4 ways to plan your sustainable trip to Iceland: The Basics 

4 ways to plan your sustainable trip to Iceland: The Basics When we guide people on the glacier, the question we get most frequently is, “Is the glacier melting because of climate change/global warming?”, often followed by, “Are we hurting the glacier by walking on it?” The question of how climate change affects the glaciers deserves a blog of its own, but to answer the second question, the hikes and footfalls themselves are not the issue. A challenge facing the sustainable or eco-tourism industry is how to provide more sustainable or eco-friendly options for tourists visiting our country. Sometimes there isn’t much of a choice (as in, whether to fly or say, sail to Iceland) but we’ve tried to round-up some choices you could make to have a more sustainable trip in Iceland.  Offsetting your flight to Iceland Unfortunately, there are not many options for reaching Iceland. Travelling by car requires you to take the ferry from Denmark, and sea-based operations like cruise ships come with their own large carbon footprint. If flying, try to book non-stop flights or minimize stopovers whenever you can: It’s the take offs and landings that create most of an airplane’s carbon emissions. It’s worth seeing if the airline you fly with has a carbon reduction program like Icelandair, who have an inbuilt carbon calculator and connections to Icelandic companies that plant trees locally. Otherwise, you can estimate your carbon emissions using a calculator like My Climate and then choose one of their programs, or donate to an Iceland-based company like the Forestry Service’s Iceland Carbon Fund Kolviður. Electric car rental, bus travel, ridesharing and hitchhiking in Iceland  For a country with one main highway (and the odd road poking out the sides), Iceland has taken a while to coordinate electric car travel with tourism. There is now one company, Geysir Car Rental, offering a small fleet of electric cars for about €600 for a week (as compared to about €300 for an automatic bensin/diesel car). It’s worth calculating how much and where you’ll be driving, because at between 200 – 240ISK a litre (€2 a litre or $7 USD a gallon) you might find it worth the initial upfront cost to go electric or hybrid. This is a good blog about fuel costs in Iceland. The electric network is better than ever, so our advice is to check in with Geysir car rental and ask them questions pertaining to your itinerary, and plan driving times and the length of your days around charging stations. It is also possible to take the bus year-round in Iceland, although it’s a lengthier and less-reliable journey in the winter due to weather delays. Nonetheless, you can take buses around town with Straeto (make sure you get the app!), to the highlands with companies like Trex.is and Reykjavik Excursions, and consider getting a bus pass that covers the popular south coast, the highlands, or the ring road.  Samferda, “travelling together” is a ridesharing website where people advertise rides or request them. It’s always polite to offer your host cash/PayPal for gas as it’s quite expensive here, although some won’t ask for this. You can also try the ol’ thumb on the road, but this is mainly successful on the south coast and can be hard to manage in bad weather so always have a back up plan.  Lastly, you could consider taking tours with local companies like our friends Hidden Iceland to reduce the days you rent your car, sharing fuel, and to boot, getting some good local guidance.  Sustainable accommodation A lot of travellers want to have the “authentic” experience when travelling in Iceland, but it’s important to consider whether your desire to experience the “real” Reykjavik is having a detrimental effect on the actual residents. AirBnB is a double-edged sword. For some residents, it can assist with rental costs, but many apartments listed on AirBnB are run like guesthouses and hotels and are effectively pushing people out of the housing market. Reykjavik has more hotel rooms than ever before and prices have been adjusted to reflect this so consider booking a hotel in the city center. You can get a great sense of Icelandic design from visiting the many stores and bars downtown. Outside of the city, it’s much better for the local economy to book into guesthouses and AirBnB cottages and cabins. Many icelanders have summer houses they occasionally rent out, or run guesthouses out of older farms that they can no longer work due to age or the changing market. Here, your money is going directly into the pockets of the local communities rather than larger hotel chains based out of Reykjavik, so you’re helping to support schools, roads, services, and individuals. Community-based tourism: Local, small family business  The way to truly support small business and local communities in Iceland is to go with companies and guides that pay their tax to their local communities. This supports schools so children can grow up in the countryside with their families, preschools so working parents (especially mothers like Local guides Helen and Lotta!) can help run local businesses, road and plow services, recycling, search and rescue, and health centres. The tour companies operating from the city will definitely be doing their part as many of the employees are long-term residents of Reykjavik, but where you can help out the 30% odd percent who live outside of the city, go for it! Our pick for city tours is always going to be our friends Hidden Iceland not just because all their founders and guides are extremely smart and extremely attractive, but because they support families, pay a living wage, choose local operators and offset their carbon footprint. When you have the chance outside of Reykjavik to book day tours, consider doing it with family companies like Midgard Adventure and KatlaTrack for your south coast adventures near the Highlands and Vik, and we’d love to have you for your Skaftafell shenanigans. Send us a line if you’re after

Why is the ice blue? An introduction to glaciers in Iceland

Why is the ice blue? An introduction to glaciers in Iceland What is a glacier?  A glacier is a huge mass of ice and snow that is constantly moving under its own weight. Glaciers are made up of fallen snow that compresses into thick ice masses. Glaciers form when snow remains long enough to transform into ice. Each  winter, more snow is added, and it does not all melt in summer. The weight of the snow creates pressure which transforms the lower parts of the snow into ice. It forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds how fast it melts, over a period of many years, or centuries. Glaciers slowly deform and flow due to stresses induced by their weight which creates crevasses and other features. Glacier mass is affected by long term climate change (precipitation, temperature, cloud cover), which makes glacial changes to be considered amongst the most sensitive indicators of climate change.  Why is the glacier ice blue? After snow falls on a glacier, it ends up getting compressed into ice. As it’s compressed ice, all air bubbles are squeezed out and ice crystals enlarge, which makes the ice appear blue. Water is very good at absorbing light. Blue is the colour of light that has the most energy. Only the strongest light, with the most energy, is able to escape. This causes the blue to be the only colour of light that escapes without being absorbed. The thicker the glacier is, the more blue it appears.  What is a glacier outlet? Outlet glaciers, or glacier tongues, is where we do our glacier trips. They are channels of ice that flow out of ice caps (such as Vatnajökull glacier), which are constrained on the sides with exposed bedrock.  What is an ice cave? A tunnel or a hole in the glacier formed by water flow. As they can be fragile in summer when it’s warm and the glaciers are melting, we can only access them in winter time when it’s cold enough, resulting in most water to freeze up. Ice caves can be full of water or not safe to access in the summer time.  After snow falls on a glacier, it ends up getting compressed into ice. As it’s compressed ice, all air bubbles are squeezed out and ice crystals enlarge, which makes the ice appear blue. We are able to visit the ice caves during the winter time only and this is when we offer our public ice cave tours and the private trips for those who are interested. What is the biggest glacier in Iceland? Vatnajökull, the area where we operate as a company, is the place where you can experience the biggest glacier in Iceland and the second biggest ice cap in Europe. This glacier has around 30 different outlets and we proudly operate on two of them: a beautiful Falljökull in the summer and a Breiðamerkurjökull in the winter time. The first one is easy to reach from Skaftafell National Park and the second one is very close to Glacier lagoon Jökulsárlón. Is it safe to go on the glacier on my own? It is not recommended for travellers visiting Iceland to do a glacier walk on your own. The weather in Iceland is quite unpredictable and it is definitely not safe for a person who doesn’t know the area to be going to any glacier outlet without a guide and any safety equipment. We definitely recommend booking a tour with any of the local companies who offer visits to different parts of Skaftafell and Vatnajökull areas. Some travel agencies also offer glacier hikes in the Sólheimajökull area, which is closer to Reykjavík. Good option if you have limited time in Iceland. OUR RECENT POSTS

Why we love exploring the glacier in the summer 

Why we love exploring the glacier in the summer From April to September we take you on small group glacier hikes to Vatnajökull National Park. Our favorite glacier outlet for an adventurous but family friendly hike is Falljökull.  Pack your outdoor clothes and a light backpack for some layers and sunglasses and head to the southeast of Iceland! All our tours in the summertime start at Freysnes service station. You can leave your car behind and jump into one of our super jeeps. On the short drive you can enjoy a view of Hvannadalshnjúkur, Iceland’s highest peak, rising up at 2,110m tall, right until we dip deeper into the Falljökull valley. We drive as far as we can into the valley along an old sheep track that was put in by the local farmers, before the area was made into a national park. The track is still in use today to round up all the sheep that call the valley home during the summer, during the annual réttir. Our super jeep makes light work of the rough terrain so that we arrive at the edge of the glacier in no time. We care about our environment and therefore offset all our carbon footprints – who knows maybe there will be electric super jeeps soon?! Our guides have all equipment to keep you safe and help you into harness and crampons. With a helmet on your head and an ice ax in your hand we can start our summer glacier adventure. Crossing through the rocks the glacier has left we take the hill to get up onto the ice. You will take your first steps on Vatnajökull ice that is hundreds of years old. It doesn‘t take long to get used to crampons underneath your feet but the sound of crunchy ice never gets old. The Glacier Encounter is a gentle hike on the lower, flatter section with a view of the icefall from below. This hike weaves in and out of the relaxed waves where the crevasses flatten out again and explores lots of interesting features, vertical walls, deep moulins and lots of streams to drink from! You can expect a physically easy, but action-packed hour on the ice itself. The Glacier Encounter is the perfect choice if you are looking for an easy glacier hike in Iceland or a kid friendly glacier hike. You might even get to meet the inhabitants of Falljökull – glacier mice. Some might be relieved to hear they are not real mice but they are for sure special since you can only find them in a few places on earth and Faljökull is one of them! In this lower section of the glacier we also come across something very characteristic of Icelandic glaciers – the volcanic ash. We see it collected in small, volcano-like cones and in great streaks across the surface. Falljökull sits beneath Öræfajökull, the ´wasteland´ volcano that is one of just a few local volcanoes under Vatnajökull and in Iceland. With the ash blowing on Iceland´s high winds, it spreads across the islands and glaciers quite easily. During a glacier walk in Iceland you will truly experience the land of fire and ice. The Glacier Discovery takes you on a longer expedition to make full use of your three hours on the ice, navigating up through the cracks and waves to the base of the icefall. Up here, the ice is moving faster and the ash is dropping into the crevasses and getting washed down the glacier by the streams. We emerge up on a second plateau and choose our path around the edges of crevasses and moulins, where we can look down into the deep blue interior of the ice. Heading up into the seracs gives us an overview all the over the glacier lagoon to the ocean. Even on a rainy day the moody clouds make for the perfect backdrop of the high ice pillars of the ice fall. It’s hard to do the same tour twice up here because there are endless changing features to explore, but that’s the beauty of such a unique experience in nature. Our Glacier Discovery is a small group activity off the beaten path. If you are looking for an even smaller group glacier hike in Iceland we organize private tours. A guide just for your family with smaller children, your group of friends that want to try ice climbing or a proposal on the ice. Let’s find the perfect glacier adventure for you in the southeast of Iceland. OUR RECENT POSTS

A guide to hunting the Northern Lights in Iceland

A guide to hunting the Northern Lights in Iceland One of the biggest draws to Iceland is the Northern Lights. During the winter months when it’s dark you can witness this stunning natural phenomenon where green lights flicker and dance through the cold night sky. Typically the lights are visible in Iceland between August and early April. Here we’ll explain what the northern lights are and how that affects how you look for them, as well as how to use some helpful websites and recommended phone apps. What are the northern lights and how do they work? It helps to understand what the lights are before you start hunting for them. The mistake most people make is that they head out to see the lights and are met with a thick wall of cloud, a full moon, or there’s no forecast for the lights in the area that evening.  The dancing lights, northern lights or the Aurora Borealis (in the northern hemisphere, Aurora Australis in the south) are collisions between electrically charged particles from the sun and Earth’s atmosphere. The particles are drawn to the magnetic north and south poles, which is why you only see the northern lights at high latitudes like in Iceland.  We often talk about there being a ‘sun storm’ that leads to us seeing the lights. Just like with the rain, if there’s no rain, there are no rainbows. Without these particles coming from the sun carried towards us on a solar wind, there are no northern lights. This is why a forecast will show activity on one day, and not on another.  What is the KPI index? When we talk about “activity” or the KPI index, what we’re referring to is how close the particles from the sun are in relation to us on a scale of 0 to 9. The Kp–index describes how much turbulence the solar wind has caused as it interacts with our atmosphere. The faster the solar wind blows, the greater the turbulence and the brighter and more intense the northern lights.  The scale indicates how intense the geomagnetic storm is likely to be. It will regularly be between 1-3 daily in Iceland, but when it starts to hit 3-6, you’d better grab your camera and a sweater – but no need for a raincoat, it’s not that kind of storm.  The most common colour we see is green, which is made by particles with oxygen interacting with the atmosphere about 60 miles or 100km above the earth.  Nitrogen rather than oxygen produces blue or purplish-red aurora, which is generally considered a very good Aurora here in Iceland. This is more about the gas in the particles than how dark the sky is, or how “high” it is on the KP index. However, the more particles and the stronger the wind, the higher chance of seeing the lights and the more intense they’re likely to be.  How to check the forecast There are a few sites that we recommend for checking activity. By using these you should be able to get an accurate forecast for each night you are here, and for different areas in Iceland.  Check the cloud cover Use the Icelandic site vedur.is (which you can select in English) and here you can see an hourly cloud cover forecast to get an idea of the coverage in the area you will be staying. The trick to vedur.is is to remember that the cloud cover is green, and the clear skies are white – it can be a little confusing at first glance! You can select the language (English or Icelandic) in the top middle of the browser, marked with the flag. If you search “Aurora” in the search bar, or click on any of the coloured images of Iceland it will navigate to a page where the Aurora Forecast becomes available on the browser on the left. If you click that, you’ll see this view with green and white. On the right hand side it shows you the forecast level on a scale from 1-9, and will give you the sunrise, sunset and moonrise times for the day so you can try to plan your hunting hour-by-hour. You can move the blue button at the bottom hour-by-hour to watch the cloud forecast and the aurora forecast change.  Check the activity You can do a basic check of the activity near you using the Vedur.is website and mobile version. We also recommend  the app Aurora – My Aurora Forecast – Aurora Alerts and Northern Lights forecast app for Android or iPhone. The app can be set up to give you a push notification when the KP index is heading above 3, which is when you’ll start seeing green aurora with the naked eye. The in-app cloud coverage prediction isn’t always accurate however, so we would suggest combining the KP and activity predictions from the app with a more up-to-date and local cloud coverage prediction from Vedur.is. If you’re looking for something more in-depth, Spaceweather.com is a great resource for plain language information about solar activity and storms. They feature a daily forecast on the left hand side, a visual representation of the aurora around the northern and southern hemispheres, and also have an SMS update system you can subscribe to for about USD $4.95 a month that will send you more-in-depth text messages than the Aurora app. OUR RECENT POSTS

Ice Caves: What? Where? How?

Ice Caves: What? Where? How?​ The chances are, if you have stumbled across our website it is because you are looking for an ice cave tour and perhaps you would like to know a bit more about where the caves are and how they are formed.  What are they? Ice caves are chambers that form in the ice within the outlet glaciers.  How are they formed? Ice caves are formed during the summer months when rivers and channels run through the ice, they carve tunnels and chambers among other formations within the dense glacier ice. Once the colder winter weather arrives and the rivers retreat we can access the caves and explore the icy blue underworld of the glaciers. Where can I find them? Ice caves can be found within any glacier in Iceland, there are many that will never be discovered in the more remote parts of the country.The most popular place to visit the caves is in the South East of Iceland in the outlets of the Vatnajokull glacier. Here there are caves that are often accessible within 1 hour from the main Route 1 making them a popular attraction with tourists in Iceland.  When can I visit them? Ice caves are normally accessible from late October to late March however the weather conditions play a big part in this and we have to monitor the caves constantly, perhaps we can visit them a bit earlier or perhaps we have to end the season early.  How can I get to them? You can visit Ice caves on organised tours. At Local Guide we offer daily tours both short accessible yours and longer tours aimed at the fitter more adventurous client. We use specially modified superjeeps to access the caves and highly experienced guides from the local area. Our meeting point is at the main parking area next to the Glacier Lagoon Jökulsárlón. It is very easy to see our big black van with the Local Guide logo on.  Can I go alone? No. It is very important that you visit the cave with a trained guide. They use their years of experience to monitor the conditions of the cave, know which areas are safe/unsafe to visit and they carry safety equipment with them at all times. Weather can change very quickly in Iceland and can lead to unpredictable and uncomfortable conditions if you do not have the correct vehicle to access the caves. OUR RECENT POSTS

VISIT VATNAJÖKULL

VISIT VATNAJÖKULL Of all the beautiful glaciers in the Skaftafell region of Vatnajökull, Falljökull is the one many locals in the area are privileged to call their workplace. Falljökull is famous for its steep, flowing ice fall and dramatic mountains. You´ll find many photos of the icefall and the undulating waves of ice in travellers’ holiday albums, because who could come to Iceland without checking out its namesake? Falljökull or the ‘falling glacier’ stems from the main ice cap Vatnajökull, which itself is around 8% of Iceland´s total landmass. Falljökull is what we call a ´glacier tongue´ in that it´s a smaller glacier that comes off the larger ice cap, like a stream coming from a lake. The glacier was first formed high up above the mountains in the ice cap, where the yearly snowfall compressed down over time to become the special glacier ice, which melts much more slowly than regular ice that develops at freezing point. The ice that we hike on in the Vatnajökull national park ranges anywhere from 400 to 1,000 years old since it was last snow! A glacier hiking or ice climbing tour onto Falljökull begins from Freysnes gas station, located just a 5 minute drive from the glacier carpark. You catch your first glimpse of the glacier after heading past the Svínafell settlement, and can watch the tallest peak of Iceland, Hvannadalshnjúkur rising up at 2,110m tall, right until we dip deeper into the Falljökull valley.We drive as far as we can into the valley along an old sheep track that was put in by the local farmers, before the area was made into a national park. The track is still in use today to round up all the sheep that call the valley home during the summer, during the annual réttir. Our super jeep makes light work of the rough terrain, and within just 15 short minutes we´ve made it from the meeting point to the terminal face of the glacier. Before putting on our crampons and stepping onto the hard glacier ice, we need to ascend one of the many hills of ´dead ice´at the end of the glacier. These hills are made of hard glacier ice, and due to being covered by a thick layer of ash and rocky debris, they are protected from melting away in the sun. We reach the edge of the ice, have a quick lesson in walking in crampons, a small safety briefing, and then we´re off.  Taking your first, crunching steps on a glacier is a vivid sensory memory to store away for decades to come. The crunch, crunch, crunch of crampons biting into crusty white ice, the trickle of the refreshingly cold glacier melt water flowing over the surface and the feeling of the cool wind coming off the ice cap. OUR RECENT POSTS