We bundled up and hit the road in the wee hours of the morning (it was 10am, but when you travel to Iceland 10am can still be pitch blacki) to meet my Defender-driving Icelandic outback version of John Wayne. After fording a few raging streams we arrived at our destination: an enormous block of ice that has been permanently frozen between two ridges for more than 500 years aka one of Iceland’s incredible glaciers. No big deal. Hiking glaciers is just one of the better things to do when gays and lesbians travel to Iceland.
Sadly, my mountain man had forgotten the rental boots, which left me strapping military-grade clamp-ons to my multi-colored Aasics Tiger sneakers. Bad idea, but I wasn’t going to travel all the way to Iceland and not hike a glacier was I? An hour into the half-day escapade the clamp-ons were grinding deep into my Achilles. The rest of the day was spent attempting to hike without bending my ankle.
The trek wound up the side of the glacier where the oldest ice now rests. As the new layers of ice form in the winter, the older stuff slowly moves downhill, meaning the most ancient layers are furthest from the center. The darker the ice looks, the more compact it is. In fact, that dark blue color comes not from a different or superbly clean source of water, but from being so tightly compacted that no light can be captured, reflected or filtered through it.
If you’re looking to get a visual on climate change, this is the place to do it. The glacier we were hiking across is roughly one mile wide, five miles long and half a mile deep. Twelve years ago, however, it was nearly double the size. While research has been done on whether such changes in mass are cyclical, it was determined – without question – that this latest thaw does not match in any way, shape or form the traditional freezing and melting patterns of this glacier. In fact, the glacier has lost the same amount of mass in the mast twelve years that it lost in the previous 500 years before that.
After leaping back down onto earth with tired legs and gashed feet, I re-boarded the earth-galloping Defender and headed back to the “big city” of Reykjavik, a whole lot to think about and a whole lot of nighttime during which to do that thinking. Gay and lesbian travel in Iceland is beautiful and thought provoking. I suggest you check out the glaciers.