Svínafellsjökull ice climbing

Svínafellsjökull ice climbing

Hiking on Svínafellsjökull


Blue ice

I started out breaking in my new hiking boots on a treadmill at the Wellness Center back in February 2014, and put myself on a pretty rigorous 6km in an hour on a 5 to 10‰ incline.  I planned on a lot of hiking for three weeks and I wasn't going to be near dead at the end of the trip.  I was hiking an hour four or five days a week.

One of the excursions I planned on was hiking on a glacier.  I'd never seen one, I wanted to see crevasses, blue ice, moraines, kettle lakes, hear grinding and cracking as the glacier moved....  A part of one hike however was ice climbing, which lookt so cool, but having a paralyzing fear of heights, it wasn't going to happen.

But the Wellness Center has a 15 meter climbing wall that I had to pass by every day, and I thought, I can do this.  I'm fifty-three.  I took the class in top climbing, it took me six weeks to get to the top of the wall without a panic attack.  I made good progress if not slowly.  I was ready for Ice Climbing.  I was over my fear of heights.  

Ice climbing isn't quite the same as top climbing, but you are belayed, and the carabiners at the top of the climb are attacht to long screws bored into the ice. But the method for getting up there is the axes you use to create a new hold, and crampons bound to your boots for you to kick their spikes into the ice creating a new hold.  It's best just to see it in pictures. 

This is our guide Jonni preparing the gear.  A lot of what he did I recognized and was glad of it actually.  We were taught to look over each person's ropes and knots and have everything in order before starting.  That I recognized what he was doing was reassuring to say the least. 

Jonni, our guide, preparing the ice screw bolt, to attach the belay carabiners.

I had one of the men in our group take lots of pictures of me as I climbed up a crevasse wall in the glacier Svínafellsjökull.  You need to scroll down to the bottom of this page and work back up to properly follow the climb!  I wish I'd askt how high the wall was.  Maybe 10m?  It's less than the climbing wall I'd learned the sport on.   

Success!

Properly tying in and checking everything.

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A half hour before this the sky was blue and sunny and suddenly gray covered the entire glacier, making for not as beautiful pictures, but it didn't distract from the fun.  By the way, my polarized sunglasses made the entire glacier classic ice blue.  Amazing color. 

This glacier in important respects is not an ordinary one.  Note the precipitous wall of ice pouring of the Vatnajökull icecap in the distance of both photographs.  These are to Creative Commons photographs of the glacier and both have a perfect view of that wall.  It's an ice fall.  The glacier tumbles down this slope at 2 meters a day as huge blocks of ice.   We would come no closer than these pictures as that part of the glacier is extremely hazardous.  Also, the crevasses you see in the first photo all have streams and the suddenly disappear into deep holes making glacier hiking a dangerous sport and we'd be hiking on the tops of these clefts only where safe and properly belayed or our harnesses attacht to rope lines bolted along the tops.  It was on a crevasse wall that we did our ice climbing.  Naturally, that part of the glacier is constantly monitored for the safety of both hikers and climbers.

deviaxe/23

The Svínafellsjökull ice fall
Note, the the map, west of Tindaborg, how
the contour lines show the ice fall very clearly.

Bromr/wikicommons