Jökulsárlón Glacier Ice Hike

There’s no other way to describe today but Magical! Having booked a hike out onto Europe's largest glacier, we already expected it to be great. But it became so much more.

We were on the road early for an hour-and-a-half drive to Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon - the meeting point for our ice hike. There had been some snow the night before, so I wasn’t sure what the road conditions would be. Fortunately, the forecast weather for the day was to be the best of our time in Iceland. As the dawn started to break we immediately noticed the sky was clear and it started getting light a lot earlier than the previous days. There had been a solid dusting of snow but the drive was no worries with the winter tires fitted to our car.

Jökulsárlón Lagoon would be the furthest point we would head east before making our way back towards Reykjavik. The lagoon itself is famous for the many icebergs that fill the lake and eventually float out to sea. Fortunately for us, another of the highlights we’d flagged was adjacent to the lagoon car park.

Diamond Beach, a black sand beach directly where the lagoon meets the ocean, is covered in chunks of ice that have broken off the icebergs, floated out to the ocean and washed back onto the shore — an incredible contrast against the black sand. We arrived over an hour before sunrise but with the clear morning, the lighting was perfect.

After wandering around Diamond Beach for as long as we could bare the wind, we headed over to meet our guide for the glacier tour. Suddenly, above us, the sun's rays hit a particular cloud and it exploded with colours. Completely confused about what we were seeing, we stood there asking ourselves if this was some kind of daylight Aurora effect. Once we met our guide, he told us that in Iceland, they call these clouds “Glitzkrieg”, which directly translates as Glitter Clouds. In his very cool Icelandic accent he explained that they are extremely rare - so rare that he doesn't know what they’re called in English 😂. Glitter clouds definitely made sense to me.

So after an already eventful morning, we were ready to begin the main reason we were there. We had booked a “small-group” tour that would go further onto the glacier than the majority of groups. With only one other person in the group, it was starting well. We loaded into the “Super-jeep” and drove about 30mins out through a wild rock field to the foot of the glacier. Along the way our guide explained that the glacier is the largest in Europe and over a kilometre deep in places. He also described the changes the glacier goes through between seasons.

Along with receding at a rate of a couple of hundred metres each year, the many volcanic eruptions around Iceland also affect it in different ways. One of the unique effects of a glacier in an area with so much volcanic activity is that the ice regularly gets covered in a layer of ash. When the ash is over 1 cm deep it provides insulation to the ice and protects it from surface melt. And as the ash gets recovered in snow, over time this can become layers through the ice.

Once we’d fitted our harnesses and crampons we started the hike out onto the ice. The first impression was how unnerving it was to be walking on something so transparent that you could see metres through the surface. Blessed with the best weather of the day so far, it was surprisingly not that cold and the wind had completely stopped. For the first time in our trip, the sun broke over the clouds on the horizon. Being only about a handspan above the horizon I was shocked when our guide told us that would be as high as it would get all day! A clear reminder of how far north we were in the world.

Our first stop was the main ice cave that the majority of groups go to. Slowly formed from surface water channelling into grooves, these massive chasms are formed by the water consistently finding its way down through the glacier to an exit point. We followed a set of stairs that had been carved out down into a massive open-top cave completely in awe of the slick wavey surface of the walls. This place is incredible!

After finding our way through into a darker closed section of the cave the deep blues of the ice could be seen to even better effect. We emerged back onto the surface and headed further out across the wide flat surface of the glacier. We spent the next few hours exploring different cave systems while our guide explained how ash cones are formed and that each season the glaciers’ caves and features completely change. The further out we got the clearer and bluer the ice got. Truly mesmerizing!

We got back to the Super Jeep just at sunset and made our way back to the car park at the lagoon. It had been the most expensive thing we would do while we were here, but absolutely worth every Kruna!Read more