Entries by step

No more availability in October & November

Due to additional responsibilities with the Vatnajökull National Park – I have been tasked with helping to assess and monitor the ice caves in the nearby glaciers – my calendar is now fully booked for October and November.

Safety Plan Update – Version 4.1.1

As a consequence of the accident in late August, I decided to include an explicit section on overhead hazards in my safety plan. As always, it is public and you can check it out here (the entry in the menu above will always refer to the most current version; this one is a permanent link […]

The State of Ice Caves for the 2024/25 Winter

As we are coming into September, it is still a bit too early to talk specifically about which ice caves will be accessible – and worth visiting – next winter. The glacier will continue to change in significant ways over the next weeks and may open up new opportunities or remove others in the progress. […]

Safety on Glacier Excursions

I have received an incredible amount of very positive feedback about my recent essay, and it motivated me to address some of the questions that came up both in direct response to it and in other discussions. This article is intended primarily for visitors who are concerned about various planned activities, and deals specifically with […]

Thoughts on recent events

The tragic collapse of an ice cave left us mourning the loss of a life, a family torn apart and many lives irrevocably changed. I have just returned from two days on the site of the incident, and staring at the computer screen I keep asking myself the same question again and again: How on […]

Training Day #3 – Solutions (kind of)

I guess by now everybody who was planning to go through the little homework assignment has done so by now… Each of the problems I posted was based on a situation I have encountered, either on my own tours. Estimating the accurate location of an unknown point by using bearings from / to other, known […]

Safety Plan Update – V4.0

It was time for my annual review of our safety plan — no major changes, but it is good to go through everything that we encountered over the past year and see if anything could be done to improve the situation. Maybe the biggest change that has come from this was the observation that many […]

Training Day #3 – Navigation Planning & Theory

Alright today is the next training day in my schedule! This one is work friendly since everybody can just do it at home in their own time. It is primarily a precursor to next month, where we’ll put these things out into the field… the idea about this episode is that some aspects of working […]

Mapping project updates

My opportunistic mapping project has been on a bit of a hiatus throughout the past year due to ongoing issues with computer hardware and lack of access to a drone… fortunately both have been resolved recently, and I went out for a brief test flight on a tour a few days ago. Due to time […]

Community Training Days!

A few years ago I organised informal training days for the guides in the area, and I have decided to bring those back and with more structure, with a half day per month dedicated to those activities. Those days are not at all intended as a full-on course to learn new skills, but more as […]