This week’s travel dream: Volcano hunting in Iceland

A year ago at this time, traveling to Iceland was about as high on most people’s to-do lists as drinking sand, said Jonathan Tourtellot in National Geographic Traveler. The volcano whose eruption shut down air traffic across Europe last April and May sits just off the island nation’s southern coast, making a jaunt to nearby Reykjavík daunting, if not impossible. My wife and I loved Iceland too much already to think that way: We’ve been drawn again and again by its “wild, weird landscape” and “literate, unusual culture of 309,000.” To us, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, known in America as “that volcano in Iceland,” was cause for charting an excursion across the vast volcanic zone that bisects Iceland. It’s one of the only places in the world “where you can see the Earth under construction.”

Second thoughts about our itinerary first hit me as I climb into the cockpit of a 35-year-old Cessna. My pilot, 70-year-old Ómar Ragnarsson, offers tourists close-up views of Eyjafjallajökull, and he’s promised to cruise over the summit before diving into one of the volcano’s new canyons. From above, the fractured glacier that envelops most of the volcano resembles “a fallen soufflé burned on top.” The deep canyon below us is filled with steamy, swirling fog, but Ragnarsson wants to get under the veil. We dive under the fog and slalom down the canyon, “ice walls not far from each wing tip.” It’s thrilling, especially because Ragnarsson is “flying the plane with one hand and shooting pictures with the other.”

A day’s drive later, I’m happy to be exploring Vatnajökull National Park on foot, even if underneath us is an “upwelling plume of magma” that might just be the force that’s been slowly wedging Europe and North America apart. Inside Europe’s largest national park lies an “assortment of geological oddities,” including Vatnajökull glacier, M´yvatn Nature Baths, and “a tangled maze of volcanic rock” known as the Dark Castles. I was most captivated by Jökulsárgljúfur (Glacier River Canyon), a 5-mile-long gorge whose towering and twisted columns of basalt make it a veritable “Louvre of lava.” Europe’s mightiest waterfall, Dettifoss, flows over one of the canyon’s great walls. If a volcano was responsible for this, keep the lava coming.

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