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volcano
Views of Iceland’s Prime Hiking Destination
Landmannalaugar isn’t so much a place. It’s more of a rip in the space-time continuum.
Consider its summer: It’s hard to tell 3 a.m. from 3 p.m. It can wrap you in the warmth of geothermal vents, chill you with wind, hose you down with rain – all in the span of 30 minutes. You can hike for hours without seeing a solitary living creature. It can even dispatch a lethal blizzard – yes, even in June.
Night doesn’t fall. The often-overcast skies will keep you in a permanent state of twilight. The terrain and scenery changes drastically from mile to mile. The colors of the rhyolite mountains will make you want to get your eyes checked.
In June of 2010, I arrived at Landmannalaugar with my wife. We read about it in guidebooks and blogs. Nothing even remotely prepared us for this place. Oh, we had the equipment we needed. But the scenery! You can look at these photos all you want, and you will still not believe your eyes when you get off the bus from Reykjavik.
There just is no other place like this.
Here’s what to expect on this amazing, one-of-a-kind, 12-kilometer trip from Landmannalauger to the Hrafntinnusker camp site.
S.P. Crater Easy to Overlook, Impossible to Forget
It’s easy to forget or to never even realize it – but much of northern Arizona’s landscape was shaped by fire. Or by lava, if you prefer a more precise word.
Volcanoes disgorged magma onto the surface, forming everything from towering giants like the San Francisco
Peaks to the loaf-like dome of Mount Elden to the mysterious hoodoos of Red Mountain. But trees have covered the landscape, often concealing the area’s volcanic origins.
S.P. Crater – An Unheralded Attraction
S.P. Crater, however, will resist any attempts to whitewash its furious history. This beautifully shaped cinder cone had the foresight to belch a four-mile long lava flow onto the flat prairie lands. Today, nearly 71,000 years after its birth, S.P. Crater stands out among a multitude of lesser cinder cones in the area, beckoning visitors to peer into the crater that once spewed ash and blobs of lava.
Few hear its call, though – that’s likely because of the nearby Sunset Crater National Monument. The park might be slightly more picturesque, with its pine forest and an equally haunting lava flow.
But for me, S.P. Crater has an effect that its just-slightly Disney-fied neighbor doesn’t: a sense of solitude that practically takes me back in time. I can picture the lava glowing red as it churns across the landscape like so much hell-flavored soft-serve ice cream. I can smell the sulfur in the air as another family of bombs rockets out of the crater, borne aloft by super-hot gases. I can imagine fumaroles venting steam into the [...]
New Zealand plans taking shape
Well, the plans for the New Zealand adventure are coming together nicely. I’ve booked a bunch of accommodations on the North Island; Sarah will handle most of the South Island plans.
We’re mostly booking smaller, locally owned hotels. They operate a bit differently than an international chain, where you visit the Web site, enter your dates, pick your room and you’re done. With the smaller places in New Zealand (and in Australia, Costa Rica and Belize, too), you often have to send an inquiry to the hotel with your dates. The staff then gets back to you to confirm, and that’s when you get down to the credit card number business. It takes a bit more time, but it’s worth it. So far, the New Zealand hotels have been super-fast and friendly.
One of the more interesting places we’re staying will be Woodlyn Park. We’ve reserved a room in the tail section of the airplane, which should be all sorts of cool. The New Zealand Department of Conservation was also exceptionally friendly and helpful in giving me the lowdown on how to get hut passes in the Tongariro area.
For me, hiking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing will be one of the key points of this trip. Obviously, the New Zealand government is really clued in about how to make a hike even better … throughout its parks, you’ll find huts that can range from barely a lean-to to fully heated and enclosed affairs. And they’re pretty inexpensive for a night. That frees up [...]
Going to Flagstaff? Don’t Miss Sunset Crater & Wupatki
A few years ago, Sarah and I were riding in the Taylor House Century bike ride in the 60-mile group. I didn’t know much about the route, but it took us through Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, which has a road that also goes to the Wupatki Ruins.
We’d already had plenty of excitement – I survived someone crashing right in front of me and falling right into my front wheel, but we’ll save that story for another time. Let’s just say I pulled off some sort of move straight out of The Matrix to keep the rubber side down. (Actually, the moment was pretty rife with cinematic parallel, now that I think of it. For instance, the protagonist in Shaolin Soccer would insist that I must’ve studied kung fu all my life. Darth Vader would say that the Force was strong with this one. Commander Data would chalk it up to a rift in the space-time continuum, and Dante from Clerks would tell me I’m not even supposed to be here today.)
About 15 miles after that craziness, Sarah and I were between a bunch of packs of riders. We were pedaling up the road that leads to Sunset Crater, and we still didn’t have a clear view of the crater.
But then we came around a corner and saw a blackened vista of dry lava stretching before us … and it was absolutely amazing. We could barely keep our eyes on the road as we passed the lava field and splatter [...]
