This Week In...Iceland

Hello! Pardon my absence. Autumn was intense, with an upward trajectory in my energy and a downward trajectory in my mood. Those things have been synonymous my entire life, so it was disorienting to say the least. 2023 was the worst year of my life so far and I sure hope I never have another one like it.

But that’s boring and I don’t want to talk about it.

I want to talk about Katla!

I’ve been spending New Year’s in Iceland with my husband and kids. This is the first time we’ve been out of the country, or on any real family vacation, since 2018. Between the pandemic, and visiting my family in the Pacific Northwest, and college tours, and settling my oldest into her new apartment, and my sister’s death and its bureaucratic aftermath, there hasn’t been time or energy to travel for fun.

But my youngest leaves for college next year, and the time for family trips is rapidly coming to a close. Soon they’ll be busy with their own lives and interests, and going places with their parents will not seem as fun as it does now. (Debatable whether it’s fun for them now, as we’re reaching the age that they get frustrated with our inability to use technology the way they think we should, and we keep accidentally treating the oldest like she’s still a child.)

A lot of people have questioned the sanity of visiting Iceland in winter, but I wanted to see ice caves and aurora borealis, and guess when the best time to see those is? Also, as a person who had the privilege to grow up without winter, I thought it would be a character-building experience. And I was right, though not exactly in the way I expected.

The Katla Ice Cave Tour was marketed to me as “easy.” And I quote: “this is an easy hike on quite an even path.”

Not one to take a tour company’s word, I checked Reddit. Reddit, if you didn’t know, is the best place in the world to get actual information about anything. Way better than Google. Other people, of course, have wanted to know how difficult the ice cave tour might be. And they were told, “Unless you’re severely disabled, you won’t have a problem.”

In terms of disability severity, I’d rate myself “mild.” I’m not in a wheelchair; I don’t even use a cane unless I’m recently injured or recovering from a surgery. So this inspired me with confidence.

Well. Circumstances have changed. If I’d gone on the tour a year ago, or even six months, the “easy hike on quite an even path” might have been true. But the entrance to the cave that they used to use has collapsed, and they decided to make the new one about three hundred feet up the glacier, which meant that we walked a decidedly uneven, steep, and slippery path to it. It was, I dare say, a difficult hike.

To be fair, I am currently deconditioned. That’s not a surprise; I’ve only recently been allowed to even use a stationary bike for more than ten minutes, because of my knee surgery. Clearly the strength training I’ve been doing to rebuild my muscles after months of forced inactivity has not been enough, either.

Even the flat ground was a lot for me. When a path is covered in snow, it is not even. It is lumpy. Sometimes the lumps collapse under your feet. Sometimes they don’t. You never know—every step is a surprise! You know what else is a surprise, is whether or not my ankles and knees will decide to support me or fold in any random direction. Combine that with my lack of strength and cardiovascular conditioning, and you really have a situation I should not have put myself in.

I would have struggled with this experience even in my twenties, I think, but I would have just blamed myself for being out of shape (regardless of what shape I was actually in). I have more knowledge about my body and the world now, though, and without the noise of self-castigation in my head, I was able to view things more objectively. It was the clearest illustration I’ve yet had of the difference between what my body can do and what other people’s bodies can do.

We were all equipped with crampons, which made the walk about a thousand times easier than otherwise. With the crampons, I wasn’t slipping all over the place. I just had to deal with all my other issues. And watching everybody else walk across the snow like they were on a sidewalk, while I was stumbling and losing my balance, was kind of a punch to the gut. Other people put their feet down, and their feet stay where they put them! Their ankles don’t decide to roll because there was a centimeter difference in the height of the ground between one side of the foot and the other. Their knees don’t buckle and hyperextend, or try to go sideways, when a little bit of snow collapses under their heels. They just… walk.

And they walk fucking fast, too. I was constantly falling behind the rest of the group, and though the guide repeatedly reminded us that “it isn’t a race,” I felt bad making people wait for me. And also embarrassed to come up to the waiting group heaving and gasping like I’d just run a marathon. My physical condition aside, it’s harder to move when the surface you’re walking on is jumping and sinking beneath your feet. And that’s what walking is like for me at the best of times.

I won’t even get into what it was like trying to get back down off the glacier, while already physically exhausted from getting up it. As anyone with bad knees knows, going down is harder than going up. I was tired, in pain, and frightened. I was, essentially, in a panic attack the whole way down. My husband and son were so kind and gentle with me, talking me down the whole way, holding my steady, picking me up when I fell. I was in an altered mental state the whole time. I don’t even remember most of the trip back to the van, except that it was horrendous and I never want to do anything like it again.

But what about the ice cave?

Well, friends. I should not have gone. But I’m glad I went.

I’m not going to waste words describing it; the photos speak for themselves. If I’d known what I was in for, I wouldn’t have tried it. That would have been the correct choice, but it also would have been a shame.