Singletrack/MTB
Gravel/All-road
Dirt-road Touring
Fat-bike
Extreme vs. Everyday: Bikepacking the Iceland Divide
Following Emily Cartigny’s recent bikepacking trip along the Iceland Divide with her husband, Tom, she reflects on the paradoxical way we often seek out challenging experiences on tour but avoid discomfort at all costs in our everyday lives. She also shares a few surprising lessons from the trail. Find Emily’s story with photos and details on the spectacular route here…
PUBLISHED Nov 22, 2024
With every crank of the pedals, we inched our way awkwardly through a lava field strewn with boulders just large enough to make forward motion slow, jittery, and energy-sapping. Bikes laden with eight days’ worth of ration packs, clothes, and a tent added extra weight to the knees. A crank turn forward followed by half a crank turn backward manoeuvred the wheels over a rocky step. The progress was just high enough to rationalise staying in the saddle.
Gusts roared in our faces, chilling our extremities and shaving even more time off our average speed. With it, the wind brought waves of sideways rain, moving so forcefully it barely touched the ground. Progress was glacial, I was cold, and it would be difficult to describe this as anything other than type 2 fun. And yet, I thought to myself, “I’d still rather be here than tackling Manchester Airport’s security halls.”
Taking on the Iceland Divide, a 344-mile crossing of the country, was a daunting challenge for me and my husband, Tom. Having travelled Iceland by campervan before, we’d mostly stuck to the more populated outer edges of the island. This route offered the chance to cross the untamed highlands and experience first-hand the epic landscapes we’d seen on posters.
Being more used to bikepacking in the UK, where you’re little more than a couple of hours from a corner shop, the idea of heading into some of the most remote areas of the country, with no chance to restock and a long gravel road between us and any form of rescue, filled us with nervous anticipation. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but that was the reason this route appealed to us. We were going out of our comfort zone, and we would need to be prepared.
We’d tested all our kit, watched all the YouTube videos, read all the articles we could find, reviewed the route guide here on BIKEPACKING.com, and researched every hut along the route. We’d planned out our calories, borrowed a robust tent, and layered up the sleeping bags. In this sense, we’d prepared as much as we could to experience a new level of extreme nature. What we hadn’t prepared for was the human side of the journey.
The Human Challenge
The challenge of simply getting from the train station carpark, through an underpass, and onto the platform with two cumbersome bike boxes should have indicated to us how the next few days would go. Filled to the brim with all our kit, the boxes were so heavy I could barely lift mine. I would take a few laboured steps before putting it down to readjust, getting more exasperated as I went on. Those 400 meters turned out to be typical as we attempted to navigate bikes through train stations, airports, and bus transfers. All before the “real adventure” even began.
We sat on the train, worrying about finding a trolley on the other side. Then, if the boxes would be overweight, which they were, resulting in a hefty charge and a last-minute reshuffle of luggage. We worried about whether the bikes would arrive and whether we would get them on a bus transfer to Reykjavik. We then worried about them being left outside for the night after the hostel receptionist advised us to tie the very items that were essential to our trip to “a piece of wood” and seemed confused at our concern about them being stolen.
If that wasn’t enough, after a sleepless night, we then worried about getting to a shop to buy a gas canister before making it to a bus station for a nervous wait to see if there was space on the one and only bus to the start of our adventure, Vík. Essentially, the initial few days of the trip were a story of stressing out, mostly unnecessarily. We did arrive in Iceland with all our luggage, we did find a gas canister, and we did make it on the bus.
Stop Stressing
Stepping off the four-hour bus from Reykjavik to Vík, there was a certain sense of relief that we’d finally made it to the start of our route. This relief lasted only a few minutes before we overheard whispers that the road east, the one we planned to take in the morning, was closed. Upon investigation, the rumours were true, and the reason was mindboggling.
The small town of Vík sits directly south of Mýrdalsjökull (pronounced mir-tals-jœ-kult) ice cap, which lies on top of the Katla volcano. Living the sheltered life of the UK, I imagined volcanoes (which are hot) and glaciers (which are cold) to be incompatible. At least, I was partly correct. In the time we’d sat on a bus, the Katla volcano had experienced a small eruption, melting a section of the glacier. Thousands of gallons of water were pouring down the valley and washing away the road east of Vík. Not only was this a stark reminder of the extreme environment we were heading into, but it was incredibly humbling to think we could have been on that very road if the eruption had happened just 12 hours later. Worrying about having a bike tool taken off us in airport security suddenly felt a little silly.
With the other hundreds of tourists, mostly campervans travelling the famous ring road, we were now stuck in Vík with the prospect of either waiting out the flood or finding an alternate route. After a pizza and a beer to contemplate our new sense of mortality, we decided to adjust our route and head west around the Mýrdalsjökull ice cap before picking up the original trail.
Our new start point was 60 miles back up the road. This time, with no buses available, we called in a local taxi. The £70ish didn’t seem too bad to finally get started with the real reason we were there. It was only later we realised this taxi trip had been the first victim of miscalculated currency exchange and it had actually cost us closer to £200. Either way, after days of travel, the real adventure was finally underway.
Heading into the Extreme
Every adventure seems to find a way of challenging you early on. A qualifier, perhaps, to test if your heart is really in it. If the obstacles we’d experienced so far weren’t enough, our first night in the highlands had us questioning what on earth we thought we were doing. Day one had rained almost exclusively, with the wind howling in our faces. Despite the weather, the scenery was spectacular.
Sponge-like green moss, so vivid we questioned if it was real, glowed against black lava sand. We followed a valley most of the day, slowly climbing into the highlights as the mountains grew on either side of us. The rain at least empowered the rivers and waterfalls to shine white against the dark landscape.
With no planned stop on our new route, we cycled until we were tired and hungry. As we pedalled the vast open valley, we looked around for any form of sheltered flat ground to pitch a tent. Kilometre after kilometre, none appeared. Eventually, we decided to make do with a curve in the river, which, despite the slight chance of being flooded in the night, almost offered a break from the wind.
This was our first introduction to Icelandic ground and its reluctance to hold on to a tent peg. As we got one peg in, another would be pulled out by the tension. Holding on to a flapping tent whilst the other person tried to find heavy enough rocks, it was hard not to wonder if we were wilfully underprepared for this. We slept the night with slightly cold noses poking out from our many layers, wondering if this was how the next eight days were going to be.
Finding Clarity in Simplicity
Luckily, the following day rewarded us with some of the best landscapes we’d ever seen. We cycled along, turning our heads on a constant swivel in awe of the towering mountains, gnarled lava fields, and lime-green moss. Martian-style topography of sweeping barrenness and hues of red gravel were interspersed with magical fairy pools cushioned with moss. Long climbs were compensated by roller-coaster singletrack, weaving in and out of boulders or craters of sparkling black sand. Suddenly, the cumbersome bikes were in their element, and the worry was blown away by the wind.
It’s bizarre that it takes going to remote places to remember the beauty of the simple things. Yet, it works every time. It took a near-alien landscape far away from the noise of everyday life for us to find clarity in simplicity. The route brought with it the joy of doing just one thing at a time, such as sitting by a river and listening to the rush of water. The joy of feeling the first warm rays of the sun as it peers over the mountains or the smell of your one and only coffee ration for the day. The simplicity of having only the stuff you can carry with you. But most of all, taking your mind back to its basic needs of food, water, and warmth. The stress and worry of work and keeping up with life melt away through the days on expedition, and the quiet remoteness emanates calmness.
Be More Yan
In such a remote location, we hadn’t imagined we’d meet many people, but those people were a highlight of the trip. The commonality of braving the extreme brings an easy sense of closeness. One person was a chap we met at Kistufell hut, a small oasis of warmth in the barren landscape, watched over by the largest of Iceland’s glacier’s Vatnajökull (pronounced Va-na-jœ-kult).
This was night five and the highest point of our trip. We arrived tired, pushing our bikes up the last steep slope to the hut to a welcome from Yan, standing on the porch sipping coffee. He’d spent the day there, exhausted after 130 kilometres a day from Keflavik airport.
Yan turned out to be the complete opposite of us: calm and relaxed in every way (in case you haven’t already guessed, we tend to overthink things). He chatted to us about his trip and how he’d ridden straight out of the airport towing his bike bag before hiding it at an unmarked location. When we worried for him about finding it again on his return journey, he responded with a shrug.
He had also forgotten his tent poles, a mistake that would have ended the trip for us, but not for Yan. He’d spent two nights rolled up in his tent liner instead. He was, frankly, a breath of fresh air. After spending a night comparing our Surly bike setups, generally geeking out about bikepacking kit, and sharing stories of trips we’ve been on and the photos we’ve taken, we parted ways promising to ourselves to “be more Yan.”
We travelled the final few days towards Akureyri feeling physically and mentally lighter as we went. We’d come expecting the wilderness to test our physical limits, but in fact, we’d been challenged by the everyday: the endless travel logistics and the weight of overthinking. All the energy we’d spent worrying had mostly been unsubstantiated, and the only real threat (a glacier exploding!) had been completely out of our control. It had also turned out to be something we’d been able to adapt to reasonably easily, despite the taxi bill. As we rolled back into civilisation after eight days, we left the gravel tracks of the Iceland Divide with a vow to worry less and embrace the journey.
Just below the Arctic Circle, situated between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, a remote land emerges from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, dominated by huge glaciers, ashen deserts, and mighty lava structures. Here, along the fault line that crosses the island from north to south, the incessant work of fire and ice traced a route that runs through a world of immeasurable desolation and enthralling beauty, the Icelandic Highlands. Find the full route guide here.Further Reading
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