Maureen and Bill's Blog: Life and travel stories

Saturday 1/13/2018: The weather forecast promised a good day for photography, but weather can be very unpredictable in Iceland. Our first stop was the famous black sand beach at Jokulsarlon. Icebergs break off the glacier into a lagoon. From the lagoon the icebergs float out to sea at high tide the wind and waves drive them up onto the black sand beach. This is what the beach looked like on Saturday.

The weather held and we got some nice sunrise photos. At this time of the year the sun never gets very high in the horizon at Iceland. It just rises up low in the sky and then just moves across the horizon at that height.

You have to be very careful the waves come in and move the ice. Since this is glacier ice it is very dense and even small chucks are quite heavy and it they hit you they could break a leg. The blue ice is the denser than the clear. The large iceberg in the image is probably 8 feet tall.

This image shows the glacial bay. The glacier can just be seen in the background on the right side of the image. This particular glacier is the fasted receding glacier in Iceland. It recedes from 600-900 feet a year and supplies all the icebergs on the beach.

In the afternoon we went to photograph the mountain Vestrahorn. This is an interesting peak and we were hoping for alpenglow on the peak. It’s only during the winter that the sun is in the correct location to make the peak glow reddish. There was just too many clouds and we didn’t the alpenglow although the peak is photogenic in it’s on right with the wet black sand flats in the background.

Tomorrow we plan on going back to Jokulsarlon. It’s different every day – sometimes there is no ice.