Iceland pt.1

How do you describe a place like this? It’s really dang hard. This pictures below document the first week my family and I spent in Iceland, exploring the Southern area of the island. There will be two posts because there are just too many photos truly. We landed in Reykjavik and immediately picked up the rental car, stopped to buy a cooler and some food, and we were on our way. On zero hours of sleep (we were all too excited to sleep on the plane) we hiked to two waterfalls and stopped to pet many horses. We documented this trip carefully and paid close attention to pinning locations so that we wouldn’t forget the name or location of any of these stunning places. So, if you have any questions about where we went, stayed, ate, hiked, swam, what we packed, or what we would have done differently – feel free to comment below and ask a question or shoot me an email on the contact page. It was certainly a trip to remember.

By being a photographer you don’t often have to describe things or places to see, however it feels too simple to leave you with all of these photographs and none of the emotions that went with them. Iceland is simply other worldly. It is stunning and wild and confusing and immense and tiny and desolate and behemoth all at once. There are vast flat areas of only black sand, massive snow topped mountains, and even more mammoth glaciers encroaching on and devouring those mountains. I remember when I was in 7th grade in physical science class when we learned about glacier movement and how it formed and shaped the earth. I recall taking tests on volcanic activity and memorizing names of rock layers that formed following a eruption. Iceland is the largest science project I’ve ever encountered. All of a sudden it was pure science everywhere. At the bottom of glacial tongues were massive moraines from where the glacier grew and retreated each year. There were lava fields – fresh ones that were pitch black in the strangest shapes you could imagine, there were moss covered lava fields that went on for miles and seemed to be from another planet, and there was black sand on every beach that was everywhere and went on forever. While we drove around the Ring Road each day we passed about 15 waterfalls every mile, all jaw dropping, but just cascading down behind an old farm with a few dozen sheep eating grass at the base. The most incredible waterfalls were of course tourist attractions and usually housed a few tour buses at the bottom of them, but some of the most incredible places we saw were the ones you had to work a little harder to get to, whether that be hiking more than a mile or driving some questionable roads, I mean that’s why you rent a 4×4 car right? And we still barely touched the surface of this magical place. While we rented a tougher car, it still was not set to make it into the highlands, the center of the island. Still, we were in awe.

This is part one of a mind blowing place that left me speechless most of the time, enjoy how I saw it.