Glaciers and plains

August 13, 2021 by Filed under Curious Tagged with

A crisp, clear morning. Just the tiniest bit of tailwind.

Happy horses enjoying the short summer.

Hard to beat this roadside view!

Multiple layers of farming.

Not a lot of natural arches in this terrain, so it's surprising to find even a small one.

Local pie and local waterfall.

You know it's a warm day in Iceland when you start seeing heat mirage on the road.

If you squint, it looks like a beach covered in elephant seals.

Stopping for a snack, and to try swapping my front tube.

Got mjolk?

Depending on where you stand, the cloud cover is a lot closer.
Clouds throwing shade.
Geologic history laid bare.
This was a pretty long bridge!
The incongruous flatness of a zone long covered in glacier ice.
A closer look at the pulverized flatness of the glacial plain.
Meltwater churning with rock dust, moving out to sea.

Interesting info about the early explorers of the Vatnajökul ice cap.

This would be impossible without the road.
There's an extremely fancy waterfall in there, but I'd seen so many pictures of it already I wasn't all that enthusiastic about riding over.
Glacier under dramatic cloud cover.
The first full-on view of a glacier for this tour.
This bridge wasn't in use. I'm not sure why.
Slowly getting dark.
A channel of sunlight.
45 years old, circling Iceland in the late summer.
Seriously, a view like this is just wasted on sheep!
Imagine this massive pile of ice slowly sliding down the side of that mountain, year after year, for tens of thousand of years, crunching boulders down to sand, which washes away...

Sheep just can't appreciate how great of a view they have...

Wreckage from part of the highway that got destroyed in a flood years ago.

Wreckage is cool!

Having only one road around most of your country is problematic.
The old bridge at Gígjukvísl was smashed away by floodwater carrying icebergs that weighed up to 2000 tons.
Background and description of the 1996 volcanic eruption and flood.
When constructing a road like this there are choices to make that sometimes conflict with each other.

Even guided tours on this glacier are strongly discouraged. This is a warning to locals as well as visitors.

Not only are there rockslides already damaging the road, but more could happen any time!

Oh, fart! It's impassable!

Hello, meltwater! Gosh there's a lot of you.

A restaurant serving food to an avalanche of people, mess-hall buffet style. One of the best deals I've seen in all of Iceland, actually.

The view outside the restaurant.

It's a nice spot, but way too expensive for what you get.

The room before I obscured it under all the reast of my gear.

Drying clothes, importing photos, and patching a tire all at once.

So many snacks got chomped!

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