 Poster: A snowHead
|
It's that time of year again. Iceland had a garbage snow year in 22/23, but there's still snow here, if you're renting a helicopter. It looks like a terrible touring year to me, as the snow line is much higher than usual.
The airport's bottom left of the island, and the Troll peninsular (where the helicopters are) is on the top about a third of the way from the left corner. For a change I drove along the bottom of the island then up the right hand side, then back along the top, to bag some of the tourist stuff on the way. It's still quiet at this time of year, but that route takes a few days rather than a few hours for the direct drive from Reykjavik to the Troll Peninsular. Here's a tourist shot from one of those places.
Icelandic hotels mostly have a fairly modern aesthetic. They're kind of expensive if you're not feeling the Brexit benefits, but the best ones are pretty good. To me that means smoke free, with good food, and rooms which don't smell bad or make me think like I'll catch something. Overall it's best not to convert the currency, assuming you're going to drink the beer whatever the price anyway. There's no point in worrying about how much more expensive it is here than other places.
There are a few heli operators in Iceland, and I've been to the main ones before a few times.
I've never seen poor snow quite like this though - some years, you can ride all the way down to this lodge in June, but not this year.
Note the cheapo rental car, which is fine on the gravel road you need to drive on to get here. There are more serious off-road tracks around for which you need more expensive rentals.
If you're sticking to the highway then it's pretty much like driving in Scotland, but much quieter.
No matter, there's snow in them mountains if you know where to look for it, and this guy's a guide, so he does.
I've ridden hard boots since we invented snowboarding... and we lost the game to soft boots for about 30 years somewhere in there. A bit like rear entry ski boots, perhaps, fashions come and go. Anyway, now I'm achingly fashionable again, with my AT ski boots and Phantom springs. The springs came out of split boarding (not racing, although there are springs there too), and Icelandic folk are very much into that.
They're running two A-Star machines with two groups of four in each, which means the machine is pretty much right there when you need it. It's spring snow, so the guide needs to pick and choose aspect and time carefully. Some of it's steep enough you'd not want to fall on it. The riding's easy though, but the snow can be variable. Out of those 16 people, there's only one snowboarder. And this is my tiny 1.44m snowboard:
Brown snow is a thing, but it's pretty much the same as the white stuff, and you can leave funky white tracks in it. At nice 360 carve in brown snow would be fun.
Lunch? Oh yeah, let's go to the beach to have that, no point in getting wet bottoms sitting in the snow.
And here's what my watch thought of the day... although it thinks it's "resort skiing/ snowboarding", so it can't count runs correctly as the machine also does descent which confuses it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
|
Lemons, lemonade
Keep it coming please
|
|
|
|
|
|
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
|
|
Excellent. thanks for posting
|
|
|
|
|
|
You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
|
|
Superb, lets have some more please.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
|
Nice 
|
|
|
|
|
|
You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
|
One of these boards is perfect, the other should be hung on the wall and admired. Mine's the baby. I've no idea whose poles those are - I should have moved them out of the shot. The only time I'll touch a skier pole is when I'm picking it up after they've fallen. Seriously, it's a religious thing: sticks are for skiers. If I once accept the loan of a pole, for whatever reason, I'd be taking abuse for the rest of my career. So they're not my poles, I didn't touch them, ok? I'm no ski expert, but I'd guess that the "rentals" here (all Volkl) are essentially piste skis. The snow varies from sticky schmoo (when the guide gets it wrong) though decent spring snow to frozen sastrugi (when the guide gets it wrong). Sometimes you get all three on one run. The guides and I think that for snowboarding here hard boots work best - it's not like hard pack in that you don't need to get an edge, but you do need to be on your edges, if that makes sense. Hard carves work well.
They run two A-Star helicopters with up to two groups of four in each, so the place is intended for 16 guests. This week they're all skiers except for me. Two groups in an A-Star is better than many places, and means you move faster than if more groups are sharing. The Iceland operators use "Hobbs hours" - you buy a certain amount of flight time spread over the days you book. If you're down one day... you can use the flight time the next days. I'm not sure what their down day ratio is - I've done quite a few trips here and it's probably about 25%, so worse than BC. On the plus side the days are long so you'll still use all your hours, and sometimes you'll be down in the morning and flying at midnight.
16 guests need... 16 radios. Just got mine for the day. The map is pretty much accurate, with all the tourist features of Iceland listed 
In BC radios are important because you often can't see the other people you're with, because of terrain or forest. Here they're actually less useful - you're in a group of 4 plus 1 guide, and although the other guys may be far away in the distance, you can mostly wave at them if you need to. I mean: no one gets lost, and if something went wrong the guide could see it.
They used to issue airbags both here and at the next door operator, but they stopped doing that here, it's just shovel packs all round. You don't really need that stuff here, IMHO, I mean: just look at the snow. There is some sloughing in the right kind of snow, so it's handy to know how to deal with that. I rode a fairly major steep slough yesterday... I was thinking it was quite fun before I remembered it's a bad idea to play with stuff like that. I doubt they've had any fatalities here over the years, or if they did it'd be old guys having a cardiac when they see the price of wine. No tree wells, broadly zero slide risk, no trees to hit. I'd guess the biggest risk would be numpties doing Mach 2 and either hitting each other or crashing onto rocks. They do of course give full safety briefings and training in slide rescue etc.
Selfie time. New toys this trip: blue North Face jacket, Black Diamond mitts.
The jacket's skinny, which is why I bought it. Two hand-warmer pockets and one phone pocket on the outside, a goggle-cloth pocket inside. It's thicker material than soft shell, which I found wore out fast especially when used near trees. The pit zips only work one way, which I actually think is better as I don't need to work out which end to chase when I want to close them. Simple is better. The Mercury Mitts.. work fine here, and are skinnier than my usual, so they don't need to come off to fasten seatbelts etc. I'm not sure they'll be thick enough for minus 30.
Less sunny out there today, variable conditions, but sufficient light to see what was what. The camera's making this look a bit duller than it seemed.
At the bottom centre of this is the lodge (a farm plus four separate "cabins"). Last season this time, you could snowboard right to it and there was snow across the valley bottom.
Last run of the day is down there, with a high pick-up because we can't ride right down to the lodge (not visible, but bottom right somewhere on that river). The snow here was actually the best of the day; you never know how it's going to work out.
And here's one from yesterday - a long day in good light - which I'd missed before, because it seems brighter than the one above:
Last day tomorrow. They typically sell 4 day trips here. Tomorrow we'll ride from when the snow warms up at around 10:00 until maybe 15:00 or so, depending on the conditions and how much flying time we've left. I suspect we may have used the time already as we flew pretty far yesterday. Whatever. Then it's an hour's drive off to the "Trapped" hotel and the joys of the Herring Museum, which my girlfriend has yet to experience.
--
I should say... I'd not particularly recommend the heli skiing here, in that it costs as much as over-the-head powder costs in BC, and this isn't that. The reason to come here for me is that the season is long. Right now, this is where the snow is. It's much easier than BC heliskiing in so much as it's all open terrain, so there are no trees or other tricky features like pillow lines, and you don't need to be able to ride powder. That said, the group I'm with this week are very strong... that just means we're on steeper stuff with more interesting rocks, and maybe we'll do more etc.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Nice  . Looks epic.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Vert of runs please?
|
|
|
|
|
|
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
|
|
The line down the middle of your board would make it easy to convert to a split. Looks like you already have some poles and the right boots
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Poles? Noooo... never, ever. Those not mine, I didn't touch them. But yeah, the board has the guideline printed on it. However I did night school at the same time as school and cleaning toilets, so now I have a helicopter
--
Last day of 4 today. Day 1 was down, but we ran out of the package flying hours by about 14:00 today, so pulled the plug. Vertical... my watch will know, but it's not entirely reliable (it gets confused when the heli flies downhill, which is common for translational lift etc). I think day 1 was about 10,000 vertical meters. The runs are big, and so long as you don't mind the snow and the steepness, it's easy going. That said, I was with an expert group and they generally needed to take a breather and they were working - it's all about technique, IMHO.
Today we were blown out of the place we were headed by the weather, which rolled through in waves. We'd some precip including a bit of freezing rain, but mostly just wind and sun, alternately. The wind was marginal for flying... if people weren't scared by that then they didn't know what it was.
Here's a shot from when the sun was out, and from a place the wind wasn't. The snow cover was really poor.
This south facing one was steeper than it looks, and had a sloughing issue going on. I'll make a video later, but it looked like some of the snow was moving uphill! In fact I think the base I was on was slowly sloughing downhill snow, and some of the layers on top were moving at a slower speed than the base layer. It was weird. On the original image you can see the guide plus 3 skiers right down the bottom there - it's a long way down.
Just leaving a drop off, high up, probably windy up there, but the sun came out.
Approaching a flat topped peak with a couloir on the right hand corner of it. That's where we were going...
At this point safety mavens need to stop reading, although they probably aren't anyway. There's a difference between an avalanche and a slough, I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but if it "doesn't go" then it's a slough, and if it does, you don't want to be in it. I let the skiers hit the couloir first - I'm faster, and I can pick narrower lines than skiers with their poles and skis and all that. The guide slowly ripped the snow out of the centre of the couloir, making it less likely to slough on the guests. I'm not much for riding tracks, and I reckon I'm not phased by a bit of slough management.... so I took the left hand line by the rocks, which was all fresh snow. That started really well, but my video shows I kicked a slough off pretty early on. I didn't stop, but there were rocks and it was as steep as you're likely to find... so over a few turns the video shows the slough growing into a monster wave of wet snow. I could hear it, and see it moving down all around me.... and then it swept me off my feet.
That still is me rolling on it, the video shows I was toeside when it hit. I rolled heelside... then I considered my options, which were make a 180 turn and out, or try switch, or sit and wait. I didn't fancy switch, and the turn out seemed risky (if I'd lost it, I'd be rag-dolling over rocks). The slough sped up a bit, but the direction seemed safe enough, and I knew it would stop eventually. It started to slow, and as soon as I felt it safe to make the turn, cranked the board forward and right and rode out of it.
I'll make a video with that in it, although I'm not sure I want to be known on the internet as the dick who rode a massive slough on his ass, so I shall have to decide how uncool it looks once I've made it.
The weather continued to come and go:
And we wrapped the trip with no injuries. One of the other guys fell once, but I think that was it all week.
Maybe that's a wrap for the season, maybe not
The tops of the runs are about 1,500m I think. Previous seasons I've regularly ridden to sea level, or 30m above it (depending on cliff profile!). This time the snow line was much higher - I'll look at the data later and work out where we were stopping, but it was relatively high. The Troll peninsular mountains at the coast tend to have worse snow than those in the middle, so if the snow is not great, then going back in there is where the cover's better. After that, the guide's job is finding the right aspects for the weather - that's a bit trial and error, so you may get some less good stuff whilst looking for the good.
|
|
|
|
|
|
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
|
@phil_w, 
|
|
|
|
|
|
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
|
|
|
|
|
|
NZ sounds good, although I heard Chile has a few helicopters too, and that's a mere 14 hour flight away, so there's that... Got to wash my gear and check my board for dings before worrying about that though.
I checked Garmin and we were riding from about 1,300m down to 700m-500m. You could ride lower but it tended to be sticker down there, but overall the snow line was massively higher than the last few seasons I've ridden the same place. So no riding down to the sea this year, like in some previous seasons at this time. They had a particularly bad snow season - which is what I heard happened in Europe too. If you have a helicopter, you can always get to the snow. Excessive wind, poor visibility, and rain, are the sorts of things which stop play more than lack of snow.
Riding... was from about 10:00 in the morning (snow still hard earlier on...) through 17:00 or so (snow starting to get sticky). Other seasons I've ridden earlier and as late as midnight. It depends.
In terms of vertical, it's a long way when you stand at the top and look down at where the guide is. You can see that in some of these images. Experts ride those runs top to bottom, and don't fall. It's possible they take other folk to other places. The steep stuff is easy, but you don't want to fall on it. I didn't see anyone fall all week.
A bit of a half pipe...
|
|
|
|
|
|
You know it makes sense.
|
And here's a video from that trip.
There's a variety of snow. The first pitch in the video is soft isothermal stuff which was all in flow - I could hear it moving. As I was moving downhill, it looked like islands of snow were moving back up slope, which was very odd. Sadly it doesn't really show in the video.
Other stuff in there includes some harder snow which makes hard snow type noises and required edge control. The brown snow tends to be easy as it seems mostly soft.
My slough management failure is in the second half. I was getting a bit cocky with that stuff.
Snowboarding in Iceland Spring 2023 from phil 45464 https://vimeo.com/836136118
The original is a decent 4k; Vimeo seem to be downgrading free videos more and more. Ah well.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
FAQ
