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Time of year mid November to mid March when winter is cold enough (not on Sundays) -
Equipment provided helmet (crampons, harness, ice axe, ropes when needed.)
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Duration about 2 - 3 hours depending on where the cave is, how many participants and how the conditions are to get there. Sometimes we only need to walk few hundred meters from the car, but sometimes over 2 km.
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Group size 1-14 people at a time, for bigger groups it is recommended to split the group up.
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Recommended gear camera with wide angle lens, but in some cases a zoom lens can also make sense for close up details. Definitely bring tripod. Good boots or hiking shoes are essential. Sometimes we need to put on crampons, and sometimes the ground can be very muddy in or on the way to ice cave.
In autumn each year we start looking for the ice caves for the winter. Normally we find caves in several different locations on the south side of Vatnajökull, and sometimes they are very special, sometimes not as special, but become very special in the right light and conditions. Some caves we find are very stable and we can go in there in any weather, but others are less safe and we might not even go there at all, even if they are very beautiful. Some caves are only accessible in below zero conditions for example if there is water in the floor that needs to be frozen over to walk into the cave.
The departures are exclusive and the meeting point and time of day depends on where you stay in southeast Iceland and where the best caves are at the time. Right now the best caves are close to Skaftafell in Vatnajokull National Park and we meet most of the time at the Shell Gas Station in Freysnes, or at the Fosshotel Skaftafell.
This trip is recommended for serious photographers with good camera gear that want to make their own ice cave photos. If you are not so serious about photography but want mainly to experience entering an ice cave, the Photo Ice Tour would often give us opportunity to include a visit to an ice cave, at least in the period mid November to mid March.
The cave we choose from day to day depends on the time of year, time of day, weather, group size and your hiking ability and other conditions at the time. We normally go into one cave per trip, and we expect that photographers might need at least an hour to work on their pictures, bigger groups longer time.
There are always new ice caves each year. But we can never go into the same cave two years in a row. The glaciers move forward and meld backward so much each year. The routes to the caves can also be longer some years, but we always try to find caves where we don’t need to walk more than about 1-2 km and sometimes less.
Note also, the weather can be unstable in winter, very strong winds etc. so it is recommended that you give us a mobile phone number when you book or send us an SMS to remind about you the day before, so we could contact you if the weather is going crazy when you are supposed to come for the trip.
This picture is taken by Einar on 4th of February 2013.
This picture is taken in a cave in Vatnajokull on the 14th of February 2013.
I use HDR to have the right light inside the cave and outside the cave.
