Iceland '24

A snowHead

Friday
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I landed in Keflavik, about an hour outside Reykjavik, and proceeded to lurk by the over-size baggage conveyor to wait for my snowboard. I watched a lot of luggage go past. As it was raining heavily outside, wet things went past, and I felt smug that the stuff in my board bag was in plastic bags. I felt less smug when my bag hadn't arrived after an hour.

I went to report the bag lost, and explained that it was probably outside in the rain. They said they'd no idea where it was, apparently their systems aren't as smart as some. Most people flying here from London are in transit to the US, so I reckoned my bag was probably getting wet with the bags in the transit area, which is not where the baggage hall is (they don't need to clear Iceland customs to transit to the US).

I tried to remind myself that I have trained extensively for this. I take my boots - the only hard snowboard boots in Iceland - in my carry-on, as I can't get any more locally. My helmet is my "personal item", and my goggles, mitts & ear defenders are in there. My carry on has a spare pair of bindings, knickers, socks, snowboard pants: everything I need. I wear my jacket. Other than my board, the lost bag is irrelevant... and yet it still feels bad when it goes astray. I don't really want to ride a board which I know isn't as good as mine.

I took the opportunity to practice my people management skills and tried to get the baggage folk to help. I showed them photographs of the bag, told them I had a Galaxy tag in it, and that the bag and everything in it had my phone number stencilled on it. It couldn't be any easier... all they had to do was walk out there in the rain and go get it... but still I failed. They explained that if my bag turned up (it's outside, guys, in the rain...) they couldn't do door-to-door delivery (I think my lawyers would disagree), and it was all going to be terribly difficult.

I'd put an extra day into my itinerary precisely for this kind of hassle, so I picked up my hire car, and drove to the city. It's cheaper to hire a car to get to the north of Iceland than it is to fly, even for one person. Leaving the airport, I noticed that the road south - to where the volcano is - is shut, but I was heading north anyway to the capital, about 50 minutes away. Just as I was driving through the Friday evening commuter traffic downtown, the car handsfree rang, and the baggage guy confirmed he'd now got my bag. Relief overwhelmed any annoyance. My new best mate offered to put my bag on a bus so I could pick it up at the bus station. I didn't know where that was, and didn't fancy waiting around for a bus which may or may not arrive... So I said I'd drive the hour back to the airport and pick it up. He sheepishly admitted that they were closed until 23:30... but I persisted a bit and he offered to open up for me if I emailed them when I turned up. I arrived, parked, walked, emailed, and they brought out my bag. I had to sprint back to my car as if I park there for more than 15 minutes I'd have to pay... but it all worked out.

Saturday
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The docks were quiet in the morning, but at about 6 degrees it felt a lot colder than the UK. There were a few early morning runners, then a couple of US tour groups heading for whale watching trips. The local roastery opened at 08:00 and their coffee and Skyr (not mixed!) were great.

I drove north, stopping what is probably a motorway cafe which is my regular stop on what's a 6 hour drive to the Troll Peninsular, where the volcanoes aren't and the snow is. The sandwiches and the coffee are reasonably good. Here's the view from the car park there. It's a windy place, the car doors all have "hold door carefully when opening" warnings on them for good reason.

The drive was uneventful, a bit busier than last year. There is more snow about that usual, but nothing on the roads. Half way through I stopped for a break and flew my drone in the mountains, which were high and empty.

I'm UK legal for flight, but Iceland's rules appear to be "don't fly above the buildings in Reykjavik as it has two airports", and there was no one around anyway.

Eventually I arrived in Hjalteyri and couldn't find where I was supposed to stay. I'd expected a big red helicopter to be parked outside, but it was away being mended. A quick email put that right. Later, after checking with the pilot of the big red helicopter I sent my drone up to look at the clouds, of which there were rather more than I would have liked.

That's a few meters above sea level and usually has no snow at all, so some patches of white are a good sign. The clouds, not so good...

... to be continued...

A snowHead

You've already buried the lead with your pic in another thread. Guessed you were doing the fire n ice thing....

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

Saturday
The rest of the crew turned up later in the evening - an Australian, a Pole, a German and one English snowboarder. Enough for a bad UKIP joke. The other guys had skied together before; my job was to fill the forth seat. You could see branded clothing from most heli operators world wide - we'd all been around a bit.

Sunday
Sunday dawned to dense fog, not a good sign. We sat around, unable to fly. I walked down to the post-industrial fishing port and tried not to annoy the bird life with my drone. We sat and watched the weather. At lunchtime it looked like we might find a hole in the clouds, so we flew across the fiojd to take a peek. We couldn't punch through it, and ended up eating sandwiches on the beach. We did see a humpback from there, who eventually flashed his tail and dove right in front of us. But no skiing.

After a while we lifted from the beach and headed back across the fijord. We flew over the local hot tubs and parked by the changing rooms there. I wondered if the locals who were already gently simmering in the spring water would hate us. They were friendly enough, although all noticably obese. I think the Icelandic diet may have more ultra processsing in it than fish these days.

Monday
Monday was essentially a repeat of Sunday, more cloud, more sitting. It's not a good thing.

Two days into a six day trip and no skiing sounds bad, but it's not uncommon. The down-day ratio is never talked about much, but 1.5 days in 6 is probably average where I ride. It's never a good thing, but the trick is to think about it the correct way around. That is, what you're buying is food & lodging, plus "flying time", and in six days we had seven hours of that. If you were to ski/ride every day you'd easily burn that heli time up, so in reality down days are necessary to prevent you paying for a lot more flying time. It'd simply cost more if you have no down days.

Tuesday

My phone had been forecasting sun since before I arrived, and fortunately day three was as advertised: blue sky and bright sun. Those two things aren't sufficient to guarantee you get out, but the other stuff (overnight freezing level, ambient temperature, wind) were also favourable, so we lifted early and rode all day.

At the first landing the marker post was buried up to the flag: they have had a good snow year. The snow itself was entirely spring - so in the morning the top would be a little hard, softening as you descend. As it warms the bottom becomes large granular warm snow - good for my snowboard but not so good for skiers. The guide rotates around the aspects looking for the perfect compromise, and picks up at an altitude so you don't ride the stuff you don't want to be in.

After two days sitting around, we burned about half our heli time through the day, and knocked out 27 runs. Those were a range about a maximum of 1,200m down to a minimum of couple of hundred meters, generally around 700 meters a pop. All were single pitch - you can see the pick up from the top, and the guide doesn't need to stop. Our team was good (no one falling or slow), and the terrain steep but straightforward, so we could keep the machine running all day. You don't pay for engine time, just flying time, and with no one else to share the heli with, we could bag about 4 runs an hour on average and the machine never stopped aside from lunch.

Ok you're not supposed to stick your arms out, but what the image doesn't show is that this was something of a cut-back off a ridge feature.

Morten the pilot was happy to show off the A-Star (AS350 B3) whenever appropriate.

That day put us right back on track time-wise, we'd used over half our minutes and were set for the second half of the trip.

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Wow that's a pretty big heli day. Guess you'd all been itching for it.

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27 !? Epic ! Very Happy

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Wednesday, Thursday
After that it was all downhill. Ha ha.

Plenty of space, where do you want to ride?

The next days were typical Icelandic... lots of runs of 800m or so vertical on spring snow. The mountains typically have flat tops and layers of striated rock, with massive corries where you can turn as tight or wide as you like. There's no concept of farming the snow here - the space is massive. Runs tend to be steep but easy. The convex ones are most fun as you never quite know how steep it's going to get, but steep is easy, especially on a snowboard. No real flats, no traversing, no trees.

Typical Troll Peninsular geology.

The snow varied from dust-on-crust stuff where you're edging hard, through to soft snow at the bottom. My snowboard loves that but skiers don't, but that's not a vote a lone snowboarder's going to win. I did my best to let them know what they're missing with those skis. The guide worked the terrain and the weather to avoid crust, although we'd occasionally encounter a turn or two of less than "in good condition" snow, that was rare. When I've ridden here before in June, we'd encounter sticky patches; either those weren't around this early, or our guide knew how to avoid them. I would not attempt this snow with a no-board. The lowest elevations with the softer snow would be ok, but you wouldn't be able to ride much of the stuff without hard edging ability.

Small boards rock. As do hard boots, but don't tell the kids - at my age I need the unfair advantage of gear which works.

I think you probably do need to be able to carve, if only because you'd get tired pretty fast sideslipping around. And you might find speed control tough. There's plenty of opportunity to study turn shape and board dynamics in this type of snow; you can feel the changes through your feet. I tried counting turns on one run and lost count at about a hundred. On a snowboard as the snow softens you end up using more more base and less edge, for the same angulation & turn shape. The board feels a bit looser once the base takes over from pushing the edge down into harder snow. The softest stuff feels like "slap slap slap", where as the icier stuff enjoys more down force for better bite. We encountered a fair few half-pipe like features, and I made as much use of those as possible like snowboarders are supposed to, although I reckon they'd work equally well for skiers.

Let's fly down to the beach for lunch. Still pretty cool down there, maybe 8 degrees in the sun.

The game is that the snow freezes over night, with the main issue being how low the freezing line is. As we're riding that frozen snow as it warms up... the freezing level governs how low you can ride each day. As the earth turns the sun cooks each aspect in turn, and the guide tries to hit the point between "this is hard pack" and "this is schmoo". Mostly it works out, and you leave tracks down some large open snow slopes as evidence. Except those tracks soon disappear in a day or two as the sun does its work. If it rains or snows... that doesn't make much difference, which is very different from riding powder.

We could have burned all our flying time by the end of our second day on snow, so we backed off, mucked around more, and went in for an early hot tub. We didn't hit it hard on day three either, engineering to have used all seven hours (6 day's worth) by the end of the third day. So down days are financially handy. I went to fetch my girlfriend from the local airport, which is of the bus-station variety although it is internationally capable. It's usually cheaper / more convenient to fly into Reykjavik and drive than to fly into Akureyri.

Friday
It's not a race, and for us there was no one else to race. We started our forth day with a large breakfast and started burning "extra hours".

Checking out the hoverboard functionality

Maybe I should have brought two jackets to provide some variety. I did try to persuade the skiers to play with the camera, but found no takers.

A partial track log; I kept forgetting to turn the GPS watch on. Flying is across similar sized areas on both sides of that big Fjord.

Down the bottom sometimes there's grass, and I like riding close to it.

DO we have enough cameras on this?

We eventually stopped for a late lunch and "called it done".

Morten demonstrating what the machine can do. Don't try this without a sick bag. And don't encourage him.

After lunch we drove North & West to Siglufjörður, then eventually back to Reykjavik, a place with interesting restaurants and a small town feel. And some cruise ships full of Americans. The Fish Market delivered an excellent fish supper.
I hoped that Easy Jet would do a better job getting home than Play had getting me out there. Fat chance.. all the bags were once again left for an hour on the tarmac at Reykjavik in the rain, and I felt smug about that again. The flight was an hour or so late for reasons which weren't made clear ... ah well. The transition from the chill of cold days Reykjavik to England's green 25 degrees and Luton's still burned car park was a bit jarring.

Reykjavik harbour.
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That first day was a pretty big day, but this is the sort of terrain where you can clock it up if your technique's up to it - it's not hard work. I think you could do more vertical here than in BC (where the records were set) if that's your thing. It's not mine. When I worked for PMC we sold 3 and 4 run packages to day-skiers, a different thing.

These stills (except the Garmin and the last) are from the Insta 360 x4, which definitely does a better job than the x3. I've not processed the video from it yet but will put a small review in the thread for those things in due course.

After all it is free

phil_w,

Great report & photos! Very Happy

Thanks for posting.

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Interesting take on the down days. While I knew they were an aspect of Heli skiing I didn't realise they were almost costed in. It does seem like a bit of a waste to do nothing on down days though - is there not any touring possibilities or some lift/snowmobile served options somewhere nearby?

Heli skiing is way outside my budget, but having had a private snowmobile driver for the day this winter (easily my best day ever on a snowboard) and racking up just under 10,000m vert in a day of mostly untracked deep powder I can definitely see the appeal.

snowHeads are a friendly bunch.

There are [closed] ski hills nearby in Iceland there - Dalvik & Siglufjörður. But if you're down because it's foggy at all altitudes in Iceland, that means the sun's not going to be warming up the snow after the overnight freeze. So there's going to be a hard crust layer over the snow base pretty much top to bottom. Fog is a bit of a double-whammy: you can't get up there, and if you could, you won't like the condition it leaves the snow in.

There are no tracks and no people on those ski hills for a reason (we flew over now and then...). On the first day we tried to punch through the fog (damn the crust...) but failed so went heli-whale-watching and were entertained by a humpback. Then we flew to the local hot tubs and buggered about in the sea a bit. Can't remember what we did on day 2 - was driven to the fish soup shop (a regular down-day hangout...) and flew my drone and tried to figure out Android Studio and Sveltekit, I think.

And then if you do a lot of heli, hiking for vertical is almost never worth it. That said, I learned to no-board by hiking the luge hill in Blue River on down days.

Northern Escape has a cat backup, and having experienced that it's really good, but they cost it in. Wiegele has one cat but it runs on a slope you don't want to ride and you have to fly to it... so it's no use for this. Any resort-based operator has the resort as a backup, but those tend to have less good terrain/ clientele, and you're not ever going to get 27 runs, but if you did it'd be expensive and repetitive. And in BC you're going to be "on standby" most of the day, so you don't want to be in the resort [or drunk] if the weather improves....

I still haven't been to Greenland or AK in winter because of their famed down day ratios.

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PM sent. Google has costs too of course.

That was a private - a dedicated heli - so you can get more done with that. Plus the guys I was with were into vertical, or perhaps they were trying to tire me out wink

I dislike the vertical competition thing - Wiegele gave it up last century - but I couldn't really tell the down day story without explaining the response to them.

I had something similar in Chile last year, when we knew there was a 3 day storm coming, so we used half our flying time on day 1 as we knew we were going to sit out the next 3.

You can do a lot of vertical in BC too, if you stick to easy uncomplicated runs and ride with a good crew in your own machine. It's not my thing, but my watch records vertical, and it says had a 26 run day in Blue River in February this year. It overcounts a bit, confusing heli descents, of which there's always at least 1, with runs. That was a semi-private with some Warren Miller ski ladies.

I'm not exactly sure how it compares with Canada cost-wise. I would always go to Canada because the snow is better, if Canada is "open". In May/ June that's not an option.

You know it makes sense.

Come to Nz in July. Heli is cheaper and it’s good Very Happy

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

Second that

A snowHead

A snowHead

You can google the costs for the various places. You tend to get what you pay for.

I really like unlimited vertical if I can get it. There is a down side, which is that despite a massive tenure, the financial incentive on Wiegele is to use the untracked runs close to their hangar before they use the further away stuff, so you get to know those runs more than you'd like. I even have a sarcastic T shirt about that and one of those runs. On the other hand the CMH model has an incentive to ride "to the valley bottom", which doesn't exist in Blue River [and which you often don't want to do]. The Hobbs thing... it's at least fair to all parties and doesn't affect where you go as much as the others. I'm equivocal over paying for small heli and even "privates"; if you are in a good group (and others sharing the machine are good) then none of that matters much. I should point out that Icelandic spring snow is not remotely as good as cold smoke powder in BC, so in that sense even if the price is similar the value isn't as good.

In Blue River costs go up for unlimited vertical as the days get longer. Within a season you get an increasing discount for every extra week you spend there.

The Insta360 pole... ah yes, the software takes the pole out inside the camera, so you never see that. However the shadow would require manual removal... a few years ago I bothered to do that but I didn't bother with it here. Perhaps I should go and look to see if the technology for cloning that out has improved. It used to be a real hassle. For skiing they have an angle adaptor so you can fasten the camera to a ski pole - the thread in these pages about 360 cameras has talk about that I think, and some skiers using these cameras. It works better for snowboards though wink

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

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^^^^ Wow!!

- Add Jyrgalan in Kyrgyzstan to 'To do list'...TICK!! Very Happy

Thanks for the info @boarder2020.

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@mountainaddict, they were offering an early bird deal for next winter:

It was around £1500 for 2 people. 7 nights accomodation in ensuite room including breakfast, packed lunch to take out each day, and 3 course dinner, 3 days snowmobile skiing, 3 days guided touring. Very good value indeed!

Perhaps @admin, would be interested in putting together a kyrgyzstan bash?!

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

What's the name of the operator @boarder2020?

(Apologies for the thread hijack... rolling eyes

)

After all it is free

Destination Jyrgalan.
https://jyrgalan.com/
Email: destination.jyrgalan@gmail.com

^^^Thanks

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Good report thanks. Couple of questions of that’s Ok:

1 Was this with Arctic Heliski or another operator and if AHS how did you find the accommodation compared to the original AHS lodging? AHS seem to use the location you had for Ultimate Private packages ie unlimited only?

2 Taking weather (down days) into account did you find 6 days of that terrain too much? I ask as last time I did 4 days only and it seemed plenty - it sounds weird but after 20+ lifts in 1 day I sort of lose some my usual enthusiasm.

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All noted. Thinking of going back next season. Many thanks.

Help!!

Iceland '24

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