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Watch a full Youtube video of the trek, on my channel here.
What does it mean to truly experience a place, a landscape, Earth?
This question burned in my mind as I walk through Iceland‘s largest lava desert: Djunn..
On 2nd August 2024, a friend of mine - Mona Westphal - and I set out to walk across iceland. For over two years I had mulled over the idea of this trekking expedition. I rather fully experience Iceland, I thought: her weather, her force, her colours, her silence, desolation, beauty and vastness.
Walking through the eerie silence of Askja volcano crater, where NASA Apollo astronauts trained in 19XX, I felt suffocated and scared of the utter stillness, of the feeling of having stepped foot in nature’s graveyard and simultaneously, birthplace. The world is dunked into black-and white paste. Dry, dusty and desolate. On the crater’s rim shards larger than ten women tall, of a deep raven back jarr the white sky’s silence. Scattered around the shards, are the dark ashes of stones and stones that the gusts hadn’t yet crushed.
Life lessons
The three life lessons I time and time again, learn from walking long distances in harsh terrain, are:
- You have to keep going no matter how hard it seems or how hard the conditions are. You keep going whether it’s rain or sunshine.
- It’s you and only you that can move & set the next step. If you want to get anywhere, it’s you who needs to take action.
- You have to enjoy the process. The reward of achieving the goal and reaching the ‘end’ lies not within the end itself, but in the distance trekked and experiences, memories and things seen along the way. If you were to take out the whole pain, hardship, long desert treks, beautiful rainbows, river crossings and simply drop me off in Skogar (the trail end in Iceland) it would not be worth anything, really. The same goes for life or any vision or goals one has.
A Diary Entry - 7 August, wild camp, lava sand desert
Today was a very long day, just under 33 kilometers with heavy packs as we had to carry extra water for tomorrow as well as we crossed Iceland’s largest sand and gravel desert and walked alongside the edge of the Holuhraun 2014 lava field. I ate a whole chocolate bar and half of the Halva which kept me going. Even in the middle of this black, sandy desert, setting up camp was idyllic - the sun at 8PM still high in the sky and expanses of misplaced rocks and black sand - and us. The weather has been really good so far, except the occasional rain shower. My head is slowly clearing up, embracing the process, the slowness, the present, simply setting one step after the next. We saw Vatnajökull glacier in the distance and also went another way in order not to cross Flaedur (glacier drainage area) as that area is often underwater or swampy.