Beautiful, Strange, Alien, Iceland (Photos)

(N.Morgan) Iceland has always been a mysterious,strange place to me. Seemingly isolated and barren, never revealing it’s hidden, secret beauty. This photo set highlights the absolutely stunning, amazing, exotic, beauty of this hidden treasure. I hope you enjoy these photos as much as I did.

Iceland is a landscape that’s still being born. While much of the world’s once-jagged peaks have gradually worn into sloping hills, gushing rivers and mighty waterfalls have slowed to a trickle of their former flow, and remnants of the last Ice Age melted long ago, it’s not so in Iceland. This a young land, one that’s still being shaped by the same primeval forces that made much of the world — fire and ice. Its massive Vatnajokull glacier, which dominates about 10% of the country’s landmass, is so large that it’s technically classified as an ice cap.

The European and North American tectonic plates meet in Iceland, and more than 130 volcanoes have sprung forth from the gap between them. Iceland has only been populated since about the middle of the ninth century, but already in that short time there have been dozens of major eruptions and lava flows, many of them devastating to human life. Almost every minute of the day there is an earthquake happening somewhere in Iceland. It’s also one of the least densely populated nations in the world — only about 320,000 people live there, three-quarters of them in the relatively warm and urbane capital city, Reykjavik. The rest of the country is wild and wooly, and of immense geological variation. It’s like the world’s most interesting interactive geology textbook. My wife and I spent the last two weeks exploring it — we rented a 4×4, crossed our fingers that we wouldn’t regret declining the extra insurance, and lit out for the countryside.

I often say of places I’ve been that “it was like being on the moon,” but for nowhere has that been more true than Iceland. I’m not the only one who thinks so — in 1965 and 1967, American astronauts trained for moon missions in Iceland’s barren, volcanic highlands. Vistas like the one above — rocky, glacier-carved valleys, touched with subtle shades of green in summer only — stretch for endless miles. (By the way, those switchback roads can be tricky when the wind’s gusting at 60mph, as it was when I took this picture. It was a struggle just to open the car door against the wind.) Something else you’ll find in the unpopulated highlands are these bright-orange huts. A peek inside the window reveals a bunk bed, a wind-up radio and a box of emergency rations. They’re emergency shelters for hikers.

You’ll find them only in the most remote and dangerous parts of the country, and it’s illegal to use them in anything other than a life-threatening situation. In Iceland, where the weather can change dramatically with little warning, even the most prepared hikers might suddenly have need of one.