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Iceland 2026

Sun Mar 15 2026

Last year my friend J moved from the UK to iceland to train up as a glacier guide. This year my friend Phil and I took a trip to visit him, check out Iceland and meet the glaciers first-hand. We saw wild alien landscapes, climbed vertical ice walls and saw the northern lights in full force! What follows is the diary I kept through the trip.

Day 1

Iceland is either flat or very hilly and it seems there’s no in between. Gnarled black rocks jut from the landscape, black powder stretches to the sea and from the plains you can spy the white hooded hills marching all along the horizon. It’s an old land, forged by ice and fire. It feels as gnarled and wise as Scotland, perhaps even more so.

It’s the 10th of March 2026. This morning I donned my full winter adventure kit inside my Edinburgh flat (wouldn’t fit into my carry-on bag), squeezed my last bits and pieces into my wee pack and hopped on the bus to the airport. Security was easy and I chatted on the phone with a pal while I waited at the gate. After a smooth 2.5 hour flight we were approaching Keflavik airport. Descending on the peninsula I peered at the land from the window. It’s as though some giant cookie cutter had carved out part of the earth crust and extruded it upwards; it was flat as a pancake on top with vertical cliffs plunging into the rolling ocean. It would turn out that a fair amount of Iceland’s south coast is like this.

I met Phil and we tracked down the car rental and drove the scenic and quiet coastal road south from the airport to join the main Iceland ringroad (Iceland has basically one main road which skirts the perimeter of the island), avoiding Rekjavik’s busier roads which was a blessing because we were both getting used to driving on the right hand side of the road. The towns here are how I imagine the US - they are sparse, with shops and businesses and their car parks laid out “open plan” along the main roads, but with smaller houses and bungalows tucked in smaller streets behind. It’s very spread out, which is strange for someone who grew up in dense old England.

Our way took us along the south coast where we passed barren fields of black rock, ice-crusted ponds and farmland, all flat as a pancake. Nearby, black cliffs jutted from the plain, marking a boundary between the flatlands and the jagged topography beyond. J, our local friend, would later reveal that the flat plains of Iceland were formerly the sea bed, and they have been pushed upwards by tectonic movement from the ocean floor. The cliffs we saw were formerly sea-cliffs!

We followed the coast with the sea on our right and looming mountains distant on our left, making headway towards our destination: the town of Kirkjubæjarklaustur (roughly pronounced “Kirk-you-buy-ya-klow-schter”, but known as “K-town” to the glacier guides). On our way we stopped by two waterfalls. The first was Gljúfrabúi, where the roaring stream of water drops into an enclosed rock grotto which can be accessed by some careful rock-hopping. Inside the air churns from the movement of the water and the spray rides the wind, efficiently soaking you from all sides. The second was Skógafoss, a fat 40 foot fellow leaping into a deep plunge pool carved from the rock. From the viewing area at the top of the falls we could gaze beyond the plains all the way to the Atlantic. Here is where we met J, who had hitchhiked 2 hours from home to meet us. He took us to Vik where we grabbed dinner as well as provisions for the coming days, for it would be the last time we would see a decent supermarket.

Onward to “K town” and J’s dwelling. He lives in a communal house of glacier tour guides of all nationalities. We arrived to the occupants playing a cheerful card game round the table and J gave us a little tour. Wow. It’s the dream house share: a bit like a mountaineering bunkhouse but more comfortable. There are communal snacks everywhere, and ice axes, harness and crampons scatter the surfaces. The pantry groans under the weight of wholesale sacks of dried beans, huge tins and other kitchen essentials. Everyone seems to share stuff and everyone is super friendly. I look forward to getting to know some of them in our upcoming adventures!

For now I am settling down to sleep so I can be energised for the first adventure tomorrow!

Today I learned:

• After native Icelanders, the most represented community is Polish. Vik is the Polish capital of Iceland.

• Reykjavik means “Smoky bay”, named for the vapour that rises from the geothermal activity in and around the town. English speaking folks sometimes simply refer to the capital as “smokey”.

• English is very widely understood in Iceland. J compared the situation to Welsh: whilst Welsh is represented in Wales, almost everyone speaks English and it is easy to forget that it is not the “main” language. The same goes for Icelandic.

Day 2

I don’t think today could have been any more perfect.

The objective of the day was to get up onto a nearby glacier called Falljökull. The other guides in the house were bustling about bright and early at 7am, but we treated ourselves to a 8am start. After an oats and fruit breakfast and a healthy amount of faff getting our kit together we hopped into the rental car and drove East. We were Me, J, Phil and G (a good pal of J’s from the house) and 50 minutes later at Hof í Öræfum (Hof for short) we gained V, a chirpy Spaniard living at a different company house of glacier guides. We continued onwards along the exceedingly bumpy track to the glacier!

At the car park, a pothole-ridden square of black gravel, we donned harnesses and winter boots. We went light on the layers as the sun was so warm and bright. We even put on sunglasses! 15 minutes up the track we hit ice and equipped our crampons which gave us quick and easy purchase over the slick ice and snow.

Traversing the lower plateau we got accustomed to the ice and crampon walking but soon we were entering our first crevasses. These are natural trenches in the ice, usually with compacted snow at the bottom. You can walk the length of them, admiring the ice walls which take on a crusty and snowy look nearer the surface (“summer crust”), and a glassy blue tone deeper down. I enjoyed asking G why the ice appeared this way. In this easy section of glacier there were a handful of separate official tour groups, each with a guide and 10 or so tourists following like obedient ducks in a row. I felt rather smug as our group bypassed the tourists and marched onwards and upwards to the tricker upper plateau. Here the crevasses run deeper, yawning snow holes called moulins snake far into the ground, and one must tread carefully as to not slip and fall to a very cold and very uncomfortable situation. At a friendly 6m crevasse J called a halt and told us to get out our helmets and ice axes, for we were to abseil into the crack and then climb back out again! Wow, it was my first time trying ice climbing. It’s super fun kicking into the wall with the toe spikes of the crampons and swinging the ice axes into the wall with a satisfying thwack, but it’s spooky to trust that you won’t slip off the wall. I was thankful for the top rope that J had set up.

Now, upward to even better things: A serac field. We could see it as we approached, even from the car park actually. It was like a thousand blue icy needles sticking towards the sky from the side of the mountain. I’d never seen anything quite like it. And as we approached the needles turned out to be strange and collosal pillars, twisted into alien shapes. We could walk among them, dwarfed by their stature, and feeling like ants as they loomed over, imposing. J and G went for a little explore while the rest of us hung back for it required some free ice climbing (unprotected, i.e. no rope). Only for the keenest (and most experienced) beans.

It was wild terrain, and it took concentration to not stumble in the patches of knee-high snow, or trip into a crevass, or slip down the steep slopes we were ascending. As we journeyed I enjoyed the banter of the three guides, sharing stories of silly customers and shenanigans on the ice, and teasing each other in several languages (English, Spanish and French). What a joy! We were all in awe by the sun, and the perfect ground conditions and the clearness of the air - G remarked that this may have been the best day for glacier exploring that he’d seen so far in his 10 months in Iceland. I’m so damn lucky that this was my first experience.

Next: A proper pitch of a climb, maybe 10m. Each cleared it valiantly, apart from myself who struggled. I was not trusting my footholds on the wall, I was clinging too tightly to my ice axes and I was tiring myself out by being tense. I nearly gave up halfway through but J, who was belaying me, insisted that bailing out was not an option. The bastard. So I pushed through the burn of my pumped forearms and reached the top after a long time, several rest breaks and lots of tips and encouragement from the others.

We ended the day with a wee photoshoot with all our fancy gear and the serac field as a backdrop, tromped back to the car and had a sleepy ride home.

I’m so impressed with the community among the guides and the way their houses are set up. The big food order is shared and expensed to the tour company. Everything is bought in industrial quantities. They have giant sacks of rice, stacks of tubs of nuts and dried fruits, a tower of crates of bananas… It is all so efficient. And as for the people themselves, there are people from the UK, Poland, Slovakia, France, Spain, Greece, and more that I can’t remember. It is so multicultural and there seem to be no barriers - it seems like the utopia vision of Europe that I keep in my head, and inspires me greatly to get out and live abroad amongst people different to me.

Tonight however we are not staying in the guide’s house. We are staying in a hut - one that provides super cheap prices to the worker’s union that J is in. It’s only a kilometer or so from town and it means we won’t be imposing on J’s housemates so much.

As I type this I am snuggled in the timber attic of the house, on a mattress on the floor next to J and Phil while outside some of the best stars I’ve ever seen set a marvelous backdrop for the dancing aurora borealis. It’s truly magical and I’m so lucky to be able to visit a place like this, to walk the glaciers for free, to spend time with and be guided by a dear friend. I think it will be very difficult to have a day better than this!

Day 3

Today we arose, packed gear and hit the road for a 2 hour drive powered by peanut butter and marmite (“nut-but-marm”) sandwiches. just J, Phil and I this time.

It was a big day to Hoffellsjökull where the glacier spits out collosal icebergs onto a frozen lagoon. J exercised caution as we stepped from the black pebbles of the shore onto the ice, measuring the thickness of the solid surface at intervals using an ice screw. Crampons helped us find purchase as we traversed a new alien landscape. Yesterday was my first time on a glacier and today would be my first time on an iceberg.

The icebergs themselves varied in size from small car to warehouse, but all were bulbous and rounded and tinted blue under the bright sun. From the flat sheet of the lagoon surface they rise like slumbering behemoths, forming hills and contours riddled with crevasses and holes - a wonderland of winter climbing! The lagoon was filled with dozens of them, all suspended in motion by winter’s freeze so that we could spend the day exploring one and then walking to the next. It was a playground, and we were there to play.

We started off on a fun bit of wall which looked easy until you realised the lower part of the wall (up to shoulder height) was a nasty overhang. J and Phil struggled with it for a while before both managing to finally send the route, placing the ice axes high and employing a cheeky alpine knee to gain the initial bit of height. I also struggled with it for a while… Let’s just say I don’t have quite as much previous climbing experience as the other two!

Next we clambered over several icebergs, exploring the tops and peering into the crevasses. Eventually we found an amazing cave - a circular tunnel carved by water, blue and dark and stretching into the side of one iceberg. J ushered us in, told us to ditch bags and then led us through, traversing the tunnel before turning sideways to fit down some very slight corridors. In this deepest part of the cave it was very dim, for not much light penetrates this far into the ice, and this is when the ice appears most blue (when it is not covered by volcanic dust). Soon we saw daylight streaming in ahead and realised that this tunnel took us all the way from one side of this iceberg to the other! We took lunch and some pictures in this particularly spectacular spot.

Now for a good climb: we found a moulin plunging deep into the core of a berg, round and slender. J set up an anchor and top rope and send us down in turn to experience the hole. And then to get out of the hole… it was intimidating being stood in the bottom and looking up at the glassy smooth walls and then J peering over the edge far above my head. Ice climbing is tricky for me and I still don’t trust my feet to hold me, but it is a rush every time and this one was no exception.

The final highlight of the day was a great gaping cave dug out (by hydro action, I assume) of the base of one iceberg so that the lake’s frozen surface formed the floor of the cave and the roof was a giant overhang of ice. It was huge enough to park several lorries in with headroom to spare. Looking in it did indeed feel like some kind of vehicle hangar, like the rebel base on planet Hoth (Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back). Phil asked if we could abseil into it from the overhang and J obliged! He would later say it was the coolest single move he’d ever performed on ice.

Throughout the day when I wasn’t climbing I admired the ice and the way light played inside of it. The following paragraph is my best Nan Shepherd impression: Stood on top of an iceberg, the surface is rendered differently depending on the position of the sun; facing away from the light the ice appears a matte white, pockmarked and divetted like some kind of huge golf ball. Towards the sun, however, the light glints in such a way to reveal the moistness of the ice’s slick surface, combining with it’s mottled texture to create the effect of a huge and slimy white piece of skin. Conversely in our tunnel, as well as other places the sun can’t reach, the ice surface does not know warmth and retains the clarity it was given upon its creation. You can peer through as though through glass and observe its internal structures. Flat planes cut through the ice at haphazard angles, evidence of fractures in the crystal lattice, which are revealed by the way the light reflects and refracts at their boundaries. It’s like an ice cube, a cracked mirror and a blue gemstone all at once. Also visible in the clearness are galaxy-like structures of entrapped air bubbles which tell us of the ice’s past - layers upon layers of fluffy snow which became compressed under the mass of a hundred years of subsequent snowfall. Moving your head to view them from different angles brings out the three dimensional shapes of their constellations.

I am again struck by how lucky I am to have these experiences (yes, I know I’m sounding like a broken record) - to have them with good friends and to not be constructed by some company offering a packaged experience. It is pure pleasure and freedom.

We ended the day by sharing dhal and looking at all the pictures, videos and drone footage of the day, reliving all the best bits with lots of laughter and silly commentary. It’s moments like this that glue a trip together, that elevate it beyond a string of cool happenings into a truly bonding experience between pals. I hope I can continue to share trips like this long into my life!

Wisdom of the day:

• Rope work is a marvelous skill. You can achieve so much with a rope, harness and some carabiners and get to many otherwise-inaccessible places. But you need the know-how. I wonder how many new places I could safely see if I had some gear and a bit of training? And could I enable my friends to have adventures just like J has done for us?
• J became a glacier tour guide. But this is his second career - he had already been employed in an office for several years before his current company took him on and trained him up. He simply had the passion and drive (and an expertise in glaciers from a geological perspective) and went for opportunity! If he can manage a career switch like that then so could I. I’m not necessarily locked into the corporate world forever. I need only be aware of the opportunities and to have the guts to take them.

Day 4

Today was the last day in the union house. We woke up slow and took our time with making breakfast and cleaning up the house. After that we headed back to J’s house to organise gear, for tonight we were going to be camping! It would be the first time any of us had camped on ice.

We stuffed tents, sleeping bags, food, cameras, climbing gear and layers into bags and took the car to Kvíárjökull, a glacier about an hour’s drive away. It was a 30 minute hike to the bottom of the glacier aross the volcanic debris. We were traversing one arm of a huge horseshoe of a moulin - a build up of debris deposited at the end of a glacier the size of a large hill.

After being briefly distracted by throwing big rocks to try and smash a the ice on a small frozen pond (ugg ugg) we donned crampons and ventured out. The ice we were traversing was the end of the glacier - meaning it is the oldest and as such the centuries of weather had rendered it flat, grinding away the seracs and levelling the crevasses. But flowing water had been hard at work, carving moulins and tunnels that gaped in the ice like funnels. We trekked 20 minutes deep into the glacier and pitched camp so that we could stash our gear inside the tent. We had to use ice screws instead of tent pegs to secure the corners to the floor.

From camp we took lighter bags to a particularly inviting hole where J taught us how to perform a crevasse rescue. It’s a complicated process that involves managing a dozen different bits of gear, tying knots and prusiks, ascending and descending all while hanging from ropes in dead space over a pit. The finale of the rescue is the assembly of a clever 6:1 pulley system with which you can haul the casualty (“victim”) up back onto safe ground. It is all very methodical. Each connection of man to rope has multiple redundancies to minimise the chance of falling. Even something as simple as discarding a piece of gear is not so simple on the ice. You can’t just place it down lest it slide away down a slope and fall irretrievably into a moulin. Instead everything must be clipped to a harness loop, or secured to the ground with an ice axe or screw. It made me appreciate the expertise of these glacier guides and of course J explained the whole process with finesse and great humour. This kind of rope work is another beckoning skill that would be super satisfying to learn, which I may dedicate time to one day…

At this time the sun was getting low, and we took advantage of the last light to do some more ice climbing on the plentiful ice walls offered by the Moulins. Much like yesterday, this glacier was a playground of beautiful fresh blue walls, daring overhangs and secret tunnels. We spent a couple of hours here, and as the sun dipped below the mountain we donned headtorches which cast glowing beams through the ice at our feet.

Soon enough though we were tired and headed back to camp to set up beds and cook food (a dehydrated lasagne dinner that J had found in a car park once, paired with a can of beans. Gourmet!). We shared the food following the old custom: two spoons and pass to the left. As we munched we gazed upwards to the heavens, where stars were blooming and intensifying by the second until the cloudless sky was bedecked with planets and constellations. And just as we were marvelling at and remarking upon the clarity of the stars, a faint glow emerged. The glow intensified, becoming a streak that stretched across the entire breadth of the sky, casting a rippling haze into the heavens. It was the aurora borealis. And it was nothing like any of us had ever seen - dynamic and dancing before our eyes, changing shape and colour, and oh so vast! We spent hours gazing in wonder and taking photos, and even when we were too cold to stand out in the open air we took to our sleeping bags and lay with our heads out of the tent, lest we miss the spectacle. Only when it calmed down to a drifting green haze did we tear our eyes away and allow ourselves to sleep.

Life doesn’t get better than this. We were in beautiful solitude all day, the climbing was superb, there was not a cloud in sight and barely a breath of wind to chill us. And wow… The northern lights blew my expectations out of the water. We all thought that the dramatic images you see online were results of clever camera techniques, long exposures and special effects. Never did we dream that we’d witness something like that with our naked eyes. It’s enough to render a man speechless.

Lesson of the day:

• Take a chance on something cool! The forecast predicted a windy night and only medium levels of aurora activity. We went out camping anyway, expecting to be cold and pummelled by wind. Instead we were treated by the heavens. We never would have seen it if we had played it safe.

Day 5

I slept in this morning. It was frigid overnight on the glacier but as the sun came over the hills it had an incredible warming effect on the tent. J and Phil went out to enjoy the sunrise and take photos. After an hour or so they came and told me to get up and follow them. It turned out that they’d found a tunnel between two holes in the ice and had strung up a hammock in there, using ice screws to secure the hammock’s two ends to the roof. It made for an exceptional sitting spot.

Alas today was the day to travel back to the airport so we had no time to dilly dally. We packed up camp, took down the hammock and enjoyed the sunny hike back to the car.

At J’s place we repacked bags and passed gear back to their respective owners (camping and ice climbing both seem to involve olympic amounts of gear management faff!). Bidding our final goodbyes to J, me and Phil then took the 4 hour drive back to Keflavik airport while attempting to soak in as much of the landscape as possible, burning it into our memories. The huge ancient sea cliffs rising above the road, the endless snowy peaks, the little towns huddled into nooks to hide from the wind… It’s scenery that I could get used to… And that I will miss.

I write this entry from the airport for I fly early tomorrow morning. I will take the time to reminisce, absorb and reflect. This trip has inspired me in many ways - to travel, to go out and find opportunities to live and work abroad, to properly investigate and understand visas, to keep sharing trips with friends… And to keep considering whether an office job is enough to feed my soul.

For now I shall sign off. If you have read this far, I appreciate your time! I hope you will feel encouraged to chase adventure as well, whatever that means to you.

Peace,

Peter