The Iceland Divide

Eight days, one ridgeline, and a headwind that never quite lets go. The Divide crosses the Icelandic interior from the south coast to the north, following the F-roads and river valleys that split the island roughly in half — a route with almost no fixed infrastructure and long stretches where the nearest building is a weather station. River crossings are unbridged and change character by the day depending on glacial melt, black-sand plains stretch for hours with nothing on the horizon but the road ahead, and the silence out there is the kind you can genuinely hear, broken only by wind and the crunch of tyres on scoria. Huts are spaced days apart, so most nights are spent in a tent pitched wherever the wind allows, which in the highlands is rarely a generous amount of shelter. This is the trip that the rest of our Iceland writing grew out of — eight full dispatches from the road, covering the gear that survived, the gear that didn't, the hot springs that saved a bad day and the stretch of black volcanic desert that very nearly ended it. Read them below, or use the day-by-day breakdown here to plan your own crossing.