Northern Iceland - Part 3 - Lessons Learned

This is the final blog post about my January trip to the north of Iceland. In parts 1 and 2 I posted about the two halves of the trip, firstly to the Herring fishing town of Siglufjorddur at the very northern tip of Iceland looking across to Greenland, and secondly to Lake Mývatn and it's volcanic wonders. In this final part I wanted to say a few words about the wild and dangerous nature of Iceland in the winter, and about not biting off more than you can chew and respecting the way weather here can change so fast at this time of year.

Now I am a fairly well travelled person and have been to some pretty wild and remote places in my time, so when I was planning this trip to northern Iceland I decided I wanted a little more adventure than just driving on the Ring road and to try and reach places that they say you can't get to in winter. I knew that the F roads into the Highlands would be a no go, but I read that the waterfalls of Dettifoss and Aldeyjarfoss were "maybe" reachable if you had a SuperJeep. So that fired up the adventurer in me and research started about trying to reach the impassable.

It soon became clear that the west side of Dettifoss was possibly reachable on a tarmac road that is not serviced in winter, but the more photogenic east side was not. I found very few winter images of the eastern side of Dettifoss online so that really intrigued me. Aldeyjarfoss was reachable by SuperJeep and involves a 60km journey up past Goaöfoss waterfall up to the rarely visited in winter Aldeyjarfoss waterfall that looks amazing in the snow. Lots of chats to Icelandic SuperJeep companies resulted in one company who said they could get me to Aldeyjarfoss no problem although the last 6km are "a challenge if its snowed" and to the westside of Dettifoss. "How about the Eastside?" was my question. After a long wait they came back with "yeah ok, we can do it if you really want to go". So the madman in me booked the trips on two separate days with the SuperJeep company who I will not name in this post. Things didn't go to plan as you will read, and it was no ones fault really, so I don't want to name and shame them online as at the end of the day they pulled out all the stops to get us to safety.

So the day arrived for the first trip, the journey to the eastern side of Dettifoss up the impassable F864. Our guide who I will call Magnus for the purpose of this blog collected us at our Hotel an hour after sunrise saying the journey up to Dettifoss would take maybe one hour 30 mins as it had snowed hard up there, so off we went. His SuperJeep was an impressive beast. Admittedly it was not new, but the Nissan Patrol 5.6l V8 had been heavily modified. Lifted with enormous suspension and tyres that inflated and deflated from the compressor mounted in the boot. Full off road lighting rig, snorkel etc it looked the real deal and a beast.

Magnus made light work of the start of the journey. Blasting up snow covered roads and tracks we were maybe 70% of the way to Dettifoss before he started to hit heavy snow that needed the tyres to be deflated for more traction. Watching an experienced driver get through deep virgin snow was very cool and he was using the full power of the SuperJeep to drive backwards and forwards to make compacted tracks in the deep snow. We made progress. Slower than we expected but it was progress, and we were now some 5kms from the waterfall before things became really difficult. He fully deflated the tyres to 1psi and was driving really hard to to make forward progress and we felt very alone and isolated. Clearly no other vehicles had been here for a long time. Deep snow drifts with zero tracks from anyone was all we could see all around. After another 2 kms and the waterfall only 3kms away, disaster stuck and the car came to a grinding halt with bad heat smells coming inside. Magnus was clearly not expecting that, and up went the bonnet for investigations. "Overheated" was the verdict, so we let the car cool for 10 minutes. Again we immediately overheat after retrying and Magnus is again under the bonnet.

It's a problem he reported back. "Not sure what, but we have lots a lot of coolant leaking from the engine and it's overheating. We have a problem. We need to call for help". Now these are not the words you ever want to hear, but when it's minus ten degrees outside with darkness approaching and your stranded miles up an impassable track in deep snow it is seriously disconcerting. Magnus was able to reach his boss by radio, and help would come, but they would have to send another SuperJeep as no normal 4x4 would be able to reach us. The nearest SuperJeep was in Akureyri some 180kms away! So we were now faced with spending at least 3 or 4 hours, maybe longer in a dead and rapidly freezing car with darkness imminent. I wont lie, at this point I seriously regretted my decision to try and reach the eastside of Dettifoss on the "impassable in winter" side. I should have listened to people who know this island and it's weather better than me.

We hunkered down in the car which was rapidly freezing on the inside. I had 40% of my phone battery left and just 1 bar of low quality signal and it was 3.45pm with dark at 4pm. I decided it would be prudent to send a Whatsapp message to two good friends in the UK with my What3Words location and for those interested it was ///surpass.stronghold.snow with the instruction to say that if they hadnt heard from me by 9pm to contact Icelandic rescue services. An overeaction? Maybe? I just thought it was sensible for someone other than the SuperJeep company to know where we were and what was happening.

We took this image at 4pm just as the light was fading of the place we had broken down.

Four hours later we were frozen and shivering. We had no heat from the engine to warm the car. Even though we had all the arctic gear on, I had now lost feeling in my toes and my extremities. It was pitch black. It was starting to get pretty scary. I could even tell the ever cheery Magnus had not been in this position before. Finally, after forever, we saw powerful headlights coming up the valley towards our marooned car near Dettifoss. Rescue! Very happily we climbed into the warm rescue Jeep while the guys worked on the broken down vehicle, in the hope they would not have to leave it abandoned. It soon became apparent that a snapped fan belt had caused the issue and caused the overheating. They had a spare in the rescue car but it would be 30 minutes or so work to fit the new belt. I let the guys in the UK know we had help and waited for the repair to be completed.

The repair worked and soon both cars were heading back down to civilisation. We never made it to the east side of Dettifoss. The reports were correct. It is impassable in winter. Even with all the gear, a SuperJeep and experienced local guys we failed to make it, and it was a sobering experience about what can go wrong in Iceland in winter. If you are ever contemplating a similar journey, think carefully and respect Iceland's winter weather. It really does need full respect.

So that left us with a decision to make about the second SuperJeep tour we had planned a couple of days later. The snow was still bad but the SuperJeep guys assured us that the road to Aldeyjarfoss was not as bad as Dettifoss. It was 45kms of gravel track, yes snow covered track, but track all the same. The final 6kms would be tricky but a lot easier than east Dettifoss. So maybe we are mad after the previous experience, but we put our faith in Magnus and the SuperJeep company once again and set off for another "impassable in winter" waterfall!

"Our SuperJeep on the ridge above Aldeyjarfoss"

"Wild Horses on the way to Aldeyjarfoss"

Sure enough the road part was easy enough and the SuperJeep ate up the 40kms or so until we turned up the final track to the waterfall. Then we hit deep snow and progress stopped dead. We did have a "here we go again" moment, but Magnus lowered the tyre pressure and went to work ploughing the vehicle through the fresh snow. Finally we made it to the ridge above Aldeyjarfoss (see above image) and we walked the rest of the way down to the ravine with the waterfall with the camera gear. Here are my images. Ive seen lots from here in summer with the falls surrounded by brown ground, but few from mid winter. So here are mine from a very hard to reach waterfall. It's truly a special place in the snow and ice.

"Aldeyjarfoss in winter"

"Aldeyjarfoss in winter"