Good News!

Yes that's right... Good News!

Like a particularly well handled yo-yo, or a man with serious bi-polar issues, first we're up, then we're down, and now we're half way up again... Hang on a minute; that was the Grand Old Duke of York wasn't it?

Where was I?

Right, yes.

Good News Everyone! Having taken the advice of a commenter to my previous post "Bad News" (see how these titles work? Clever huh?) we've been eyeballing the maps of Iceland, and it's possible, just possible, that there is a route which does near enough what we want it to. It's not quite so grand as Plan A; lacking the "furthest", "first"* and "stupidest" superlatives, but when you've been thwarted by a volcano, I think it's okay to allow a little slack.

Speaking of The Volcano, it seems the Holurhaun eruption is slowing down somewhat. The area we want to cross is still out of bounds, but the exclusion zone has been reduced and the SO2 emissions are also down. So, while we still can't cross the Spregasundur safely it's good to think that the new route is in less danger of being knocked on the head too. And you never know, the eruption might still end by July.

So the new route looks like it'll start in Akureyri, pass between Langjökull and Hofsjökull on the F35, before veering wildly to the East and joining up with Plan A and heading off to Kötlutangi. It's a rough plan at present, but it's still a north coast to south coast off-road crossing, and that's good enough! 

Now... does this mean I still "need" a Fatbike? 

* It probably wasn't ever going to be a true first. But until Google proves me otherwise, I'll hang onto that very very faint hope!

Bad News

Well, it would seem our trip is going to have to be shelved for the time being. And it may not happen for quite a while.

We have been thwarted, before we even set out, by a volcano. Of all the things to be thwarted by, this at least seems reasonable. But that doesn't stop it from being just a little bit heartbreaking. We've spent so much time and effort researching, planning and excitedly telling anyone who'd listen; to have to postpone is very very sad.

But, who are we to argue with a volcano?

I guess we could have worked this out before now. After all, Holuhraun has been kicking off for over 4 months. But while we knew about the exclusion zone for flooding and lava, it's taken quite a while to learn about the exclusion zone for gas (principally SO2). And even once we'd found that out, it wasn't until late last week that we learned the general guidance suggests going near this thing for extended periods is a bad idea.

Since then we've contacted the Professor for Volcanology at the University of Bristol who offered us the following, fairly sobering, advice:

"...volcanic gases ARE hazardous, as they contain both respirable particulates and high acidity (including HF, HCl and H2SO4). As you know, the gases travel with the wind, and therefore it is not possible to choose a route that will not be impacted. If the eruption is still continuing in July, I could not in good conscience advise you to travel in the highlands near the eruption site..."

We have also encountered the Icelandic Meteo site, which forecasts gas emissions. It's very clear from their website that emission concentrations vary wildly and are pretty unpredictable. But there is a broad pattern, and that pattern seems to suggest we'd be spending a good deal of time cycling into ever increasing concentrations of SO2, until such time as we died (possibly). Plus, given the variance in concentrations on an hour by hour basis, we might go to sleep okay, but wake up in danger. And where we're going there's no quick getaway.

One of their more cheery maps is shown below. Anything orange or above is a potential risk to health. Red or above has a safe exposure of 15mins, less if you're doing anything which requires breathing heavily (like riding a 40kg bike up a hill).  As you can see, we'd be spending about 4-5 days exposed to fairly high concentrations of SO2.

And if we survive that (with only short term health impacts), you don't want to be in the wrong place when it turns into this (these images are 4 hrs apart):

Anything in purple is described as "Very Unhealthy - Everyone may experience severe respiratory symptoms". Nice.

So, like Brave Sir Robin, we've chickened out. And unless Holuhraun stops erupting before May/June, then I'd say this trip probably isn't going ahead in 2015, and that makes me pretty unhappy.

Route Planning and Things - PLUS; we need your help!

Well, it's 2015, Happy New Year! 

Interestingly, in China this is the Year of the Fatbike, no really. It's also the year John and I hope to cycle unsupported North to South across Iceland from Rifstangi to Kötlutangi. 

In my last blog entry I mentioned Dick Phillips and his invaluable help. Well, thanks to the maps he provided and his brilliant knowledge, we've discovered that there are rarely used trails which we can (hopefully) follow, making the plan slightly more achievable. This is good, as the entire first two days will be spent trying to cross 100km of bog, with no official tracks and a high likelihood of getting profoundly lost! 

Of course after that it's a doddle; just another 120km over lava fields and mountains should get us to the crossing of jökulsá á fjöllum. From there it's merely another hundred klicks before crossing the notorious Sprengisandur plateaux, before a quick (about 100km coincidentally) loop around Porisvatn and then the final 100km to Kötlutangi.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy? Or difficult difficult, lemon difficult?

As we get into planning in more detail, we're having to revise our visionary goal a little. So while we still intend to be "unsupported", that doesn't preclude dropping into a filling station for something vaguely fresh as we cross Route 1 and head into the highlands. Equally "offroad" means definitely no metalled roads (ie no tarmac), and wherever possible off vehicle routes. However there will invariably be pinch points at fords, in the Sprengisandur and as we head between the lakes around Porisvatn. So whether we like it or not (unless we break the law) we're going to end up on gravel tracks from time to time. 

Beyond that we're at a bit of a lull. John is waiting for his back to improve so he can get back on his bike, and I'm waiting for John. Then we can get our Fatbikes (which incidentally are highly likely to be Surly Moonlanders). Since all of this is an elaborate wheeze to convince my wife into letting me have just one more bike in the house, I'm feeling mighty impatient! 

In the meantime, I mentioned needing your help. John wants to name our trip, all of my ideas are bad, crude or crude and bad. Any help? 

Cheers, Tom

Dick "Icelandick" Phillips

In an earlier blog post I mentioned a man by the name of Dick Phillips (of the Rough Stuff Fellowship), who in 1959 crossed the Sprengisandur by bike. He and his three colleagues travelled from Stokkseyri to Akureyri.

Thanks to Al Humphries, I managed to get in touch with Dick Phillips and spent a highly entertaining hour talking about his experiences and what we're planning. Dick has spent the past 50+ years organising and running guided tours of Iceland, often to some of the wilder and more remote spots. Between times he's been a font of knowledge for people like me.

Through Dick I've learned about what our proposed route might actually entail. He described the landscape, his own experience of crossing the interior (river fording using shoelaces tied together) and Horace Dell's exploits.

Brilliantly, Dick has amassed a large selection of now out of print maps. Some of these show old routes used by horse-traders and sheep-herders which probably haven't been used by more than the odd person for decades, if not longer. Apparently some of them date back to their use in the 1890's, when the East-Fjords were better populated and the routes linked farms and homes (now all abandoned).

Dick was delighted that we were attempting our route, and even more so that we were shunning the roads and well-trodden trails. However he did suggest that these disused routes might be a good basis for our own path. Apparently they follow the natural lie of the land, they needed to be accessible by horse (so are probably okay for bikes) and they are likely to have cairns in some places. I briefly thought about complaining that this defeated the spirit of being off-road. But decided that this man's experience was considerably more valuable than my pride!

I wont bore you with much of the rest of the conversation, except to say that we both share a love of cartography, in particular of geological mapping. Yes-yes-yes. I'm a geologist. Get over it.

It's also worth noting that Dick sells his maps for about £7 a pop. Which is something like £20 less than Stanfords. He sells them for "the price they should be", with little consideration to maximum profit. So not only is he a fascinating man, but also one who is generous with his time and encouragement. I'm looking forward to speaking to him again once I have the maps spread out in front of me.

An Adventure vs A Challenge

Twitter is awash with Adventurers isn't it? People who have (for the most part) done extraordinary things, but who proudly and wonderfully claim it wasn't the thing they did that mattered, but the experience of doing it. There are loud proclamations of independence, of freedom and of corporate distrust. It's fascinating.

Amongst all of that, I've begun to feel like a bit of a fraud. Here I am talking about something I haven't even done yet! Cheekily, I'm looking for sponsorship and encouragement from people who've done simply ridiculously tough and life-changing things.

So I think it's important to draw a distinction between those amazing individuals, and lowly old me.

I wrote a blog in 2005/2006 when my wife and I jacked everything in, sold our house, got a clapped out camper van and meandered off into Western Europe for the better part of a year. We left with no real direction, no plans and our only known goal was to be in Chamonix some time in early December 2005 so we could run a chalet (without doubt the cheapest way to do a ski season, and great fun too).

We went on that trip because our jobs were sucking the life out of us, and I was almost certainly going to have some kind of itchy-foot induced breakdown. We wrote a blog because postcards and phone calls are expensive and my handwriting is shit. Our families read it to keep track and see what we'd been up to.

What an amazing time we had. Those days will live forever in my memory as some of the best of my life.

This isn't like that.

I'm not even sure that this qualifies as an Adventure at all. It's not really about being footloose, lost, free or wild.

Perhaps a better term is 'a challenge'. I've previously called it an adventure (I probably will again), because to me it seems pretty adventurous. But really it's a sustained ordeal, with known start and end points. It's the latest in a succession of cycling challenges I've been setting myself over the past few years. I want this to be difficult, nearly impossible. It might even be more rewarding and educational if it actually turns out to be impossible!

Don't get me wrong; it's not a race. We're going to one of the most beautiful places on earth, a place I've been to before and fallen utterly in love with. But also don't mistake this for a moralistic eco-crusade, or think that I'm trying to find the inner me. I am not Bernard Moitessier. I am not especially spiritual or deep. And I have no intention of jacking in my life and job to become an Adventurer living off $5 a day and blogging about it.

So. If I'm not an adventurer, then I'm either a challenger (which feels like I should be in a boxing match) or a masochistic tourist! Either way, a couple of weeks of hardship in a fatbike doesn't quite contend with riding around the world, packrafting the Ganges, climbing above 8000m or walking the Sahara. In my mind that's adventure, this doesn't quite qualify.

Anyway, I can get adventure anytime I want. I just have to sit in a large cardboard box with my 4 year old son, and we can be anywhere, doing anything we want.

It's Worth Doing This

At the moment this adventure seems to be all about trying to market the idea as hard as possible. We've dreamed up what we modestly think is a great plan, which ticks the box of being simple to describe, yet mercilessly hard to do. And now it's all about getting the message out there.

Of course we don't have to do that. We could just go about getting over excited, and then quietly get it done next summer. But...

1. We're poor. Not in the truest sense of the word poor obviously. That would be insulting to most of the rest of the word. What I mean is that we live very comfortable middle-class lives, but struggle to find the money to undertake a needlessly frivolous adventure such as this. Of course this is why Jesus invented the credit card. But if we can find sponsorship, interested parties and backing; then so much the better (I'm not holding my breath!). However despite that, it's really not for our financial ease that this awareness stuff matters. Which leads me to;

2. The MNDA (that's ALS if you're across The Pond). You've probably seen Benedict Cummerbund or Tom Hiddleston getting cold and wet in the name of this charity. Well, in a roundabout sort of way, we're doing the same thing. And any amount of publicity, retweeting, sponsorship, Facebook big-up-ing etc etc can only help to raise awareness, and so help us to raise money. I'm not trying to convince you that we're doing this solely for charity, I doubt anyone is daft enough to believe that. But that doesn't preclude using this to do good things.

But it's more personal than that. Earlier this year my father-in-law passed away from MND, and it's one of the most unpleasant ends I can imagine. He managed to maintain his dignity throughout, which is not always the case, and fortune granted him a relatively swift denouement. He was a good, generous man, and a loving husband, father and grandfather. If we raise nothing more than a fiver toward researching the cause and eventual cure for MND, then we've helped to make the world a slightly better place.

So please, share this, +1 it, re-tweet it, Facebook Like it, use a loudhailer or just leave a comment telling me I'm a chump. But don't just skip on by.

Awareness is everything.


p.s. There will be a JustGiving page soon. But we're just getting the ball rolling a bit faster first.

Could it still be a first?

The more I look into this idea, the more I begin to think that this could be a first.

Yes, the interior highlands were crossed in the 1930's and 1950's by crazy cyclists. However, the Horace Dell was specifically crossing of the interior only (his diary shows he got a lift to the start), and the latter was a North to South crossing by Dick Phillips across the highlands; there's no mention I can find of starting and finishing at the coast, and even then that it was the furthest point. Not that I'm attempting to do any disrespect to the endeavours of both of those 

The first solo crossing on foot, furthest North to South (NtoS) from Rifstangi to Kötlutangi unsupported, was apparently only completed in 2007. Which is very recent, and seems to suggest a few things to me:

1. If the first foot crossing NtoS was only 7 years ago, then the first bike crossing (which is surely going to come afterwards) may well not have happened yet.

2. Even if a bike crossing has happened, they probably used the roads and tracks. Most sane people would.

3. Even if that (possibly fictional) bike crossing didn't used tracks, was it unsupported, or did they use huts/hostels etc?

4. Was that (now highly fictional and not extremely dubious) bike crossing furthest NtoS?

5. Even if all of the above happened, was it on Fatbikes?

6. Perhaps I'm not taking this seriously enough.

Is it possible, even slightly possible, that no one has ever done this before? When you add up the factors above, the likelihood of it having been done previously (feel free to rule out point 5 as ludicrously prescriptive) shrinks considerably. 

We live in a world where firsts are measured by minutiae and most of the great challenges are done. Our legacy is to find variations on the great achievements of previous generations. Has this variation been done yet? It seems like such an obvious one I feel it must have been...

But wouldn't it be awesome if it really was a first?