One of the heaviest but most needed items were our food bags, with freeze-dried meals providing around 1,000 calories for breakfast and dinner, and sugar-laden snack bags to munch on throughout. the day. Once each of us had prepared a sled, we were ready to go.
Getting to Vatnajokull and our starting point on the vast ice field turned out to be an adventure in itself. We brought in Arctic Trucks, a company that has a fleet of trucks equipped with monster tires and awesome hydraulics so you can inflate and deflate the wheels depending on the terrain. The company operates in various snow-covered regions of the world, including the depths of Antarctica.
It took us a good couple of hours from Reykjavik to get to the edge of the glacier where we spent the night in a little wooden cabin that looked like something straight out of a Grimm’s tale and then the next day we ventured out to the journey to our starting point.
“It’s like we’re on another planet,” said Emma Ranger, our youngest member of the team, as we made our way through the frozen landscape, with winds whipping chunks of blue ice into sculptural shapes and Bulky gray clouds swirling angrily above.
Eventually, after bouncing a lot and almost stuck a wheel in a frozen river slide, we arrived on the snowy flat part of the glacier where we would set up camp and begin our ski expedition.
After pitching our two tents under deceptively blue skies, the six of us nervously waved goodbye to the trucks and rushed inside to cook dinner after dark.
Cooking in the tents involved lighting an expedition stove and collecting snow to melt it to make hot water, the white powder then being used to bring our freeze-dried dishes to life. As the three of us were sitting in my tent making dinner, we realized that the winds were growing quite wildly outside and that’s when the beating on the tents started.
It was as if we were in the eye of a tornado and we later learned that the wind speed was over 80 mph, while the air temperature was somewhere below minus 20 degrees Celsius.
After setting up our tent kitchen and hosting a feast of bagged chili con carne, Twix, and hot chocolate, we patted the tent and Felicity came over to talk to us. She reassured us to keep our calm as the storm passed, but she revealed that the weight of the snow that had accumulated outside our porch had broken one of our tent poles and we needed to we get up every two hours all night to shovel snow. in order to ensure that no further damage has been done and that we have not been buried alive.
