"Millennia one feels relegated back to. The cold desolation gives a picture of the chaos before the light came: the earth was void and desolate. It was not always so as we see it, it will not always remain so, only the rigidity feigns utter lifelessness. The time seems to stand still here - but as the invisible working hour-wheel in the clockwork, slowly the picture is changing through the decades. Here too, the volcanic activity has not yet expired, the powerful embrace of eternal ice was not able to suffocate the fire of depth, fine smoke strip above the glacier reveal its breaths. Nothing but the wind that sings around the cliffs that drop abruptly to the Knebel-Lake in our backs bothers the silence of the vastness. No perceptible change but the migration of the shadows prescribed from the change of the sun. Here, when the midsummer day passes by without evoking a touch of rejoicing life with his light, how may look the winter night?!"

- Ina von Grumbkow, Isafold - Reisebilder aus Island -

Ski "expeditions" on Iceland have usually one aim: the complete crossing of the Highlands and/or Vatnajökull. Only few teams accomplished such a goal, much more aborted their attempt or were even rescued by ICE-SAR. Well, that was not my pair of shoes and so I planned a seemingly less intimidating two week ski journey with pulksled and tent from Mývatn to Askja. It was more about the experience of the wintery Ódáðahraun desert than any athletic aim, I thought. But already the second night and very difficult snow conditions taught us different. We were slow, too slow. But even the shortcut to the Bræðrafell hut passed into the nightmare of fighting four days against a northerly snowstorm during the way out of the other world... My conclusion? Try again later, but with more time...

"Such a momentum has the time, weather you follow her or not. But pleasant it is to wander with the stars and to be equal to them in motion. It was good walking here. In the moonlight the snowy montains looked so low and far, and here and there streaks of starlight reflected in black shining, nightly ice. Such a hike was like a poem of rhymes and magnificent words; in the blood it became a poem. And like a poem you learn it by the heart as it were - and then it drove one repeatedly over here, to see if everything was unchanged. And that it was: strange and inaccessible - and yet familiar and indespensable."

- Gunnar Gunnarsson: The Good Shepherd -

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