Ring Road Day 6: Glaciers

 Höfn's view of the glacier was even better in the morning.

The massive wall of ice I saw was only the flickering tongue of this glacier. Here are some mind-blowing statistics, courtesy of Lonely Planet: 

Vatnajökull is earth's largest icecap outside of the poles. It's three times the size of Luxembourg (8300 sq km), reaches a thickness of almost 1km, and, if you could find a pair of scales big enough, you'd find it weighted an awesome 3000 billion tonnes!

Lonely Planet also warns that even those who know it's coming slam on the brakes when they catch sight of Jökulsárlón, and sure enough the bay full of glaciers took my breath away.

Pictures really don't do this place justice.

My love all things ancient Norse resulted in me stopping at a church built upon the foundation to a viking temple to Thor. It doesn't look like much now, but I was amused to note that the graves looked like the burial mounds common in Korea. 

I soon entered Skaftafell National Park.

Here there was another basalt-surrounded waterfall.

The path was treacherous at points: where it was covered with thick sheets of slick ice...

or where the plank bridge across the stream was moved aside and frozen out of place. I tried to pry it free but was simply not strong enough. I think this is the point where I accidentally donated my new fleece-lined mittens to the park. 

I think some of the icicles here were taller than I am.

A hike across tundra later I came to an overlook of one branch of the glacier.

I hiked across the outcropping of land to see another finger of the glacier.

Here I also had a view of the Sandar, the bleak perfectly flat black sands left behind after the crushing mass of ice retreated. The lifeless black sands looked post-apocalyptic, especially with the setting sun smeared across the sky like a massive fire or a still frame of an atomic blast.

The glacier and Sandar together were downright Ragnarökian with the slow destruction of the ice on one side of the charred-looking land and the dying sun on the other.

In the stillness I truly felt like I was witnessing the end of the world. The empty turf houses added to the feeling that the land was abandoned, uninhabited after some cataclysmic event.

Of course, cataclysms to indeed occur here. The stretch of the Ring Road across the Sandar was the last to be completed, meaning that those in Höfn had to drive the long way around (more than three quarters of the country's perimeter) to get to Reykjavik. The problem was that volcanic eruptions underneath glaciers of course melt a lot of the ice. When enough melts it actually is enough to make the glacier float, releasing all of the water at once. The results are massive floods over the absolutely level land, and the floodwaters carry chunks of ice the size of three story buildings with them. Roads and bridges don't hold up well under such assaults. (Similar floods are what carved the Columbia River Gorge, minus the volcanoes. During the last Ice Age the glacier holding back Lake Missoula would periodically lift or rupture enough for the water to violently make its way to the Pacific.) Now there are some earthen barriers to try to hold back floodwaters. It is hard to imagine living in a place that necessitates your language having a single word - jökulhlaup - for the destructive floods from a volcano erupting under a glacier.

I made my way down the hills to the base of the glacier. Just before the expanse of ice was a pond that had frozen over then drained, leaving the sheets of ice to shatter over the rocks on the ponds bottom in a manner that made the rocks seem to be rising up from the frozen depths and bursting through their icy prison.

There is nothing like looking up at a glacier field to make one feel small and awed.

The landscape was familiar to me as the filming location of the opening of Batman Begins, which purported to be in the Himalayas. When I saw the film I desperately wanted to visit such an epic landscape. I didn't realize until reading the Iceland guidebook that I would be doing so on this trip. I spent longer than I'd care to admit trying to capture myself in a pose similar to that of Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne in the picture that I posted in this blog's first post.

I really should have looked at that picture more recently since I didn't really remember the framing of the shot that well. I liked the result anyway.

On the way out I had to note that the official name of the glacier's park is quite a mouthful:

Driving out I stopped by the ruins of one of the bridges that once spanned the stream before being hit by icebergs. Using twisted remains of metal girders left after natural disasters as a medium seems to be a theme in Icelandic art.

(What the fuck am I doing in my shirt sleeves in this picture? Landon, you are crazy sometimes...)

That evening I drove in the dark to the town of Kirkjubaejarklaustur, whose name (meaning church-farm-convent) is nearly as long as the road from one side to the other of it. I slept in my car at the campground, which conveniently had some outlets so I could blast music into the emptiness for a little bit from my tiny computer while I charged my camera and planned the next day's journey. It was my second night in a row sleeping in the car and I slept better having picked a few tricks the night before.

Hints for fellow travel hobos for sleeping in a car when it is too cold to really be doing so:

• Wear all of your clothes (even boots), even if it is too hot at first. 
• Your towel can be used as a blanket.
• Do some exercise before trying to sleep (pushups and jumping jacks work well since running is inconvenient in so many layers of clothes and on ice). 
• When you get too cold exercise. Leave the car doors open during this time to get some fresh air into the vehicle. It's already too cold in there to worry about conserving heat. 
• Run the car's heater on full blast. Drive in circles so you don't kill your battery. (Note the importance of the ventilation in the previous tip). 
• Relax your mind so you can get as much sleep as you can while the car is still warm before repeating the process.