Drekagil - Askja – Oskjuvatn - Viti

27 June 2006

• Total distance: 9 miles
• Start point: Mountain hut at Dreki.
• Weather: Initially overcast, later sunny. Very windy at times.
• Temperature at start: probably about 8C – I didn’t have a thermometer.
• Muddiness rating: * (*=dry, *****=awful)
• People passed: Two couples, both Dutch, several hours apart
• Step counter: 18,882.
• Camera: Olympus C-5060W. Images taken before deletions = 49, plus two rolls of B&W film.

The F88 which heads south to Askja is unremarkable, by Icelandic standards. Along its seventy miles it’s unpaved, fords a few rivers, and several stretches have to be driven at a snail’s pace as it lurches and pitches over lava fields, loose rock and blowing sand. Statistically it’s been shown that half of Brits think Iceland is a supermarket and most of the rest assume it’s a land of igloos and huskies. In fact a lot of it's desert, usually an uncompromising grey volcanic expanse of “hraun” or lava field, but in places a pale brown sandy expanse similar to those you’d find in the Middle East. Only colder, obviously.

The track is defined by posts at irregular intervals, and these are invaluable where the drifting sand has removed all traces of the last vehicle to pass. However the road had only opened two or three days earlier (most roads in Iceland’s interior are blocked by snowdrifts until July) so we weren’t expecting an easy drive. The constant bashing and jerking handed out to the suspension made me happy it was a rented 4x4, but the multitude of clauses in the rental contract about the insurance not covering water damage made each ford a nerve-jangling event. Occasionally the optimal, shallowest, line was far from obvious so we adopted the principle of getting out and checking each one before launching the property of Mssrs Hertz into it.

The lovely, lonely girl warden in the mountain hut at the end of the Drekagil canyon told us the road was blocked by snow a few miles ahead. She said that so far this year few visitors had come to Askja, despite its status as one of the country’s most significant geographical and geological sites. We drove up the track until we found a snowplough parked in the way, its blond Eidur Gudjonsson-lookalike driver swigging a can of Coke and talking to the occupants of a jeep that had arrived earlier. We parked on a level bit of lava and started walking. After a mile or so the track became covered by crusty snow, which provided alternately a firm crunchy foothold or a precipitous two-foot drop down to what I fervently hoped would be rock. Most of the time it was.

Throughout Old Europe we’re accustomed to the idea that the earth we tread is unimaginably old. Not a bad assumption back in Blighty: the Reading beds and London Clays beneath our feet in the Thames valley are indeed millions of years old. Up here, though, it’s different. Straddling the divide between the American and Eurasion tectonic plates, Iceland’s geology is much younger, and youngest of all are the areas surrounding recent eruptions. The Dyngjufjoll mountain range which surrounds the volcano Askja was created by a subglacial eruption in the last Ice Age, but the huge lake Oskjuvatn at its centre was the result of a collapsing magma chamber following another eruption in 1875. At the edge of it lies a smaller lake, Viti, translated as “Hell” in Icelandic, which is a maar - a crater created in a single explosion. Viti’s water is a milky blue-green and its temperature stays constant at about 30C, evidently much warmer than Oskjuvatn which was still partially covered by ice floes. Many people tiptoe down to swim in Viti’s sulphurous stew, but we didn’t. The only person we’d met so far had warned us that the path down to the water's edge was very slippery.

Above Oskjuvatn is a large cairn of lava blocks with a cast iron tablet commemorating the lives of Walther von Knebel and Max Rudloff, who met a tragic end there in 1907. A geologist and painter respectively, they’d travelled to Askja from Cologne soon after the lake was formed, continuing a long history of German explorers to Iceland. However they disappeared without trace while sounding the lake's depths, triggering speculation about mysterious currents and passages, although the truth is more likely to centre around the makeshift canvas boat they had with them. Von Knebel’s fiancée Ina van Grumbkow came to the lake a year later, unable to accept that they could have disappeared without trace. But she grew to appreciate the fragility of human life amongst the awesome natural power in the vicinity, penned a famous poem, and established the cairn before she left.

The colours of the lakes and the surrounding volcanic minerals were astounding, especially as the sun had now come out. After an hour on the hilltop above Viti, the strengthening wind started to imperil the landscape photographer’s instinct - just one more shot, just a bit closer to the edge, just when that patch of sunlight reaches that bit of yellow, just one more, as soon as those clouds move to the left….

We shouldered our packs and headed back across snowfields less white than we’re used to because of the volcanic dust constantly blown about.

Then, on returning to the car in the evening, disaster struck. I’d wedged our last two cans of premium Icelandic beer in a snowdrift to chill. As I lifted them out one dropped, glanced off a spiky lump of lava and exploded, creating a golden geysir from its insanely expensive contents. I wrote a mournful poem and started a small cairn to commemorate the tragedy.

Click here for map > AskjaMap

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Footnote

Several people have asked me who I mean by "we". I refer of course to my longtime friend and walking companion Pete Jones, a man who laughs in the face of fear and who springs up and down mountain paths with the surefooted elegance of a young chamoix. Here's the only close-up of him I could find.

-- RodBird - 09 Jul 2006