volcanoes, cont'd.

4 a.m. hike up Ganung Batur, Bali, Indonesia

also.. more eyjafjallajokull!

Eyjafjallajökull. Me.

*Note: All photos, except one or two, by Rick Johnson. Vocals in Sigur Rós video also by Rick Johnson. Jim Wilkins on langspil.

Iceland has lost its cool again. 10 years ago, a ragged group of us tried to climb over that very same volcano, and it sent us scampering back the way we came with our tails between our legs. It's a very stubborn hunk of frozen igneous.

This led my brother-in-law yesterday to make a point: "I like how you have some sort of tie-in with most of the big current events."

Well... yeah. That's the goal.

So—at the expense of flightless travelers everywhere (including my sweet Swiss-stranded sister—tie in!), tulip farmers in Kenya, and the fledgling global economic recovery—check it out!

We did a 10 day trek that we called the Fire and Ice Tour (yes... we made sloganed shirts), because the island is very much just that. It was two weeks of glaciers, snow caves and hot springs... and even a hot rock that melted my pants. Obsidian (volcanic glass) littered the ground. Hardened lava flows from a 1994 eruption had been unhelpfully dumped all over the trail. At one point, we spent a full hour dropping huge ice blocks into a boiling pond, and at another, we spent a full day slogging uphill through what one of our crew referred to as "mile after mile of endless volcanic shit." I want to go back tomorrow.

It's the most visually otherworldly place I've ever been. Like the moon, if the moon wasn't such a freaking fascist. The midnight sun creates these sorts of six-hour-long sunsets. And the whole time we were basically aiming for the middle of these two giant ice caps — one of which was, per my prescient plans, Eyjafjallajokull.

Big white thing in the back:

Eventually we got there, camped right beneath it, and planned a marathon trek over the pass separating the ice caps and back down to the coast on the other side. Something like this:

Sigur Rós - Glósóli from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.

"Don't try if there are clouds on the icecap in the morning," the sweet Icelandic lady at the last campground warned. The next morning there were clouds. Unhappy clouds:

And we went anyway. We thought we could get up and over before the storm hit. I don't know why we thought this. That's frigging absurd. And so we climbed right into the teeth of this spittin' angry whale of a storm. Whale storm!

It actually wasn't so bad until the storm hit about two-thirds of the way up. Then we huddled and stared at the most ice-cappy part of the ice cap for an hour or two, sent a couple of former Army Rangers ahead to scout it out, and got second thoughts when Rangers returned with reports of densing (verb?) visibility, Katrina winds, and flying pebbles. Flying pebbles turned back Hitler at Stalingrad. Pebbles!

So we very literally staggered home. Some of us getting flipped:

All of us losing our pack covers (a giant pack is the last thing you want on your back in that kind of wind). All of us losing our way at one point or another.

All thrilled to see the sweet Icelandic lady waiting sans smirk to mother us into a (thankfully vacant) warm cabin with hot showers. The next day we ate whale or something, drank Spanish wine, and swam here:

Anyway... the point of this story is: I was there, man. Once. When it was silent. Before it was cool to have your travel plans shat on by an Icelandic volcano.