“Do you think this was a bad idea?”

I must have sounded pathetic, asking that to Hope. She mumbled something and rolled back to sleep.

I kept rolling over, struggling to get any semblance of sleep. Every time I closed my eyes all I could see was images of lava fountains, knowing that was now only a few miles from me. I would open my eyes and try to shift things around. I was in that half-awake, mostly-asleep, phase where your stomach churns, the head spins, and limbs go weak. The thought of 12 miles of hiking with this level of exhaustion seemed borderline foolhardy.

In the absence of food and sleep the mind can easily begin to slip. I laid face down in the car and closed my eyes. I listened to my breathing and envisioned the air moving in and out of my nose, in and out of my lungs…

I blinked awake in the back of the rental car. I had managed at least five minutes of shallow sleep. I glanced at my watch: 7am Eastern time, 11am Iceland time. There was no time left to try to sleep so I got up and began gathering things for the hike. I started a pot of hot water for tea and coffee.

The word from on-site officials was that the eruption site was going to close at 6pm. We were unsure if this meant that the parking lots would close at 6pm or if we would be shuffled off at 6pm. Regardless we packed as if we were only staying for a few hours, I didn’t want the temptation.

We started our hike out at 11:30am Iceland time. Almost as soon as the coffee and trail mix hit my stomach I began to feel significantly better. Caffeine is a hell of a drug.

The hike out began as a flat gravel trail. This trail has been worn down by hundreds of thousands of people walking out each year for the eruptions. It skirts around the base of the plateau before switchbacking up to the top of Fagradalsfjall. We climbed about 900 feet up the side of the hill.

Uphill was hard. Jetlag and sleep deprivation take a toll on us fairly quickly. Our legs felt like lead and heads kept spinning in their wooziness. The Dramamine was still somewhat in effect. Water, electrolyte chews, and Snickers bars provided the fast energy that we needed.

Of course, we had a hell of a view to look at to distract us from the pain. Path A, the 6.5 mile trail we were taking, went past each of the previous eruptive vents. The climb up the hill brought us past the lava flows from the first eruption. The flows filled the valley and cascaded over the hills leaving a massive black scar in the moors. They were completely devoid of vegetation and completely jet black. The flows capped the mountain and ran down the valley towards the ocean which was their ultimate destination had the eruption continued.

On top of Fagradalsfjall was the vent from the first eruption and the expansive lava plains laid down by it. Unlike the flows on the hillside, these flows were multi-colored. Gasses escaping from the cooling lava turned the black lava all shades of brown, purple, red, white, and yellow.

Distances in Iceland are like distances in the desert. What looks like a mile is really five. Atop Fagradalsfjall we trundled our way onwards at a decent pace.

We were not alone on the trail. Several hundred people were walking out, and ATVs with ICE-SAR members kept passing us. The diversity of the human experience is amazing. In one glance I saw folks who were out on a vacation side-show; a simple stop on their tour of Iceland. I saw folks who were clearly photographers and volcano enthusiasts. I saw tour guides taking their slice of the pie and leading dozens of people. One group was given reflective vests and hard hats. This group left the parking lot with well over 40 people in their group.

As we hiked onwards I wondered to myself if anyone else was making the same journey I was; this personal pilgrimage? I wondered how many would even care if they knew. Then, all at once, I realized it didn’t matter.

We dropped down off the highest level of the plateau and reached the site of the 2022 Meradalir eruption. Here the lava was so fresh it was still outgassing and we could smell waves of sulfur. The sulfur smells were different than what we smelled in thermal areas like Yellowstone. This was dryer, harsher and biting while also having a sweet note to it. The only place I had ever smelled this before was in Mud Volcano, a particularly acidic thermal area in Yellowstone.

After three miles across the tuya the trail made a hard left and dropped down off the plateau into a broad and low valley. The well worn, road like, trail ended and it became a very rough path over beaten down mossy cobbles. Three miles distant, beyond the hill of Litli-Hrutur, was the volcano. We could see the smoke column rising from beyond. With each step the smoke column became larger and more defined, beckoning us onwards like a finish line.

Dropping down into the valley I began to encounter what would become my biggest challenge.

A couple of years ago I went through a series of personal events that shifted something in my head. In October of 2021 I was present for a fatal cave accident that occurred due someone suffering a stroke. In December a friend passed away very suddenly of a heart attack. In April I experienced an interaction between caffeine and doctor-prescribed Adderall that sent me to the emergency room. Three traumatic events in just a few months – and nothing has ever really the same after that.

The after effects come and go but the core anxiety remains the same: that someday soon my body would just simple give out and I will die. Never mind that I am 28 and in excellent shape. Mental injuries can be as debilitating as physical injuries. I have blessedly little experience in the latter, but more experience in the former than I care to admit.

Accordingly I found myself on a lengthy, but easy, walk with a brain trying to convince me I was about to collapse. Every physical symptom set off alarm bells and after a few miles I was in pretty bad shape. I stopped to eat a Snickers bar and nearly regurgitated it back up – a full on panic attack ensued.

For folks who don’t understand what this kind of psychological injury feels like I would compare it to a chronic nerve or joint injury. It flares up and you deal with it – even though sometimes the pain is hard enough to stop you in your tracks.

Like a physical injury there is a time to baby it, and a time to ignore it. Today was a day to ignore it. For the next two miles I hiked while verbally beating down the waves of adrenaline and panic.

Hope is a God send. She didn’t miss a beat. Once it was agreed that this wasn’t a time to engage with the trauma but to actively fight it, she turned into a veritable drill sergeant. I can’t emphasize enough how much I needed her on this trip – there is no way this could have been done without her.

Two weeks earlier Hope insisted I go without her. Plane tickets were becoming unmanageably expensive and she wasn’t sure she could fit this into her work schedule.

I actually bought a ticket for myself first without her. I knew that wasn’t going to stay, and within an hour I bought her a ticket as well – finances be damned, we would figure it out. We make a team unlike any I've ever seen.

Plodding along the valley north of Fagradalsfjall, with that smoke column getting bigger on the horizon, I really only had one thought.

The valley seemed to go on forever, until it didn’t. We were passing people returning from the volcano – their faces practically glowing. The few that we spoke to had unrestrained awe in their voices. No one was walking away untouched by whatever was around the corner.

Walking through this part of the valley I made it a point to remain somewhat quiet. We were on top of the magma dyke and a new eruptive fissure was not out of the question. Despite my anxieties and distractions, I did remain focused on the sensations below my feet and noises around me. Any signs of shaking, heaving, or thumping would be very bad news.

It was this focus on my environment that allowed me to hear it. Behind the hill we were climbing came a noise almost exactly like that of rolling surf on the beach. Crashing waves and roiling water. It sounded like an ocean existed around the hillside.

Cresting the hill the horizon turned fuzzy. Pulses of heat rippled the air into a shimmering veil. Then a burst of lava topped the hillside and all at once the volcano was revealed. It stopped me in my tracks.

Dumbfounded, I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I could feel the gears in my brain slipping and grinding trying to process what I was looking at.

My god… it glows.

I don’t know why that was my first thought. It seems like the no-shit statement of the year. But that was what was so arresting with that first look. Lava glows. It has no shadows because it emits light.

Several hundred feet away from us was an elongated black cone, 75 feet tall and 300ft across. Atop the cone was a lake of lava violently trashing and boiling. From it’s depth it alternated between heaving domes of lava – canary yellow in color from the intense heat – and sending explosive jets of scarlet, incandescent, rock well over 100ft into the air. In one place at the base of the cone was a hole which produced an upwelling surge of lava which spilled out into a 30ft wide river which gently curved around in the foreground. On the side was an yellow-hot fall of lava plunging 40ft down the side of the cone. The two streams met and dropped ten feet or so over a ledge before running off into the bulk to the flow.

Sometimes the sun would come out and shine down on the eruption. When lava bursts from it’s pool it’s a bright yellow like a ripe and healthy lemon. It stretches out into globs and instantly begins to cool into a bright orange. The surface of the lava flash cools in the cold air and in the sunshine, for the briefest of moments, the surface is practically iridescent and reflective. In an instant it begins to cool and as it arcs away the fluid, gyrating, blobs begin to solidify and turn scarlet red, deep red, then brownish red, then black. When the lava lands it’s clear it’s not a solid mass because it explodes like a water balloon filled with bright orange lava.

From the top of Litli-Hrutur next to us you could look down into the crater – right into the bowels of Hell. The lava lake was a pulsating, gyrating, mass of glowing rock. The lava flows wrapped around us to the east and then south down the valley to Meradalir. Up here, with the wind blocked, you could feel the heat not only from the volcano but from the millions of cubic yards of solid, but still baking hot, lava. The heat came from three directions, radiating from the billions of tons of hot rock.

When the winds would die down the thermals rising from the lava generated intense updrafts which spun into violent whirlwinds. These whirlwinds would move over the surface of the flowing lava and lift chunks of lava up out of the flow. Chunks of molten and solidifying lava would be lofted several hundred feet up and out from the flow. Forget a collapsing spatter cone – that was a real threat! When the whirlwinds drifted off the lava and into the dusty moss they formed dust devils twenty feet wide and a thousand feet tall.

A half dozen helicopters roared around us, drowning out most of the noise from the volcano. Every few minutes they would all leave, and the entire crowd would go silent.

The noise, oh the noise. In the wake of the helicopters came the most beautiful cacophony of sound. Waves crashing on a beach was the overall sensation, but the surging and bursting produced hissing and blasting noises from the escaping gas – not unlike the gas venting you’d hear in an industrial plant. The flows around the base of the spatter cone made hissing and crackling noises like a loud campfire, and the flow fronts cooled into fragile glass-like shards which made loud tinkling sounds.

We opened our folding chairs and sat down on the ground. I laid my hands on the rocks and closed my eyes – the gentlest vibrations could be felt from below. After a few minutes I began to slowly doze off when a firm jolt from the ground woke me up. All at once I realized that the Earth was alive here, and She was creating Herself in front of us. We were nothing, we were meaningless in the face of this force that was splitting open the ground and making land anew.

We stared at the Earth and She stared back.

I needed to take care of a minor personal problem that had been nagging at me since I drank my coffee at the trailhead. Yep, you guessed it, I had to shit. We brought toilet paper and WAG bags for this occasion – there is nowhere to bury your waste in the Icelandic wilderness.

I wandered over to the SAR group standing near us, I noticed they were about to launch a drone. I asked them where they were going to fly it, my intention being that I would go elsewhere to handle my business. The lady I spoke to looked at me with some confusion before I raised the bag of TP and WAGs.

She then understood my question, and got a concerned look on her face and said, “Well, we wont watch you!”

Gee, thanks.

“I figured!” I responded, “I just would like to know where to go so I don’t give you a nasty surprise.”

“Oh!” She said. She pondered for a moment before dramatically pointing at the volcano.

“Well, don’t go there!”

Got it, noted, don’t shit on the lava.

We both laughed pretty hard at that, and she mentioned that folks had been going around behind a nearby rise. She suggested wearing my respirator just incase the wind shifted when my hand’s weren’t free. Good idea.

I won’t get into too much detail. I just want to note that I have very poor luck with backcountry restroom breaks. This time however, I hit the jackpot. I found a hole in the moss to put the bag into, around the hole was mounds of moss as soft as memory foam. It was like sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair! The rise next to me blocked the wind and the noise of the crowd. For the few moments I sat here, doing my business, only the volcano was within my perception. I could even feel the heat from it.

It was probably the best poo-with-a-view I will ever have.

I am not at all embarrassed to say that the volcano threw me a bit off guard. I shot 280 frames between digital images, three rolls of color slide film, and two rolls of color negative film. I basically shot the same three photos the entire time. I was just too gobsmacked to think about doing much else. Transient, spectacular, phenomena like the lava tornadoes would occur and I would just stare at in disbelief making no effort to try to capture them.

It turns out that years of photographing geysers in Yellowstone put me in a pretty good position to take the photos that I did capture.

The stories I mainly aimed to capture were of the volcano, it’s behavior, and it’s visuals. The motion of the lava was what captivated me so much. As I said before, the bursting lava would gracefully arc through the air changing shape, color, and light in the process. Elsewhere, the moving lava flows would turn dark red, or even crust over with black sheets, when moving slow – only to increase speed over rapids and falls and turn a bright orange and yellow again. Capturing this balance of color and motion was the main story I was to tell.

From ground level the bright sky behind the volcano made it easy to freeze the motion of the bursting lava, showing how it stretched into ropy strings. From above, the darker backgrounds allowed longer shutter speeds to document the motion of the roiling, thrashing, lava lake and the violent bursts emanating from it. I tried several photos from this vantage point with Velvia 50 but the light was terrible. The foreground and sky were blown out black and white, respectively.

Speed, color, and brightness. With lava it’s all interconnected – which creates a tricky situation to work with for mediums like film: some lava was very bright and moving very fast, and some lava was rather dark but moving relatively slow. Controlling brightness of the lava in the image therefore mostly depended on the aperture being used, because more shutter speed did not mean more light from a moving object. This balance of aperture and shutter was fairly apparent in images taken on my digital camera.

For film I largely set my exposure given a couple of known exposure points. Cooled lava is black, and a rather dark black that should set in the lowest of tonal ranges. The sky was a very high-key bright gray. The lava was a vibrant, saturated, red to yellow color with brightness but not to the level of the sky. The midtones of the scene landed right around the smoke in the background.

The lighting on this day was fairly flat and the luminance of the scene fell nicely into the typical tonality range for most film emulsions.

For slide film I set the sky as the highlights at +1.5. This left the lava to fall squarely at 0.0 and the darks of the lava flow to fall around -1.0. Perfect for the slide film that I brought (Velvia 100 and Velvia 50).

For color negative film I bumped it up a bit by setting the blacks at -0.5 to retain some detail in them. This put the erupting lava at +0.5 and the sky at +2.0. Quite heartily within the range of the color negative film I was shooting (Portra 160).

I shot one more photo running the Portra 160 at an effective speed of 80. I used a polarizer and a warming filter to cut down the light coming in somewhat.

The circular polarizer did almost nothing to the scene minus some negligible glare off the surface of the cooled lava.

What stuck out the most was the color differences. The film photos pretty much nailed the color of lava while the digital images had a bit of a harder time. The flows were a vibrant scarlet while the boiling lava lake glowed bright yellow from within. Both Velvia emulsions nailed it while the Portra emulsions got 99% there. For digital images I really needed to spend time shifting the red and yellow color channels to get them to be correct.

In all cases the smoke caused significant color balancing issues. All three mediums recorded the smoke as as saturated blue. I had to be taught an entirely novel (to me) process of color balancing in Photoshop to get these photos to be correct. In many cases it gave the Negative Lab Pro plugin a fit and rendered it almost unuseable.

There were some technical difficulties with shooting the volcano. The wind was quite strong at times and shooting with long lenses was difficult, if not impossible. This was manageable by being patient and waiting for the wind to die down.

There was one factor I didn’t expect and had serious issues with. Lava is very hot (no shit) and produces wild amounts of heat waves. These heat waves distort and warp everything. It is nearly impossible to get a truly sharp image unless the wind blows in your favor. My photos from ground level has a painting-like feel to them because of the rippling heat waves. My photos from above, especially my film photos, look rather soft because the lengthy exposure times allowed the heat waves to blur everything.

So it goes…

I hadn’t forgotten why I was at the volcano, nor how I had gotten there. I brought along a few printed photos of my grandparents and I at dormant and extinct volcanoes in the western United States from over twenty years ago when I was much younger. My grandmother had passed in February, but I personally felt she was there with me for this experience. I took a few moments here and there to look at the volcano with the photo. Then a few moments just to look at the photo, and listen to Earth erupt around me. In one photo my grandmother and I were in a lava field at Craters of the Moon in Idaho. I recall us talking about what it must have looked like when the field was active in the distant past.

Well, now we knew.

While at Litli-Hrutur I made it a point to make several phone calls to family and friends – I even did a live stream from the summit of Litli-Hrutur for a few Facebook followers. It was a lot of fun to share this with them. I called my grandfather while taking photos from the summit. They all asked the same question: “Was it worth the money for the brief amount of time?”

That answer was a resounding “YES”. I told my parents that even if the trip had cost double what it did it would have been worth it.

Around 6pm was the time when the eruption site was due to be closed by the local officials. The reality was that they weren’t going to kick everyone out immediately at 6pm, and many folks were still just beginning their hike out. But they were certainly going to try to move people out before it got dark. Trying to stay past that point would have required trying to effectively hide from SAR and the police, something neither Hope nor I really wanted to do on this trip. Our cup was full, if not overflowing. After five wonderful hours with the volcano we started our walk back.

By this point my body had caught up with the program and realized that it needed to be awake – or was that some combination of adrenaline, joy, and ecstasy? Probably all of the above. We practically floated back to the car. We were giddy, giggling like idiots. The switchbacks down to the parking lot were flat out dangerous with the loose gravel and I fell several times, drawing blood once or twice. We didn’t care – each fall didn’t even register. It was a runners high mixed with the profound wave of saturated happiness that comes with success.

We got to the car around 7:30pm Icelandic time. We had been awake for 32 hours straight, navigated countless emotional and physical highs and lows, hiked 12 miles… and saw a volcano. Hope took one last photo of me laying facedown in the dirt next to the rental car.

Mission accomplished.