Snæfellsjökull

Saturday @ 10:50pm, just before I wanted to go out for a good nights dance... Hulda calls: we are driving to Snæfellsjökull for a good hike and a snowboard descent tomorrow, are you in? It took me the wink of an eye to throw the "night out" over board...
Obviously I had nothing reasonable in my fridge for a good day's hike so I grabbed my keys, forgot my jacket and ran to the 10 11 store to get some chocolate-crunch-energy-bars, nuts and some toast...
Very excited I hardly could fall asleep... give me a snowboard and a glacier and I've got everything I need!!!
Alarm set on 6am I jumped out of bed grabbed my stuff and sprinted out to the car... It was Sunday and the usually packed roads of Reykjavik at 6am were even more packed than ever... I think I counted 5 cars! As I had not been anywhere close to the Snæfellsness Penninsual I could not wait to see the u-shaped valleys and all the other lovely geology around...




On our way we obviously drove past Reykjavik's patron: Mt. Esja
It took us about 2.5 hours on the northern ring road to get to Snæfellsjökull. The most fantastic scenery, given that it was easter no-one was to be found...
We had anticipated for the hike to take about 4 hours, that is with sunshine... But the higher we went the windier it got which means wind from every possible angle. Given our snowboards on our back we were the perfect obstruction which made it even more challenging to hike up slops of 30-45 degress.



We decided to get going with our snowboards at an altitude of about 1100 meters as the snowstorm was getting very intense... And then... The most amazing part started. Going snowboarding on an unprepared glacier is exquisite. First of all you are the only one there. This leads to extremely unprepared snow. So a range of snow types is encountered on the way down. From amazing powder snow that reached my knees to icey-bumpy tracks... Due to the persistent snowstorm I reached very high speeds... kinda scary at times... but never the less absolutely mind blowing. The group of us (4 icelandic, 1 german) were prity much enthralled by this experience and as we reached our cars the sun was shining again and more ppl were just starting to hike the glacier... lucky us we had Snæfellsjökull all for ourselves! We then decided to go to Arnarstapi for a weee apre-snowboarding. It was beautiful but still very windy...