SAMAYA x MAUD RONDOT
SELF-GUIDED ITINERANT TREK IN THE HEART OF ICELAND
In May 2023, at the height of the snowmelt season, Maud Rondot and her friend Pauline flew to Iceland to complete a 75 km itinerant trek in total autonomy. On their return to France, Maud shares with us the variety of landscapes and terrain they covered, the beauty of the immense surrounding nature, and the trials and tribulations they endured to complete the trek.
What inspired you to embark on this adventure?
Maud Rondot: Pauline and I are in love with Iceland. It was the 3rd time we'd been there, and we absolutely wanted to walk part of the country, to get a more human-scale feel for it, to really appreciate the landscapes, which are incomparable. There's no island where you can find glaciers and volcanoes at the same time. It's pretty crazy. We decided to do the Laugavegur trek, one of the most beautiful in the world, with mountains that are very particular in terms of geology, which gives very varied landscapes with incredible, multicolored hues. We opted for the opposite route to the usual one, which is a little harder on the gradient. We set off from the sea, from Skógar, to reach the mountains of Landmannalaugar. We did the 75 km trek in 5 days.
Can you tell us about your trek and the stages you completed?
MR: In the beginning, it was very peculiar because we didn't meet anyone. It was almost scary. For the first stage, we went up to Fimmvörðuháls, a perched hut where everything was frozen and you couldn't see anything because it was so foggy. We had to make our way between snowcaps and frozen lakes, surrounded by cold and wind, so it was quite a dangerous zone. The second stage was at Thorsmork, an incredible stage between two glaciers. It was pretty crazy because we started out in a green landscape, with waterfalls and black rock, before arriving on a snowy landscape, sometimes covered with black sand. We were also surprised to cross wide plains, filled with lupines that give the mountains a bluish sheen.
The diversity of landscapes is striking throughout your trek. Were the intensity and difficulty of the stages equally striking?
MR: Yes indeed. On our third stage, we knew we were in for a rough ride, on the wildest stage between Skógar and Thorsmork. We were a bit uncertain about this stage, because we'd read that sometimes it doesn't go through. We crossed some pretty scary rivers, with strong currents, loaded down with 20kg on our backs to carry our camera gear and food. But in the end, it went very well. The rest of the trek took us into areas with black contrasts, green moss, quite hostile, lots of rocks. No problem with our little Samaya INSPIRE2, super-fast to set up, which held up just as well on this rocky terrain as it did on the Thorsmork grass. On the penultimate stage, we even got to see some magnificent snow bridges. We finished the trek by doing the last two stages in one go.
