Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.04.2014, Side 29

29 Travel The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 4 — 2014
My first thought is that I've actually arrived in
Wonderland, complete with its own sparkling
ice palace. The narrow tunnel has opened up
into a vast cavern completely coated in ice
with two-metre long icicles hanging from the
ceiling and rising up off the ground like teeth.
The tunnel looks like the giant glittering snarl
of some sort of snow monster. The excited
voices of my forty or so fellow Fjallhalla Ad-
venturers echo and bounce off the walls, an-
nouncing into the abyss that we have finally
arrived at the Búri Cave.
Past The Castle Of Ice
We make our way slowly, single-file, past the
colossal icicles until we reach a second, larger
cavern. Moving further into the cave, the ici-
cles begin to disappear. As one of our guides,
Quinten Verdonck, explains, the rest of the cave
is just as damp as the entrance, though less
icy further from the opening because it's the
outside temperature that causes the icicles to
form. By June, all the intricate icicles will melt,
not to return again until autumn.
A droplet from the porous volcanic rock
above lands on the nape of my neck and sends
chills down my spine as we climb rocks of
varying shades of red and black. The complex
designs on the shiny black boulders look like
something out of an alien movie—I'm convinced
there were sections of Ridley Scott's 'Pro-
metheus' filmed here.
Hiking further into the cave, the walls begin
to spread out and the ceiling becomes vaulted,
creating an unsettling emptiness that hangs
over us like a dark guillotine. We've reached the
largest sections of Búri, where the sides reach
around ten metres in width and height. Its co-
lossal girth makes Búri one of the largest lava
tubes in the world.
Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
For the next 500 metres, we climb up and down
piles of lava rocks, which lie scattered through-
out the cave like a giant's toppled toy blocks.
Another guide, Ragnar Hjálmarsson, gathers all
forty of us into a huddle and directs us to turn
off our torches. One by one the lights flicker
and fade, leaving us shrouded in absolute dark-
ness. We sit silently, stooped in the pitch-black
world around us, listening to the ringing of wa-
ter droplets as they hit the cave floor.
Surrounded by the unmitigated void, Rag-
nar's disembodied voice tells us how Björn
Hróarson discovered Búri in May of 2005.
Because of its rather recent discovery Búri
remains naturally pristine. Crouched in the
darkness, Ragnar tells us that while Björn was
exploring the cave for the first time he lost one
of his legs in an accident—and that they still
haven't found it. As he explained to me later,
"Being a tour guide is pretty much all stand-up
comedy. No one remembers the facts you tell
them, but they remember your jokes."
We continue hiking to the end of the lava
tube, about one kilometre from the entrance,
and approach a vast black pit. Our guides in-
form us that it was formed by a 'lava fall' during
the massive shield volcano eruption that cre-
ated the entire lava tube more than 5,000 years
ago. Brave souls carefully approach the edge
and lean over, looking down into the bizarre
rock designs running along the 17-metre pit.
We stop for a group photo and hike back to
the shimmering palace of ice at the entrance,
carefully climbing over the piles of rocks as
our feet slip out from under us, which leaves
us scrambling across the grotto. We lift our-
selves out into the night and are greeted by the
Northern Lights as they arc and dance over the
lichen-capped lava field, and the secret subter-
ranean world it covers.
Words
Ben Smick
Forty-five kilometres from downtown Reykjavík I'm standing on a snowy embankment surrounded by the Leitah-
raun lava field. The snow slopes down, guiding me under a shelf of rock and into a winding crevice to a basketball-
sized hole in the ground. Feeling a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, I drop my legs into the void and slide
in, wriggling a bit to get my shoulders through the gap. The top of my helmet vanishes into the dark.
Ben Smick
What's A Lava Tube?
There are more than 500 lava tubes in
Iceland. Lava tubes are formed when
the outside surfaces of a lava flow cool
and harden while the lava within or un-
derneath continues to flow towards an
outlet, leaving behind a hollow tunnel
shaped cave. Once formed, subsequent
eruptions can lead to multiple lava flows
re-melting and changing the inside of
the cave. These flows can melt through
the walls of the lava tube creating hard-
ened lava falls where the smaller flow
fell through from one layer of the tube
to the next. Iceland's abundant volcanic
activity makes it an ideal location for
lava tubes to form, which is great mostly
because they look out of this world.
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