The Hard Way: Freezer Burn

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Outside Magazine December 2004

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The Hard Way
Freezer Burn
How do you go native on an island made of ice? Scale glaciers, strip down, and steam it off.

By Mark Jenkins

KARL IS SPEEDING THROUGH THE WHITEOUT, sanguine as a Viking in a longboat. The storm is swallowing the headlights like a black hole, but Karl is cool. He keeps the pedal to the floor, his large paws resting on the steering wheel, a rolled-up balaclava perched on his enormous shaven head.

"Never underestimate climate," he's saying, "or geography. Climate and geography are destiny. When Iceland was founded in 870, it was warmer, and the island was covered with trees."

We're crossing Langjökull—a 360-square-mile glacier in western Iceland, 50 miles north of Reykjavík—in a radically customized Nissan Patrol. It has balloon tires that float over the snow, monster-truck suspension, an extended wheelbase, and a low-gear tranny, not to mention leather seats and a killer sound system blasting Deep Purple. Veils of snow are washing over the windshield, enveloping us in whiteness. Our depth perception has vanished. We are inside a mother-of-pearl continuum—everything behind us connected to everything ahead of us.

"It began getting cold around 1200, and the glaciers began to grow," Karl continues. "Snow covered the pastures, and the sheep were forced to eat tree branches. Eventually, all the forests were cut down for fuel."

I'm listening but preoccupied. I glance at the speedometer: 90 kilometers per hour. I've always traversed glaciers in traditional nordic fashion: plodding on skis, dragging a sled. In a whiteout, it is considered prudent to move slowly to keep from plunging to certain death in a bottomless crevasse. Yet here we are, hurtling along. I imagine us shooting off the lip of a gaping gash in the glacier: Thelma and Louise go to Iceland.

"You know that the French Revolution was influenced by climate change," says Karl, looking over at me in his sunglasses. "The climate had grown much colder by the late 1700s, causing the crops to fail and the peasants to revolt."

"Are there any crevasses on this glacier?" I interrupt.

"Sure," Karl replies, "but not here."

Karl, 38, is operations director for Iceland's Ultima Thule Expeditions. Built like a polar bear, he wears sandals year-round, snow be damned. Ragged trousers and a fuzzy Icelandic sweater are his work clothes. He is a mountaineer, ice climber, expedition skier, guide, father of three, and intellectual authority on the singular history and geography of his beloved Iceland.

"Changing climate can change people," Karl says.

I glance at the side mirror. Behind us is another hypertrophic glacier jeep, driven by Thorsten Henn, 35, a dark-haired dead ringer for a young Rod Stewart. Thorsten is a German-born landscape photographer who transplanted himself to Iceland. "I was born in the wrong country," he told me when we met. "I hitchhiked here on a boat from Denmark when I was 16. Iceland has the most magical light on earth."

Riding shotgun with Thorsten is tall, laconic Tyler Stableford, 29, photographer and former editor of Rock & Ice. He and Thorsten are taking pictures of our Mad Max mission across Iceland. We have just five days to explore the rarest and most ephemeral morphological features of a glacier: ice caves. Given that a whopping 11 percent of Iceland is covered with ice—some 20 glaciers—there could be no better place in the world for this operation. We've been driving since 6 a.m. Now it's night but still light, and our internal clocks are smashed.

Thorsten powers his rig up alongside ours, and Tyler motions for us to stop. Karl and I jump out into the blowing snow and crowd our heads through the window. Thorsten and Tyler are studying the screen of a laptop mounted on a rotating platform, Thorsten punching keys to improve the resolution.

"The caves are over here," he says, pointing to an X on the edge of the monitor. "We're here." He indicates a small arrow in the middle of an ocean of contour lines. "We've got to change course."

Off we go again, across the smooth, white-skinned back of the glacier. Thorsten isn't looking out the windshield into the whiteout. Instead, like a pilot flying on instruments, he's staring at the computer screen beside him.

Our arctic capsules eventually pass out of the blizzard, and we find ourselves barreling across an endless expanse of undulating white. White extending to the horizon in every direction. Not until after midnight, in an eerie twilight, do we sideslip around a medial moraine and discover two gigantic black holes in the silver glacier.

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Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.

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