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Safety Plan Update – Version 4.1.1

September 17, 2024/in safety/by step

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 to this particular revision, 4.1).

UPDATE Sept 20: The National Park sent out a statement to all tour operators today about the expected qualifications of guides making hazard assessments, and I went ahead and integrated those into the safety plan. The new, revised version (4.1.1) is here and now also in the top level menu.

Safety on Glacier Excursions

September 1, 2024/in safety/by step

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 the situation in Iceland. A discussion detailed enough to satisfy glaciologists and outdoor professionals is clearly outside the scope of a simple blog post!

What makes ice cave tours different from other glacier excursions, such as glacier hikes or ice climbing? Or are they all equally dangerous?

The answer, as one would expect, is complicated and depends on many factors. One could (and possibly should!) write an entire book on the subject, but we can certainly examine some general aspects. Here I will focus on the glacier itself, and particularly on the areas most commonly visited for tourism activities, which are snow free in the summer months (the ablation zone).

Let us begin by examining how a glacier evolves throughout the seasons. In summer, the glacier is exposed to near 24 hour daylight, warm temperatures and rainfall. This deteriorates the upper layers of the glacier in a way commonly called sunbaking – essentially each of the individual crystals melt along their boundaries until they entirely lose adhesion and become what is perhaps best described as a brittle set of loose puzzle pieces. Importantly, this does not only happen at the surface, but because the sunlight penetrates into the ice also progressively occurs into greater depths forming a layer that is called the weathering crust. This means that as this process continues throughout the summer, the glacier not only melts at the surface but also deteriorates internally, while at the same time loose fragments on the surface get entirely eroded away or dislodged by gravity, surface water, or other effects. Surface water also continually seeps into surface defects and can further affect the ice in ways not easily observed from the outside.

There are noteworthy exceptions, of course. For example, any glacier that is covered with substantial amounts of debris (such as volcanic ash in the case of Kötlujökull) may be protected from much of this effect and exhibit slower rates of change.

In winter, the glacier is either protected by snow cover (which entirely stops erosion) or is exposed to very little sunlight – this causes the weathering of the glacier in the winter months to primarily occur at the surface level, leading to the highly polished, smooth and glass hard winter ice.

With these basic processes in mind, we can now examine their consequences for various types of excursions on the glacier.

Surface Activities

Consequently, if a glacier activity remains on the surface of the ice (such as a glacier hike), the loose and relatively soft summer ice is in many ways preferable. There is great traction with crampons, and the roughness of the sun baked crystals means that a person that fell down would just remain put in most normal terrain – although they may cut their hands on the sharp edges if not wearing gloves. Any degradation of the ice into greater depths is not a concern since we will generally walk on top of many meters of ice that is at no risk of collapse under our weight, and it is still very strong under the negligible compression of our body weight. Loose ice can be easily removed to access solid, blue ice underneath for building reliable climbing anchors.

In contrast, winter ice can be so hard that especially lightweight clients will have a difficult time finding good purchase with their crampons. The exposed ice is much harder, and even if the crampons have been sharpened to a sharp point do not penetrate very well. A stumble may quickly lead to a slide that is very difficult to recover from – so even otherwise very benign terrain may need to be protected.

A light snow cover greatly diminishes this risk once it has bound with the ice underneath. However, a more substantial layer of snow causes traveling over the glacier to become more hazardous, because windswept snow can easily obscure any dangerous spots in the surface. Larger moulins are likely to remain somewhat visible, but even a misstep into a smaller void underneath the snow could easily result in a sprained ankle, knee injury or other harm.

To protect from these fall hazards, good route choice and the use of fixed or temporary ropes are generally sufficient and easily managed.

Overhead Hazards

Once we are exposed to any overhead hazards, the picture changes. In the summer, we routinely see smaller fragments coming loose under their own weight and harmlessly tumbling down surprisingly moderate slopes, and if the structure becomes steeper the chances of larger pieces breaking off increases dramatically. In particular, if a feature is free standing (such as an isolated wall) the sun baking may occur from multiple directions until there is no core with good integrity left.

We also need to keep in mind that while ice is very strong in compression, even in its compact form it is quite weak in tension, and any ice affected by sunbaking will exhibit dramatically lower tensile strength yet! We must therefore rely on any overhead features to be well supported on both sides, having a good, self supporting shape, and suitable thickness.

Whether we encounter those overhead hazards on a normal glacier hike (maybe walking a bit into an accessible crevasse, like routinely done on Falljökull, or into a moulin as it has been popular on Breiðamerkurjökull), because we are suspended from a rope and climbing up a vertical wall, or going into an ice cave does not necessarily change the character of the hazard.

What does change however is how long we are exposed to the risk, and if that particular location is an essential component of the tour program or can be easily avoided.

On a glacier hike the guide can always choose to not approach any vertical or overhanging terrain at all, or if it cannot be avoided mitigate the risk by limiting the duration of the exposure (very much in the same way one would pass through a potential rockfall area without stopping).

For ice climbing, we must indeed be in sufficiently steep terrain that allows the client to learn good ice climbing technique and gives a good experience – but since essentially all commercial ice climbing tours are top rope scenarios, loose material can be easily managed from above before the client proceeds to climb.

Therefore, for both glacier hikes and ice climbing, approaching and inspecting the overhead feature closely is generally possible without much additional effort, and allows for good and timely judgment of its condition.

With ice caves, the whole premise of the tour is to spend the majority of the duration exploring areas underneath the surface, and thus the overhead hazard is continually present or at least cannot be avoided when entering and leaving the area. Space is often limited and there is not enough room to avoid prolonged exposure overhead hazards. In a sufficiently large cave, the inner sections are often covered with sufficiently thick and homogenous ice that a collapse is unlikely – although there have been exceptions with pieces of the otherwise stable roof flaking off, icicles forming overhead, embedded rocks threatening to melt loose, etc. Furthermore, inspecting many of those overhead features in detail is generally more difficult, if at all possible, more time consuming, usually requires leaving the group temporarily unattended, and may therefore be limited to infrequent checks. Those may be sufficient in the winter months, when the rate of change is generally relatively slow, but becomes extremely problematic during the summer.

Other Risks

Of course, the integrity of the ice is not our only concern on glacier excursions. Common to all activities is that there is generally no easily accessible shelter from severe weather (except in larger ice caves, which can remain surprisingly comfortable even if there is a raging snow storm on the outside).

Also common to all glacier activities is that most clients are unfamiliar with the use of crampons, and the risk of self injury or stumbling certainly needs to be considered. Ice axes and ice climbing tools further increase this risk, especially when used or carried incorrectly.

Particular to ice climbing, protective eyewear is important to prevent injury from ice spray and clients with poor technique are at a considerable risk of hitting their knuckles when placing the ice tools. Bystanders, including the guide if belaying from below, are at risk of being hit by ice dislodged by the climber. And clearly the proper use of all safety equipment and good belaying technique are critical to ensure a potential fall of the client is caught safely. Warm temperatures and sunbaking require the rope anchors to be carefully planning and constructed, protected from unnecessary deterioration, and may need to be checked frequently. Ice screws have high thermal conductivity and may melt the ice surrounding them, becoming loose over a relatively short time if ambient temperatures are high. This is less of a concern in the winter months.

Ice caves are generally formed by subglacial water flows or geothermal activity. Those water flows generally subside in the winter when both meltwater and rain are diminished, but especially during warm spells and spring can increase dramatically. Water held back by the glacier in subglacial or marginal lakes may spontaneously drain as a jökulhlaup that could reach into ice caves or the proglacial area around the cave. A warm spell and rain falling onto snow cover can release substantial slush flows that might drain into exposed areas such as moulins. Geothermally formed ice caves, if poorly ventilated, can accumulate high levels of toxic gases, or reduce oxygen concentration with inert gases to dangerous levels.

Finally, sloppy or poorly maintained safety precautions can substantially increase risks. A rope, handrail or bridge will be trusted by customers to be reliable and trustworthy. On a warm, rainy day it may take only a few hours until an ice screw melts loose enough to be dislodged with minimal force, and while V threads generally last longer they too eventually melt out. In both cases whoever was pulling on the rope to keep their balance will have a very nasty surprise. Poorly tied knows may come undone with catastrophic results. Ropes left to freeze onto the ice may snap loose once a client pulls on it, throwing them off balance. In all of these cases, it might have been safer if there were no rope in place at all!

Putting it all together

In summary, one could very generally say that –

Glacier hikes are safest in the summer, and some additional risks must be managed in the winter months.
Ice climbing is generally somewhat more dangerous due to the use of additional, very sharp tools, necessary exposure to heights and general character of the activity. While overall easier in the summer months, care must be taken to build reliable anchor structures and reduce the risk from falling debris to the climber and any bystanders.
Ice caves are safest in the winter, when the cold temperatures and limited sunlight allow the ice to remain relatively stable. There is a very high risk both in the spring when snowmelt and slush flows must be expected, and later in the summer once the deterioration through sunbaking penetrates any overhead ice structures to dangerous levels. The most dramatic changes haven often been observed from mid August until early October.

While both glacier hikes and ice climbing occur in environments that are more easily managed, and there generally is a much larger range of options to choose from, ice caves are dramatically more limited in number and allow fewer alternatives for risk mitigation or avoidance.

There have certainly been years where exceptional conditions allowed ice caves to be visited earlier than normal, later into the spring, or perhaps even in mid summer, but we must be careful to ensure that such an exception does not continually become the new norm due to outside pressure or expectations.

Ultimately, glaciers are a rapidly changeable environment. Safety plans, regular site evaluations and standard practices are all valuable tools but cannot replace a well trained guide who is able to competently assess the situation in the moment, and also has the authority to make possibly drastic decisions about any tour. This requires training, experience, and a supportive work environment.

This unpredictability is why almost all guide companies will not generally offer ice cave tours outside of a time frame where experience over the past decades has shown that visiting them can be performed in a safe fashion, and even within the winter months sometimes must be canceled.

Thoughts on recent events

August 27, 2024/in incident reports/by step

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 earth could this happen?

This post is my attempt at answering this question, because only if we fully understand what went wrong can we hope to prevent it from happening again in the future.

My knowledge of what exactly occurred and even which guides or companies are involved is incomplete, so we must satisfy ourselves with exploring all possible options, not all of which may actually apply – but we will see that there is somewhat of a golden thread through this discussion.

I am not even going to name the company involved, because this is a systemic problem that has pervaded the entire industry. The first symptoms have been showing up for years, and critical voices were constantly ignored. So while clearly one company took things too far, this does not absolve everybody else from also taking a very long, hard look at our own practices, and trying to see where we can do better.

The Guide

First of all, it must be abundantly clear that the final decision on safety aspects of any tour must always be made by the guide who is on site. They are the last defense against any other safety measures that failed or were overlooked.

This requires training, experience, and the right mindset. A young and inexperienced guide, possibly with minimal training, is much less likely to have the confidence to “disappoint” their customer by turning away from something that maybe their gut instinct tells them is not looking quite right… but yesterday everything also went well so why should something happen today?

There is a very good reason why any formal guide training is usually in stages, where guides become increasingly independent – going from trainee (guiding under direct supervision by a more experienced guide), to apprentice (guiding under indirect supervision), and then finally to full guide (where they have accumulated enough experience to be able to make the correct decisions 99% of the time, and know how to safeguard against not catching the remaining 1% before it is too late).

The tour itself may be very low key – after all, most glacier experiences are at a level that is entirely suitable for first-time visitors – and not require any particular skills from the clients on a day-to-day basis. In many ways it is reminiscent of the job that flight attendants have – if all goes well it looks like they are just there to serve in-flight refreshments, but they are exceptionally well trained to deal with a variety of emergency scenarios that are incredibly unlikely.

All of this also requires the right company culture, where this process is encouraged and supported, and guides know their superiors will have their backs — even when they turn back and need to refund large sums of money to disappointed customers.

The Guide Company / Tour Operator

The company operating the tour, as a whole, is perhaps the central figure in this picture. They construct the tours, determine group size, locations, time constraints, and all other aspects of the operation.

Importantly, they determine which qualifications the guides have they will send out on each tour, under which constraints those guides operate, and most importantly also establish a certain company culture. In some instances there may be a construct of subcontractors, which is usually little more than false self-employment, and I think we can safely ignore this fact and just consider those as a single organization.

A guide that is sent out with minimal qualification and training, as pointed out above, will not have the necessary tools to make good and safe decisions, and will need to rely on instructions from their superiors – who may not be on site, and may be using outdated information. One of the critical aspects of late summer is how rapidly glaciers change, especially in August and September when they have been baked by sunlight and warm temperatures, and infrequent reviews are entirely inadequate. It would have been the company’s responsibility to ensure safety checks are performed sufficiently often, which in this time of the year may indeed be every single day.

Even with proper training, a company that encourages a “laissez-faire” approach to safety may weaken the guide’s perception of risk to the point that their own threshold for what is acceptable changes as well (“all the other guides still go, so it must be okay and my own perception must be off“).

One illustrating detail in this particular case is that it turns out we were looking for two additional casualties that did not actually exist – the total number of participants on the tour had been miscounted. In any mass casualty event, tracking and accounting for every single person involved is one of the most critical aspects. It is therefore quite surprising that in the moment when two persons were not accounted for, the numbers were not immediately verified. One would think that this would have been easy enough through the online booking systems even the smallest companies use nowadays, where people are “checked in” as they arrive, or at least tracking credit card receipts if there was a suspicion people had “walked in” without prior arrangements). Obviously each guide must have known how many passengers they had in their vehicles, or the clients themselves could have been interviewed to find out the seating arrangements and deduce any missing individuals, but humans are notoriously unreliable and possibly disoriented in the aftermath of such events.

In any case, the fact that the reported and actual numbers neither matched nor were corrected quickly does lead one to believe that the processes for tracking and accounting for customers on these tours were inadequate, or not followed, which may be symptomatic of a rather lax company culture in general (and thus possibly also towards safety).

Furthermore, a guide who is under tremendous pressure from their superiors may feel obligated to proceed with a tour against their better judgment, for fear of losing their job or prestige within the company. This problem is of course even more amplified if the guides are young and/or inexperienced, which makes it even more difficult to push back against one’s superiors and cancel the tour anyway.

The Online Travel Agency (OTA)

Finally, we should not forget to consider why a guide company feels the need to compel their guides to run certain excursions. And in my opinion, online travel agencies / marketplaces play a substantial role here. They are often the customer facing entity, during the booking process, and for many clients indeed indistinguishable from the actual operators.

Almost all companies also operate their own direct booking websites, but it is safe to say that for most tour operators the vast majority of clients will come through the major OTAs (Arctic Adventures, Guide To Iceland, Tröll, Viator, etc.).

As such, the OTA can potentially create a tremendous amount of pressure, especially if they are effectively the sole source of customers for a given tour operator – and just like as a guide, saying no to one’s superiors is difficult for fear of being replaced by another, more willing guide, a tour operator that declines to offer a certain activity may end up being replaced by another supplier. This, coupled with the misguided assumption that if other tour operators are willing to arrange a certain activity, it must be possible to do it safely, spirals into a continued decline of boundaries and possibly safety standards.

It takes very strong leadership as a company to push back against this market pressure, but I would also fault the OTA for creating this demand in the first place. They, of course, may be willing to sell anything since for them any activity results in a neat commission and basically no operational risk, and if they can offer something that the other OTA’s don’t have (such as a summer ice cave tour), they will really want to have that cake. And therefore they will prod the tour operators towards extending their season further and further until it becomes year round.

At the same time, if the OTA would have done their due diligence and evaluated the possible risks involved with each of the activities they offer, they might have come to the conclusion that such a tour cannot be operated safely, and thus never include it in their program. As such, they too failed to defend and protect their customers against an activity that for many years was well known to be too dangerous to consider but crept into the common marketplace in very recent years.

The Customer

And where does this leave the customer?

It would be easy to say that each customer is ultimately also responsible for their own safety, and if they would do their due diligence they should be aware of the risks involved and consciously accept them when booking.

That, in my opinion, is mostly incorrect. Of course we all are in the end responsible for our own wellbeing, but especially when it comes to guided tours we book those precisely because we are venturing into an unknown environment, and trust a trained professional to make it a safe and enjoyable experience.

Very few clients of glacier hikes or ice cave tours have the necessary knowledge, training or experience to accurately evaluate what constitutes a safe or unsafe environment, and even less so from a brief description on a website in a country that they may have never visited before (and thus also cannot really judge for example how the local climate factors in).

A certain amount of perceived risk, even if it does not relate to any objective danger, may even a welcome part of the experience of being on an adventure. But it is of course unacceptable to expose customers, oneself, or third parties to any objective dangers, perceived or unseen by customers.

And thus, we have come full circle.

The guide failed their customers because they did not perceive, address, or avoid a severe overhead hazard they were exposing their clients to during the tour.

The tour operator failed their customers because they were willing to arrange an activity that carries a very high risk in a highly volatile environment, without giving their guide the necessary tools, training, and support to mitigate the risks involved.

The online travel agency failed their customers because they were willing to sell those tours, marketing them as an entirely safe adventure.

But wait, there is more. The National Park, as the overseeing agency of all commercial operations within its territory, failed its visitors because they did not sufficiently monitor the commercial activities, perceive the increasing risks associated with those activities, or take suitable action.

Any one of those could have avoided the tragedy with suitable actions. None did. Out of complacency, financial motivation, external pressure, or ignorance.

What now?

How can we ensure this never happens again?

Some may point to quality management programs like VAKINN, but I very much doubt that is an actual solution. I have seen too many actions of guides from certified companies that are in clear violation of these standards. Paper, after all, is very patient.

Neither would a blanket ban on “summer ice cave tours” per se work. A sufficiently motivated company could easily just label them as glacier hikes of some sort where most of the time happens to be spent inside one of those structures. When ice climbing or visiting moulins, one could easily end up in a place that is quite similar in structure to the incident site but objectively safe and possibly the most memorable moment of the tour.

The only solution, in my opinion, is a thorough cultural shift that pervades all layers of the tourism industry.

We must put our customers’ safety at the front, throughout every decision we make. From OTAs ensuring customers come well informed about the right clothing and a good concept of what the tour might be like or how it might need to change, to tour operators and guides providing them with the right equipment and instructions. Guides having full authority over cancellations or changes as well as the training and experience they will need to make those decisions. Encouraging a company culture that prioritizes safety over all other aspects of the tour (including whether it takes place at all or not), having online travel agencies that decline to carry overly risky activities and explain to their potential customers why some tours may be seasonal, and having a National Park where the rangers have the training, authority, and legal framework to put a stop on commercial activities that are deemed unsafe. I could also envision an expert panel that reviews these activities, perhaps by anonymously booking them as seemingly regular guests.

Is all of this likely to happen? Probably not.

But one can dream, and one can set an example and hope others will follow.

Which is why write incident reports whenever I feel there is an important lesson to be learned. Why my safety plan is public, for everybody to read and hold me accountable for. Why I am organizing training days that are free of charge for other guides. And why in this text I am desperately grasping at ways to extract some sense of meaning from an event that should never have happened.

Because I want to live in a world where nature in all her beauty is enjoyable, exciting, an adventure — but first, and above all, safe.

Safety Plan Update – V4.0

August 20, 2024/in safety/by step

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 clients could benefit from being able to rent boots – especially when ice climbing, where the rigidity of a full-blown mountaineering boot vs. softness of normal hiking footwear can make or break a great climbing experience. So I just ordered a number of B2-class boots (rigid soles, compatible with stiff, lever-lock crampons).

Otherwise, most changes were clarifications where I felt like certain sections were a bit unclear, or where experience showed that some additional steps were warranted. But overall, the safety plan has served us well over the past year.

As always our safety plan is of course public. You can find it here.

Safety Plan Update – v3.2

October 6, 2023/in safety/by step

I’ve just uploaded a new revision of our safety plan…

The main updates in a nutshell:

I’ve changed from using Adobe InDesign for layout to LaTeX. The final output is not so very different, but using TeX will give substantial advantages when it comes to change tracking and comparing revisions (which is really, really helpful when trying to maintain multiple languages and trying to figure out which paragraphs need to be re-translated!).
Otherwise, I have incorporated some feedback from the Vatnajökull National Park during the application process for getting my permit renewed. Nothing earth shattering, but the safety plan is now hopefully a bit more clear about my client profile, weather concerns, and the remoteness about the area I operate in.
There is now a space where I plan to go into more detail about the changes made in each revision and other information that may be important to incorporate, but should be kept separate from the main matter to keep it concise.

Safety Plan Updates

November 30, 2022/in tours/by step

Our safety plan is a living document. It is updated whenever we identify aspects that could be improved, and in recent conversations with Tún, our certifying agent for the VAKINN quality standards, we received some valuable feedback that we have immediately begun to incorporate.

Safety Plan 2.4.1 – ENGLISH

Öryggisáætlun 2.4.1 – ÍSLENSKA

Names and other personally identifiable information have been redacted from this version.