Mission: Impassable

Story and Photos by: Paddy Tyson

What a way to enter a country! After three days at sea in the North Atlantic smelling of fish, any dry land is good, but the tiny village of Seyðisfjörður at the head of one of Iceland’s east coast fjords was particularly welcoming. I’m really not a sailor, and a handful of houses, a church and a gas station are just heaven for me.

The near-freezing temperature and the fog may have been low, but expectations were high as Peggy, my ever-faithful Aprilia, and I rolled down the gangway to start exploring the most volcanically active country on the planet. Iceland is the only part of the Mid-Atlantic tectonic rift that rises above sea level, and it does so with incredibly rugged splendour. However, as it is 66 degrees north, at the same latitude as Baffin Island, the fire of volcanoes is tempered by the surrounding ice. Of its many glaciers, 12% of the country is covered by just one, Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in the world outside of the poles.

I’d taken a gamble on trying to explore the country before the summer, because the great interior doesn’t have many bridges – or roads, come to think of it – meaning that all rivers must be forded, and as the rivers are glacial runoff, the warmer the air temperature, the deeper the water. Battling the snow and crossing glacial rivers can be something of a hypothermic challenge on a 650 dual sport, so I’d brought my very own paramedic, and the adventure started almost immediately.

“Next time I say Morocco and you suggest Iceland, I’ll punch you in the face.” Andy stared at me, exhausted. With freezing fog and a biting wind that was sometimes difficult to stand up in, we were well and truly stuck in the snow, the first vehicles of the year to attempt an inland shortcut across one of Iceland’s many peninsulas. Five kilometres in two hours isn’t rapid progress, but it is proof of my incredible stupidity, or is that optimism? Maybe the “impassable” sign was there for a reason?

There aren’t a lot of people in Iceland (300,000), and the sense of isolation is palpable away from the main road. I say “road” because there is only one – Route 1 – encircling the island, and not all of that is asphalt. Up here there is no phone signal, there’s no one passing by, the weather can change in the blink of an eye, and it can kill you. If I was looking for adventure, it had found me ahead of schedule. This was day one, and throwing the bikes on their sides and digging them out again and again doesn’t leave much room for being overconfident.

I really love this country; it’s like northwest Ireland on steroids, and only a consonant apart. Maybe I’m innately drawn to a place that’s spelled almost the same, but there’s also intertwined history. When Iceland was first discovered around 800 AD, it was by the travelling Irish – fishermen and monks. No doubt the Irish pub opened not long after.

Then the first permanent settler, Ingólfur Arnarson, arrived from Norway in 874 AD and lied through his teeth, telling passersby that it was a great place to live. With the establishment of a monarchy in Norway, all those who felt disinclined to be ruled over set sail for new lands, and from the circumstances of its founding, Iceland retains a sense of freedom from subjugation. However, the new settlers did quite a lot of their own subjugating. Young travelling Norwegian men got a bit of a name for themselves as marauding bandits, which, like all freelance work, can be a bit up and down and not great for stable family life. Norwegian women generally chose reliable farmers, so these young “vikings” visited Ireland and stole women, taking them to a new life in Iceland.

This had three great advantages for the new country, if not for the women themselves: procreation, of course; the Celtic art of storytelling and music, which flourishes today and helped document the early history prior to written reports in the early 1100s; and finally, it made for an extraordinarily attractive people, who for some unfathomable reason eat a phenomenal amount of licorice in rather the same way that North Americans eat peanuts.

We decided to ride the island counterclockwise, making forays into the central highlands whenever we could. The barren northeast, the poorest part of the country, is blessed with an amazing array of bird life, perhaps the most colourful being the puffin. The fishing villages have that concrete brutality prevalent in any frontier land where a harsh climate provides no space for form. Function and strength is king where there isn’t any vegetation to provide shelter and where the wind arrives direct and unbroken from the Arctic. Coastal areas, especially the pristine black sand beaches, are littered with logs washed ashore, which are Canadian in origin, no doubt, as Iceland doesn’t have any trees.

For a short while in the summer, however, this area and the whole north coast can have the best weather, as the warm Caribbean Gulf Stream takes precedence and deposits its moisture along the south coast, leaving the north clear and bright.

For such a small country, the weather fluctuation is remarkable, and as Andy and I did battle in freezing fog in the east, the capital city of Reykjavik received 16 cm (6 in.) of snow, while parts of the north coast basked in blue skies and a heady 11°C (52°F).

After a hotdog in possibly the loneliest gas station in the world, we headed for Dettifoss, a waterfall reputed to be the most powerful in Europe. At 44 metres (140 feet) high and one of a series of mighty waterfalls on the river Jökulsá, it flows into a 24 km (15 mile) gorge, in some places 400 metres (a quarter mile) deep, that sees sediment-rich water plummeting over very geologically young crevices in grey rock, old lava and basalt. Dettifoss, like all of the waterfalls in Iceland, is breathtaking. It would be cliché to say thundering, but it really is. There are no signs to tell you it’s dangerous to jump in.

Time and again we tried “impassables,” only to be turned back, defeated by the mud or the snow, or both. The gorge was closer to the tourist zone, so the “impassable” sign on the road had a different meaning, so it was much less of a struggle for a couple of battle-hardened bikers covered in drying mud and dust. Day three and we finally completed an “impassable,” which also gave us a taste of just how the great centre of the country really looks. Black lava fields or grey/black ash is all there is.

Occasionally, a brightly coloured mound of a different mineral has been thrown out of the centre of the earth in a previous eruption, but otherwise the only relief from monochrome is vegetation in the form of tiny mosses or lichens clinging precariously to rock, or helping to bind the black ash in the earliest stage of soil creation.

We rejoined Route 1 for the ride to the geologically active area around Lake Mývatn, where boiling mud bubbles to the surface, mountainsides steam and the landscape is a rich palette of greys, browns, yellows and reds. Riding here is like nowhere else on earth, and the new road surface (a welcome relief from the dirt), gave us time to marvel at the lava formations as well as the route of the old single-track road, and the oldest route beside that again, which was simply marked by 1.5 metre (5 ft.) pyramid stacks of stones to guide the traveller, especially in the snow. MMM

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