Driving through Iceland is rough. The Ring Road is well paved and well marked. The problem is, it took us forever to get anywhere because we’d find ourselves stopping every five minutes to marvel at the landscape. Which is why we ended up in Vik – a two-and-a-half hour drive from Reykjavík – five days into our trip.

The pearl of Vik is Reynisfjara, a black sand beach with a wall of cubed basalt columns. We arrived to a full parking lot, but found that an open schedule gave us the time to walk further along the beach than many of the other tourists. We spent an hour watching powerful waves batter the rocky coast, and watched the foamy white surf roll into the black ash of the beach.

That night, the aurora forecast read 3 on the KP index and I set out to find a dark spot to look for it. My travel companion opted to stay back at the hotel and soak in the hot tub, but it wasn’t long before he was running behind me claiming a very old woman with a very distinct lack of clothing also wanted to soak, so he bolted. We walked along a nearby road, looking north for any signs of auroral activity. In my haste, I pointed my camera south to shoot the milky way, then looked to a hill to the east to provide a foreground for a faint edge of the milky way and captured a leak of green in the corner of the frame. At first I had set my white balance to some odd value and that light from the hotel must be polluting the scene, but my travel companion then shouted out, “Wait up, is that the aurora?” Yep, it was.

We spent a few hours running along the road, watching as the aurora became active, went dim, then became active again.

Black rocks, green auroras

An epic road trip across the USA for 86 enthusiasts

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