On June 14th, 2008 I start­ed hik­ing from Husavik on the north­ern coast of Ice­land. I fin­ished hik­ing across Ice­land on the morn­ing of June 26, on the south­ern coast just south of Skog­ar. The route that I took was prob­a­bly a lit­tle over 350 miles. The hike was phe­nom­e­nal and the scenery was stun­ning as you can see by view­ing the pic­tures from this trip.

One story that I want to share form the Iceland trip:

Appar­ent­ly a polar bear swam to Ice­land about a week ago. Every time I get to a town or near some peo­ple it seems to be the hot top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion. Here’s the punch line, not like a joke punch line but like oh man what the heck are peo­ple think­ing punch line. they tried to catch the bear to relo­cate it, but they say they were hav­ing some prob­lems, so they just shot and killed it instead. what the heck. that polar bear just took on an epic adven­ture and swam a lot of miles and final­ly got to land and i am sure all he want­ed was a piece of seal to eat and the peo­ple could­n’t han­dle that. Maybe he would­n’t have been able to live here any­way because of the cli­mate, but it would cer­tain­ly have been cool to let nature run its course and see if they could have expand­ed their ter­ri­to­ry in this day of glob­al warm­ing and polar bears being one of the first species that will go. I sure hope that I don’t walk a thou­sand miles to get to the biggest vat of Ben and Jer­ry’s on the plan­et for some­body to just pull out a gun and shoot me right before I can open it.

View Ice­land in a larg­er map

Getting to Iceland and anywhere you are going to start your hike:

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The main inter­na­tion­al air­port is in Keflavik which is about a 30–40 minute bus ride from Reyk­javik. The bus leaves direct­ly from out­side the bag­gage claim area. To get any­where else in Ice­land you will need to take this bus to the Reyk­javik bus ter­mi­nal. All domes­tic air­plane trav­el leaves from the Reyk­javik Air­port which is about ¼ mile walk from the bus ter­mi­nal. Bus­es also leave to go around the whole coun­try from the bus ter­mi­nal, although the dri­ve time to the north or east­ern sides can be quite long. The bus sys­tem is very good to get around the entire coun­try. If you are just going to hike the Laugerevinn (the most pop­u­lar and main hik­ing trail in Ice­land. It is about 45 miles long) then you can take the bus to Land­man­nalauger, Porsmork, or Skog­ar. I think there are 3 main bus com­pa­nies (Reyk­javik Excur­sions, Trex, and Net­buss) although there might be some oth­er ones also.

Gen­er­al hik­ing infor­ma­tion: Ice­land is beau­ti­ful and very dif­fer­ent from any­where else that I have been. I would high­ly rec­om­mend going there. If you are going to hike, there are a lot of poten­tial routes to hike in Ice­land. Most of the routes will have the poten­tial for a fair amount of cross-coun­try, but if you are not com­fort­able with cross coun­try then you can prob­a­bly fig­ure out a way to con­nect a lot of the F Roads (vary­ing degrees of dirt 4wd roads). There are few trails that trav­el for long dis­tances in Ice­land. The main one is the Laugerevinn and Fim­mvourhals which goes from Land­man­nalauger to Skog­ar. Gen­er­al­ly the trail sys­tem is con­fined to the nation­al park areas. Cross coun­try is a mixed bag. It can be very easy across open moon­scapes, or it can be very hard across the same land­scapes if the clouds are hang­ing low. The lava flows can also make it hard to go cross coun­try. In addi­tion the maps are quite lim­it­ed for the island (see more under the map head­ing below) and often there aren’t very dis­tinct land for­ma­tions to eas­i­ly line up to the sub-par maps.

Water Info: Water is pret­ty much every­where and is the main obsta­cle that will dic­tate your route. The fords can be impass­able and dan­ger­ous. Rivers are very cold and all have glacial silt so you can­not deter­mine the depth. I typ­i­cal­ly found no prob­lem find­ing drink­ing water and clear water to drink. In the north, the tun­dra land­scape made it a lit­tle hard­er to find water, but it was still around. I only treat­ed a few water sources in Ice­land. The water seemed very clean to me, espe­cial­ly because I was there quite ear­ly in the sea­son and the 4wd roads were all still closed.

Resup­ply Info: Towns with stores are few and far between. Along the route that I took, I only had two resup­plies. I hiked start­ed from Husavik (and had food with me that I brought over from the States), then resup­plied in Reykjhalid (on Lake Myvatn), then in Land­man­nalauger and con­tin­ued to the end from there. I did not actu­al­ly resup­ply in the small camp of Land­man­nalauger because the “store” (bus with some camp­ing food) was not there yet because it was too ear­ly, so I had to take the bus to the town of Hel­la and resup­ply at the gro­cery store there. The town of Hel­la did not have any Rod Spir­it though (which is the name for their ver­sion of alco­hol cook­ing fuel. You can usu­al­ly find it in most gas sta­tions though in liter sizes. It is pink in col­or.). Ice­land also has gen­er­al deliv­ery (although I would assume that it is called poste restante there) but the town has to have a post office for this ser­vice. Many small towns do not have a post office. On the oth­er hand you can send pack­ages to places by using the bus com­pa­nies. On the route I took, one could send a box via the bus to the Nyi­dalur Hut. This hut is a lit­tle bit off the route but would break up the longest stretch (between 180–200 miles) almost in half.

Maps: The maps for the island are pret­ty bad. For about ¼ of the trip I was nav­i­gat­ing off of a 1:250,000 scale map because that is all that I could find for that area of the coun­try. Some of the areas that are more pop­u­lar have 1:100,000 scale maps, but I think that is the most detailed that you can eas­i­ly find. I think 1:100,000 scale were per­fect for the coun­try because it gives you enough range to see far off fea­tures because often you have to look way out to find some­thing to ori­ent the map to. There is also a few map pro­grams for the island, but I have heard that they are a pain to work with because they do not print on 8.5x11” paper very well. I had ordered this map pro­gram from the Nordic Store a cou­ple of months in advance, but nev­er got any­thing in the mail and nev­er heard back from them. I also ordered a few maps from Omn­imap in NC and they only had 1 map that I need­ed in stock. I bought the rest of the maps when I arrived in Ice­land. There are a cou­ple of map stores in Reyk­javik or the gas sta­tion right next to the bus ter­mi­nal sells a few 1:100,000 for some regions and the 1:250,000 for the entire island.

Weath­er: I was in Ice­land from mid-June until the end of June. Gen­er­al­ly the weath­er was over­cast, on and off rain show­ers or snow show­ers, and always very windy. I had storms come from the north, south, east, and west. The weath­er seemed com­plete­ly unpre­dictable and there was no rea­son to actu­al­ly even try to pre­dict it because it was pret­ty much always the same. I had ¾ of a day where the sun was out and then it felt pret­ty warm, but the rest of the trip I hard­ly took off my wind­stop­per mit­tens and wore my ther­mawrap jack­et under­neath my rain jack­et and was com­fort­able hik­ing. I usu­al­ly wear 1 or 2 lay­ers while walk­ing, but in Ice­land the wind was strong and the ter­rain wasn’t that chal­leng­ing so I wasn’t work­ing my body heat up that often. The day­light was pret­ty much con­stant and because of that the nights didn’t get that chilly. It did snow a bit in the High­lands and prob­a­bly got down to 30 degrees, but it was prob­a­bly also about 30 degrees dur­ing the day that day. Be pre­pared for chilly weath­er because the wind chill is a big fac­tor. I would rec­om­mend bring­ing a stur­dy shel­ter because more often than not there is no cov­er to escape the wind and the huts are few and far between, except for on the Laugerevinn.

Huts: There are huts every 5–10 miles on the Laugerevinn. On the Laugerevinn it is rec­om­mend­ed that you either stay in the huts, which I think come out to about $40 per night, and they have propane stoves, or camp in a des­ig­nat­ed camp­ing area near the huts, which is about $10 per night. They rec­om­mend this because it is a very high use area and helps to pre­vent overuse. The huts on the Luagerevinn have war­dens. The rest of the island has spo­radic huts that are marked on the maps. They were usu­al­ly built for the 4wd peo­ple, but hik­ers are more than wel­come to stay also. I am not sure how much they cost per night. Some of these may be manned dur­ing the height of the season.