by Raynor Winn
At a junction in the path, the last of the bus trippers hurried past and we dropped the packs for a moment. Two backpackers passed, slowly walking over the brow of the hill, stooped under rucksacks so vast that they caused their legs to move with knees bent and their feet turned outwards. The boy had a shock of ginger hair, making him look oddly like Ed Sheeran carrying his own luggage. The girl, small and dark, seemed vertically compressed under the weight, her rucksack so large she could rest her head against the top while the bottom prevented her from sitting down.
‘Wow, what do you think they’ve got in there? Thought we had a lot!’
‘If that’s Ed Sheeran maybe it’s a guitar.’
‘And a drum kit.’
‘Of course it’s not Ed Sheeran. He’d be dropped in by helicopter.’
Ahead of us the mountains opened into an undulating carpet of colour stretching in every direction. We continued along a slowly rising path as every turn and dip and climb opened a new view to another mountain range. A landscape without borders; mountainous horizons without end. Peach, yellow and ochre hills glowed in the afternoon light. Black ash-falls holding the only signs of vegetation dazzled in streaks of bright fluorescent green: moss and primitive grasses creating the start of life on dry mountains that seemed to still glisten from the dampness of millennia under ice. Sharing cereal bars and raisins, we stopped to take photographs so often that the afternoon was rapidly disappearing. As Dave lifted Moth’s pack on to his shoulders a girl stopped for a moment nearby.
‘Hi, great view.’ I’d already fallen back into the hiker rhythm of saying hello to everyone who passed. Responses came in languages and accents new and unheard before, the casual acknowledgement of passing through a wild space. No need for more, the common language was in the air around us. But this girl didn’t respond. Just took an enormous camera from her pack with a lens the size of my boot, took a quick snap before packing it away and striding on, her bright red trousers flashing across the landscape in rapid time. We walked slowly on as she disappeared from view.
‘Glad I did some training. Could keep up with her if I wanted to, like. Just holding back for the rest of you.’
‘Course you are, Dave, thanks for that.’
Grey patches began to appear on the hillsides as the temperature dipped and we walked in waterproofs despite the sun.
‘Do you think that’s ice? It’s a bit grey for ice.’ Julie was pointing to a grey patch in the hillside ahead.
‘The remnants of last winter’s snow. Turned to ice, I think.’ Dave was closer now, so had a clearer view ahead.
Dropping down from the crest of a small ridge we came to the first ice field, where a deep ravine of snow had turned to hard-packed ice that was now melting in the sun. Beneath, a river visible through arches and caverns in the ice carved its own passage. The ice formed a bridge over a small gorge. I’d expected the ice to be white and pristine clean, but this was darkly streaked with black mush. Moth stood on the ice next to me, kicking into it with the heel of his boot.
‘What do you think this black stuff is? Do you think it’s blown ash?’
‘Could be, in part. But possibly it’s cryoconite.’
‘What?’
I watched Moth walk hesitantly across the ice, taking care that his feet stayed where he placed them. At moments like this I realized that while I’d lived at the chapel, spending so much time inside my own head, I’d really had very little idea what he’d been doing at uni. Cryoconite, what was that?
It seems cryoconite is a substance that’s causing glaciers across the world to melt even faster than we expected. Dust, ash, soot, bacteria and microbes picked up by wind and rain fall on the glaciers and ice fields, mixing with the meltwater on the surface and forming black patches. Just like anything else on the earth’s surface, a black glacier will absorb more heat than a white one. More heat absorbed into ice can only mean one thing. Melting. Cryoconite is a natural phenomenon that will have occurred across the glaciers for as long as they’ve existed, especially here where the land throws out clouds of ash on a regular basis. But now rather than ash-fall being an occasional occurrence, soot from the world’s carbon emissions is constantly circulating the earth, deposited with every fall of rain or snow on these once pristine landscapes. On the bodies of ice that hold the key not only to our sea levels but possibly even our climate balance.
By the time Moth had gone to great pains to explain the formation of cryoconite, we had passed over a wide plateau with open peaks and undulations on every side and multi-coloured mountains stretching through 270 degrees of the horizon. The final ninety degrees was filled with ice slopes rising to the side and ahead and bringing a cold wind that blew in frozen blasts from glaciers just out of sight. A monument of mounded rocks and a small metal plaque drew us off the path. A memorial to a man of only twenty-five who had got lost in a blizzard on the hillside, not half a mile away from the safety of the mountain hut. These hills are no sanctuary for any living thing. Rock, ice and sulphur are all that belong here, in a land where summer can disappear in a breath, replaced by the remorseless grip of winter before a man has time to check his map.
I’m not a fan of walking poles. I’ve always found them cumbersome, unnecessary, more of a hindrance than a walking aid and just another few grammes of weight that I don’t want to carry. Moth had carried one for a year or two, something for those unstable moments when he needed to stop himself stumbling. I’d held out, resisting them as a symbol of giving in to the inevitability of decaying joints. But persuaded by YouTube videos that I would need them for river crossings, I’d bought one. Just one, and it was staying firmly strapped to my pack, despite having seen many under-thirties striding out with two, using them like cross-country skiing poles. Now we stood on the edge of a sloping ice sheet that stretched down the mountainside from high above to a few hundred feet below. I watched Dave and Julie set off, Dave holding his one pole on the downward slope and crossing without issue, Julie following with her two, not even a slip. Moth set off, the pole protecting him from slipping with his lopsided gait. He stopped and turned back, waving his stick in the air.
‘Just do it. Give in to the pole and just get it out.’
I looked around and self-consciously took the pole off my pack. Unsure of the feel of it in my hand, I stepped cautiously out on to the ice. I hated putting my trust in something other than my own legs, yet I walked across the ice slope without slipping.
‘Oh, she’s done it. Welcome to the world of the old ones.’
‘Thanks for that, Julie, it was just a precaution. I’m sure I’d have been fine without it.’
‘Oh yeah, you wouldn’t have slipped once, like.’
A beacon light at the edge of the ice marked the approach to Hrafntinnusker mountain hut. These huts sit like day markers on the path. Available for people to stay in, sleeping on small mattresses in their own sleeping bags, some provide food but all of them provide warmth and shelter from the harshest of environments. All of the huts along the way were fully pre-booked, and really expensive if they hadn’t been, so we planned to camp near the huts each day if we could walk far enough, so we could enjoy the communal cooking tents that were erected outside and the wonders of their toilet facilities. As we reached the edge where the land fell away, green and red huts appeared on the hillside below. Clustered around the high viewpoint of the huts and scattered down the rocky hillside were stone circles. They had the look of a ruined ancient settlement, but each stone circle stood only one to two feet high and encased a tent. Elaborate wind protection for vulnerable nylon shelters on an exposed mountainside.
Just the sight of a tiny metal hut among the stone circles made me realize I hadn’t peed for ten hours. I took a deep breath and went into the stinking shed. It still seemed infinitely preferable to dropping many layers of clothing and squatting in the ice. Strangely, dehydration wasn’t something I’d considered in a subarctic climate, but in the cold, dry air I hadn’t even thought of drinking. I clos
ed the door behind me and exhaled.
We erected the tent on shale and black ash within the last remaining stone circle, set fifty metres down the mountain from the others. The girl in the red trousers was here and I watched her march up the hill near the huts, passing others on the path in a rapid ascent, as Moth blew some air into the self-inflating mattress that didn’t inflate, then collapsed on to it.
‘I’m done. Don’t know if I’ve got the energy to get back up to the cooking tent for food. Can’t we eat here?’
‘We could, but I think Dave and Julie are already there; they’ll be waiting for us. Shall I go up and tell them we’re eating here?’ I didn’t know if I could even make it up there myself; my calves had seized into a spasm that felt as if they were in a vice and I needed sleep more than food.
‘No, you go up. I can’t let them see how tough I’m finding this. Get the water boiling and I’ll be there – I just need a minute.’
The cooking tent was dark, with a long camping table running down the middle of the damp ash floor. Inside Dave and Julie were already eating. Further into the tent in the gloom at the back the couple with the huge rucksacks were laying out a huge array of food and frying pans alongside the girl in the red trousers.
‘Wow, did you really carry all that?’ Tins of baked beans, fresh peppers, a dozen eggs, a bag of flour, containers of herbs, salt, pepper, knives, forks.
‘Yes, it was so hard.’ The girl with dark hair cracked eggs into the pan, while the boy, who close up clearly wasn’t Ed Sheeran, watched the girl in red trousers as she stirred noodles in a pan.
‘Why are you doing it? I hate dried food, but even I wouldn’t carry all of that across the mountains.’
‘This is the first trek I’ve done. Eric asked me to come and said that we needed to bring all the food. It’s okay, we’re going to eat our way through it.’
‘Eric, is that your boyfriend with the ginger hair? I hope he’s carrying his share of all this.’
‘Oh, he’s not my boyfriend, just a friend. I came from Germany to study geothermal engineering in Iceland; I met him on the campus. He hasn’t got room for much food, his sleeping bag is too big to fit anything else in.’
‘You must really like him.’
She whisked her eggs; clearly more than just liked. I doubted she would carry enough weight to make a donkey’s knees buckle if she only liked him.
‘I keep my weight to less than ten kilos, even less when I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. You’re a fool to carry it. I was going to hike with you two guys tomorrow, but if you can’t keep up I’ll go on ahead.’ The girl in the red trousers ate her noodles while plaiting her hair, catching Eric’s unwavering gaze. I looked at the dark-haired girl, who continued whisking. We all knew she’d be walking alone tomorrow.
‘Saw you run up the hill earlier. Is there a good view up there, like?’ Dave, oblivious to the dynamics between the group, had been focused on food.
‘Yes, went up before I ate, superb views, took some great sunset shots.’
‘What do you reckon? Shall we go up and have a look before we turn in, like?’
Walk up to the top of a mountain for the view? I wasn’t sure if I could even stand up. The first day of a trail, having done no physical preparation, and my legs had seized into painful unbendable stilts.
‘Yeah, sure, why not.’
We all dragged our end-of-the-day legs up an ash slope and on to the rocky hillside. The light began to fade as cloud flowed over the hill top: running wet air following the contours from the top of the hill and down into the valley as the summit disappeared under pink and orange water vapour. Lights came on in the stone-encased tents before they disappeared too.
‘No point going up now then.’ Julie felt in her pocket and produced a bag. ‘Jelly baby, anyone?’
We sat in the murk and ate sweets as the mist caressed the land, lifting and falling as if moved by some force within the earth. An ethereal communication between sky and land. The crackling, magnetized wet air lowered, momentarily becoming denser in the valley to display a faintly lit thermal inversion, before expanding again to obscure everything.
Shivering in the rapidly dropping temperatures we wandered in the direction of the campsite, our head torches illuminating nothing but fog and rock. We walked beyond the sound of Dave and Julie opening their flysheet zip to a rocky unfamiliar slope where there was no sign of our tent. The mist began to blow past on a rising breeze. I couldn’t shake the thought of the young man who had died on the hillside, only a few hundred metres from the hut. So easy in this exposed land of ice, stone and electric air to slip through the cracks between life and death. My hand in Moth’s, we retraced our steps uphill, eventually stumbling over the stone circle that hid the tent.
‘I never thought I’d see something like this, thought the days of adventures were over.’ Moth was sitting up in his sleeping bag putting his hat and gloves on.
‘But now we’re on the side of a mountain in the wild heart of Iceland and, according to the tourist information office, winter’s coming on Sunday.’
‘They can’t know that.’
‘Of course not, but the buses stop running on Saturday night so I suppose they’re moving on to the winter timetable. How are you feeling?’
‘Like when I lie down I might never get up.’
‘You’ll have to: the huts close in just over a week. We’d be under two metres of snow by the end of next month.’
Huddled together in the middle of the tent, wearing most of our clothes inside our sleeping bags, we lay awake as a wild roaring wind shook the flysheet and blew through the vent holes.
‘I’m so sorry we’re here. I just had the memory of you on the Coast Path, how you almost walked yourself back to health, and I just hoped … I keep pushing and pushing – you must be beginning to hate me. I’m not like your wife any more, more like a parent who wants you to play football for England.’
‘Ray, you do talk crap. It was my idea anyway. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be, just go to sleep.’
The wind shook the tent violently, the joints of the poles creaking with the threat of collapse.
‘You do realize that today we actually did something we’ve never achieved before.’
‘Listen to that wind! I know, I’m on a mountain in Iceland.’
‘No, something much bigger than that. We did one of Paddy Dillon’s day sections in one day not three.’
‘Oh wow, yes we did.’
Álftavatn
I fell out of the tent, catching my foot on the pile of boots. No time to put them on: I rushed behind the stone enclosure and peed in the wind. The cloud was still low, enclosing wet air that rushed and swirled eerily in eddies of green-tinged vapour. Cold steam from a hot, boiling earth. I crawled back into the tent, picking lava and black ash from my socks and curled into the sleeping bag, pulling it closed over my head. Wrapped in a down cocoon, drifting in and out of sleep, I could feel a sense of air, earth and sky moving as one interwoven current of molecules.
I’d read a magazine article in the airport that discussed the role of the sea as a sink for CO2 emissions. Apparently one-third of atmospheric CO2 is taken up by the sea. In the surface ocean that volume is rising in line with rising atmospheric levels. But in the deeper, colder oceans it’s rising at twice that rate: vast quantities of CO2 held trapped in the deep oceans. It seems this whole system is only held stable by the salinity of the water. I put my duvet coat on inside the sleeping bag and tried to block the vision of the ice melting into rivers beneath the ice fields the day before. Fresh water running towards the sea. What will happen when the glacial melt increases? Could that CO2 sink system be affected? If glaciers are melting then so too is the permafrost of the northern hemisphere, where unquantifiable volumes of CO2 and methane are held. Greenhouse gases poised to be set free into the atmosphere. I could almost feel the coming heat, but not enough to stop me shivering into the morning light. One of the lucky ones, still able to feel the
cold of the high north in late August.
I made tea and porridge while still sitting in the sleeping bag having hardly slept – my own fault for half-reading articles about science. But even as the water boiled, I couldn’t shake the sense of the utter irrelevance of mankind to the terrifying, powerful forces that form the earth. The sense that despite our destruction of its equilibrium, the earth and the atmosphere would continue to move as one. In that wild place, close to the birth of the land, there was an overwhelming awareness of the earth gathering itself, preparing. Rising towards the moment when it would shake like a wet muddy dog and then go about its business. Rid for good of the annoyance of humanity.
‘Porridge?’
‘Oh, is it morning already? Can I have tea first?’
‘No, it’ll go cold.’
‘Why so grumpy? Did you sleep okay?’
‘No, not exactly.’
The other cold campers, and the warm ones who’d stayed in the huts overnight, set off into the mist, out of view before they’d even left the stone circles. We were alone again, shaking fog from the tents and drinking more tea as the cloud began to lift and the landscape reappeared. Below our viewpoint on the rocky, ash-covered mountainside, the trail markers fell into a flat valley bottom that appeared to stretch uninterrupted to a ridgeline in the far distance.
‘Looks like a nice easy walk. What does Paddy say, Moth, you’ve got your glasses?’ I knew mine were buried somewhere in my rucksack, probably wrapped in the sleeping bag.