Six days on the Jökulsárlón traverse
Camp by camp, with the route decisions we made and the two we would make differently.
Sigrún Halldórsdóttir Six days from Skaftafell to the lagoon, camp to camp, with two glacier days in the middle. It is our oldest route and the one we have changed most, which is not a contradiction.
The shape of it
Two days in on moraine and black sand, two days on ice with crampons and a rope, two days out along the water. The middle is the reason people book and the ends are the reason they remember it.
Two decisions we made
We moved camp three half a kilometre inland after a night of spray in 2024, and lost a view worth losing. We also cut the optional summit on day five, which had been in the itinerary for six years and was adding an hour of ascent to the tiredest day of the trip.
Two we would make differently
We started day four at seven and should have started at five; the ice was soft by noon and the last section was slower than it needed to be. And we carried three days of food from the start when a resupply at the hut would have taken four kilos off everyone for the hardest half.
Both are fixed for the autumn departures. Neither would have been obvious from a map.
