LAVA LAND

IT HAD BEEN four years since I’d first walked the Laugavegur. Each summer its contingent parts had become more familiar, as I learnt to read the mountains’ contours – counting the ridges and recognising each twist in the trail. But the pandemic interrupted my growing intimacy with the route and its surrounds. In 2020 there was no call for seasonal hut wardens, and I feared I might never work there again. Nothing seems as beautiful as something you can’t have, and I’d been dreaming of Fjallabak every time I closed my eyes.

In 2021 the job offer was back on the table, but I couldn’t quite allow myself to believe it until I was finally on the way. Within 12 hours of arriving in Iceland, our second Covid tests had come back negative and the boss was picking us up in his jeep. We trundled along, letting pressure out of the tyres as the road dwindled to rocky track, and slowly I began to feel the tightness in my chest dissolve. Old friends whose names I knew, the mountains of Landmannalaugar