glacier which was supposed to be a short hike yet it turned into a few hours because we actually walked onto the glacier and into the crevasses. It was by far the coolest thing we've done so far!
We explored for quite some time and it started to rain hail on us for a few minutes but then it stopped. As the time was closing in on 6pm, we realized we needed to book it back to the cars before we lost the light. Of course we had head lamps just in case, but we did not want to be in the glacier at night time. My yak tracks worked pretty well on some of the ice but Aarons crampons were much more effective and some of the slippery glacial glass was impassable for me without his help. He helped Kelsey and Erik across those sections too. We walked through the wet, volcanic glacier bottom to get back to the trail and the visitors center. After a ten mile day, Aaron and I were a bit tired. It was about a 20 minute drive to our hotel, hof 1, and we quickly checked in, walked into what felt like a dorm hallway and a dorm room that smelled like poop and then went to eat some dinner. I had the veggie option which was delicious. We craved the hot tub from the day and luckily there was a spa there and we ended our evening with a nice dip!
No comments:
Post a Comment