Glacier guiding in iceland

There seems no end to the talents of this breathtaking northern destination.

July 20^th, 2018

I have very mixed feelings about summer 2017.

On the one hand, I was able to get out climbing and biking with friends more than ever before. On the other, I was working behind a desk doing something that I knew I did not enjoy, and it was making me miserable. The full extent of how unhappy my work was making me was something I would not realise until months later, but for one reason or another I struggle to think of another time in my life when I was as unhappy, despite all the great opportunities I was getting to do the things I enjoy outside of work.

It was the culmination of several years of frustration of knowing that my work was something I did not enjoy, and the resignation of what I already knew but didn't want to admit – that I could not see myself doing this for my whole life.

And so it was that one evening after a particularly bad day and an especially frustrating meeting with my supervisor I sent off an application for a job I had seen advertised on the UKC forums some months prior. It was a quick application and as much an exercise in venting frustration and making myself feel better as it was a serious attempt to secure a job, little more than a couple of paragraphs of hastily written text typed into an email client. The job was as an ice climbing and glacier guide in the south of Iceland, a country I had visited several years earlier for a few days. I then promptly forgot all about it for the next few weeks, thinking nothing more of it. I felt a little better that I had made some vague effort to change my situation, but expected nothing to come of it particularly since there were no current job openings at the company.

A unusual view of the famour Jökulsarlon glacier lagoon in eastern Iceland, for once taken from the glaciers point of view. A long off road drive followed by an hour of glacier crossing is required for this view.

I was surprised, therefore, when I got an email into my inbox some time later inviting me to have a Skype interview. Immediately after the interview I knew I was going to be offered a position – the interviewers had spent almost half the interview talking about all the cool things to do in Iceland in an obvious effort to persuade me to work for them having quickly established that I was the sort of candidate they were after. When the offer was emailed to me a few days later I knew I had to make a decision quickly – they wanted people to start almost immediately. I remembered how I had respected friends of mine in the past who had made the decision to quit their jobs to pursue a career they really wanted and decided that I wanted to give it a try too. So I agreed to take the job, with the caveat that I needed more than a week to get my life in the UK sorted before flying to Iceland!

Svinafellsjökull, a popular TV and movie filming location (Game of Thrones, Interstellar, James Bond)

Abseiling into a deep moulin on Solheimajökull for a day’s ice climbing.

Looking down towards the town of Siglufjörður, nestled amongst the mountains of the Troll Peninsula.

Ski touring in the Troll Peninsula on the northern coast of Iceland, near Akureyi.

The summit plateau of Eyjafjallajökull on a bluebird day.

On arrival in Keflavik airport my new boss told me and the other new starters that we would be camping in a remote part of the far eastern part of the country for the first few nights while we were trained, before relocating to another part of the island where we would be based while working. The Skatafell National Park in southeast Iceland is an incredibly beautiful place, where vast plains of black sand stretch to the coast several miles to the south, before giving way suddenly and spectacularly to huge glaciers nestled in valleys beneath mountains towering 2000 metres above.

These glaciers spill down from the Vatnajökull icecap: covering an area of 8,100 square kilometres and with an average ice thickness of 400m this is Europe's largest icecap by volume and covers nearly 10% of the country.

Needless to say it is worth visiting for anyone interested in mountains, and for climbers it is an intriguing area as Iceland's small population means that there are many unclimbed peaks and routes.

After training we were transferred to the small town of Hvolsvöllur on the south coast, about an hour and a half's drive from the capital Reykjavik. An otherwise unremarkable small town, it is elevated by the view on a clear day to Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano which famously erupted in 2010. Standing at nearly 1700m tall this mountain is the highest in the area and dominates the skyline. Four other volcanoes are visible from the small hill in town, including Hekla, an extremely active volcano that was once thought to the entrance to hell, and Katla, a particularly large one – it's overdue by several decades and will make Eyjafjallajökull seem small by comparison when it finally does erupt!

Work as a glacier guide consists of meeting and greeting guests, equipping them with their equipment (crampons, ice axes, harnesses, helmets), before giving a short brief and walking them to the glacier, Solheimajökull (“Home of the sun glacier”). Because I was quickly signed off as an ice climbing guide, I often take people climbing and this is my favourite part of the job. We sometimes lower guests on a rope into deep crevasses and moulins on the glacier, and I relish providing an experience they would not be able to have without me. The job is a mixture of actual guiding, i.e. keeping people safe on a glacier, educating guests on the mechanics of glaciers, their influence on the landscape and the impact on them of climate change, and entertaining with jokes and stories. Working with people from all parts of the world allows for interesting and varied conversations, and meeting new people every day is what makes the job fun long after the actual work itself becomes mundane. And this is the problem with a job such as this – that even a glacier can become overly familiar after long enough, much like an office. We run the same one or two types of trip most days, so the variety can be lacking, and for this reason I am approaching a time when I will make my return to the UK.

Exploring an ice cave inside Solheimajökull.

The options for post work and days off activities are good in Iceland. During the long winter months there is skiing, both on piste and touring, and lots of frozen waterfalls to be climbed. Many of these have never been climbed before and I had the opportunity to contribute to some new routing this winter, most notably on a 6 pitch WI3+/4 gully route that was dubbed “Cod Wars” as it was climbed by two local Icelandic climbers accompanied by me and another guide from the UK! I also had an excellent long weekend of ski touring along the northern coast, a part of the country that reminded me of Scotland. In the summer time there is some rock climbing, although the young and volcanic nature of the country does not lend itself well to good quality rock for climbing so the crags tend to be pretty loose and a little sketchy. It's commonplace to have to trundle large blocks on every cragging session!

The second pitch of “Cod Wars” in good condition.

A large ice cave, locally known as “Treasure Island”.

There are some good experiences to be had though, particularly the rock spire known as Ingimundur, perched high on the cliffs of the southern coast above the main road. Although the offerings on this spire are single pitch, it's a mission just to get to it, scrambling up and along a complex series of rock and grass ledges to reach the base.

And of course the advantage of living near glaciers is that there is ice climbing available every month of the year, although it is best in the winter months when there is bullet hard blue ice to climb – in the summer this tends to turn to sun-crusted, aerated white ice that provides little challenge.

Nevertheless the glaciers provide an entertaining playground and a decent substitute for an indoor climbing wall, the nearest of which is otherwise an hour and a half's drive away in Reykjavik.

And of course there are plenty of hills and mountains to be climbed, including the volcanoes themselves – the summit of Eyjafjallajökull in particular provides some incredible vistas over the whole of south Iceland on a good day.

For the last few months living and working in this small sub-Arctic country has provided me with a great many experiences and memories which I am hugely grateful for, as well as giving me the opportunity and time to think about where I want to go in future. I will be returning to the UK in September, and I look forward to returning to Scotland, the Lake District, and of course the crags of Northumberland and catching up with the many friends I haven't had a chance to see since I left Newcastle. I hope you all enjoy the photos of this beautiful part of the world!