Inside the frozen world

Katla

I remember the excitement of setting out to find this one. There was a rumour that someone had found an Ice Cave on Kötlujökull. We superjeeped out of Reykjavik in the fading darkness of a 10 am Tuesday in December. We forced the jeep down a black-sand desert following something that resembled car tracks, indicating that it was an actual road, probably just for the local farmers to find their sheep. And after many questions if this was the right life decision, we eventually stood face to face with a massive wall of ice. Now we just had to find the hole. And this hole wasn't that hard to find.

Ten years later, and now there’s a conveyor belt of tourists brought here every day.

Breiðamerkurjökull

I’ve seen many ice caves in my days, and I’ve climbed many glaciers, but nothing impressed me as much as when these guys from @glacieradventure climbed out of this beast. It’s still very early for ice cave season and the river is still high - I took these photos while standing in the ice cold glacial water for an hour or two - but this looks like a promising one for the winter.

Shot in some of the hardest conditions possible, in an almost pitch black cave compared to the light coming from the opening, with a roaring river, and a melting glacier above with ash filled water soaking the camera and lens every time it blinked. But fun was had.

Cold Is A State Of Mind

The Arctic winter can be a miserable place. It's been rough up here since humanity spread its roots under these frozen lands. But lately, in the last century or so, it's also been turned into a playground. Nowadays winter is about challenging it, finding a way to get through it that feels meaningful, as a distraction, or maybe even fall in love with it and never long for the cold to end. That way, you can conquer it. This is a small piece of a drone panorama, Ice climbing a 199m frozen waterfall in Iceland. Every few years it gets cold enough for these waterfalls to freeze over almost completely. We set out on the last day of what could be called winter. Warmer days were coming and we knew we had to climb it on this day, or possibly wait years for another opportunity like this. We grabbed a bunch of rope, axes, camera gear and went out to conquer winter.