No. 20 Woman vs Snow Rhino, A Cautionary Tale
Iceland
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Woman vs Snow Rhino, A Cautionary Tale
The hut was in chaos when I shouldered my way to the employee with the gear I needed. Like the dozens of other people wiggling and zipping up around me, he wore the one-piece blue winter snowsuit meant to protect us from frostbite and hypothermia during our snowmobiling adventure. I had the suit and neck gator, but required two more pieces to complete the outfit.
“Do you have snow boots and a helmet I can wear?” I asked him. Every other person on the Super Jeep ride to the base of the glacier, my companion Jen included, was wearing their boots when they disembarked into the knee-deep snow.
He leaned over the desk between us to look at my footwear—blue cloth sneakers, the choice of winter athletes everywhere. “You’re one of those, huh?” he said, shaking his head.
My parents used to use the phrase “A day late and a dollar short” to describe those people, the kind who arrived uninformed and underprepared. I was not one of those, I reassured myself. My “waterproof” snow boots had soaked through the day before during a hike in an ice cave. They were in a plastic bag on the Jeep if I had to wear them, but there was no point explaining that to him.
“Who could’ve guessed there’d be snow in a country called Ice-land?” I said.
“What size helmet do you want?” he said, ignoring me.
Wanting to prove I was not one of those people, I said with confidence, “Large.”
He clunked down a helmet and a huge pair of boots onto the counter. The boots were recycled-NASA-moon-boots big. They encased my sneakers with a thick sole and ample fabric closed by Velcro. The double-shoe effect made for awkward walking. When I took a step, my sneaker lifted, and then two inches later, the moon sole lifted off the ground. I had to high-knee every step in order to move the boots.
Here’s actual footage of me walking to the snowmobiles:
One of the guides waved his arm for Jen and me to hurry. All the other riders were seated on the tidy rows of snowmobiles. I picked up the pace, boots double-slapping through the snow. Within three steps, my sneaker slid one way, the sole of the moon boot the other. I stumbled, stepped on the displaced boot, and fell face first in the snow. It took three tries to stand upright.
Our snowmobile was massive, the size of a three-legged rhinoceros, of which I’ve seen many. Instead of sitting on two skis like I had envisioned, there were two short rails in front, and a rotating belt in the back with deep treads. It seemed a less stable design than the one in my imagination. The designer should have consulted me.
One of the three guides gave us a quick tutorial. He made a point to tell us that turning the machine was not simply a matter of moving the handlebars left or right. We had to shift the hips off-center in the direction we wished to go. “If you fall over, don’t worry,” he said. “One of us will come and mock you mercilessly.”
One by one, the rows of snowmobiles began to pull away behind the lead guide. I folded the buff into a double layer to cover my neck and cheeks, put on the helmet, dropped the visor over my face, and pressed the gas lever with my thumb. The snowmobile jerked forward. I was surprised by how sensitive it was.
The line of riders stretched ahead of us for about a quarter mile. The sky was an unbroken band of bright blue. Despite the packed snow, the ride was not smooth. The snowmobeast had no shock absorbers. Every ice lump and uneven dip pitched us off balance side to side, jolted and jittered up and down. My instinct was to go slower, but the gap between me and the next rider was lengthening.
I sped up to match pace. The snowmobile shook with enough violence that my helmet began to slide forward, lower and lower until it threatened to cover my eyes. I pushed it back into place. How could the boot guy have trusted me to gauge the size of my own head after he’d seen my sneakers? It was just bad business.
The line of riders began to curl left as we ascended the glacier. I tried to follow them, but the handlebars were too stiff to budge. I put my shoulders into it, straining to nudge the snowmobile even an inch. It resisted any attempt to turn. My helmet slid over my eyes again. I didn’t dare let go of the handlebars to fix it. Instead, I tilted my head backwards to see out past my nose. We were still proceeding straight while everyone else curved away. I shifted my hips, leaning over the side, and yanked. We lurched left and overshot the line.
At that moment, the top layer of my buff snapped loose. It unrolled up my face and caught on my nose, blocking out my remaining sliver of visibility. We were riding blind. I let go of the handlebar to push the helmet up just in time to see the snowmobile in front of me disappear. A moment later, we crested a rise and flew.
We were air born.
For one whole second.
Jen screamed. We hit the ground upright before I even knew what happened. I decided in that instant that when we finally stopped, I would get off and kiss the ground.
As it happened, the ground kissed me and Jen a few minutes later. The snowmobilers parked one at a time on a steep hill beside the ice cave we were going to see. When it was my turn to pull in, a man zipped past my right side and cut me off. I hit the brake so we didn’t collide. Our snowmobile teetered, hovered in place, and then crashed to the ground like a felled tree. I lay sideways in the snow thinking, I paid money to do this.
When we were righted, a guide gave us spiky metal overshoes called crampons for traction. Crampon is an unfortunate word that sounds like the bastard child of cramp and tampon, so I pretended that they were called feet teeth or snow tenderizers instead.
We entered the ice cave through a tiny opening in the snow. I held my breath in anticipation. The cave that Jen and I had hiked the day before was otherworldly, a shimmering turquoise space with organic shapes that reminded me of an angel’s wing.
Our guide snapped on a battery-powered lantern to reveal a man-made tunnel. It was about fifty feet long, with straight, squared walls. It had been dug straight into the side of the glacier by machine, a hallway to nowhere. We clustered in front of a blunt, blank wall in the darkness. The guide rattled off a minute’s worth of ice facts until people began to leave. The guide looked crestfallen.
Once we were back outside, he said to his colleague, “I had plenty to say about glaciers, but no one asked me any questions.” It was hard for me to feel sorry for him though. What did he expect from a clientele who purchased expensive tickets to visit the hole that his friend Sigurd dug?
For our descent from the glacier, it was Jen’s turn to drive. She started the engine. I braced myself, gripping the handles by my hips to keep me from tumbling off the back. We jerked forward. Jen released the gas lever and we came to an abrupt halt. Everything went still for a moment, then I felt an incremental shift beneath us.
The snowmobile tilted a degree, then two, then three. I leaned left to cantilever the motion, but the machine rolled, dragging us over with it. The steel bar I had been holding lodged against the base of my calf, pinning my leg between the snowmobile and the ice.
“Fuuuuuck!” I screamed, kicking at the seat with my flopping moon boot. The snowmobile didn’t budge. Jen tried in vain to lift it until one of the guides assisted her. I scrambled out from beneath it, leg throbbing. If I had been able to put any weight on my leg, I would have walked back to the hut. There was no choice but to get back on the beast.
Over the next several minutes, Jen fell further and further behind the other riders. The sky clouded over. The wind and snow swirled up, blowing hard enough to erase the horizon. Visibility reduced from fifty feet to twenty, and finally, to a complete white out. We lost the group. We were alone in an icy vortex.
Jen’s visor crusted over. She flipped it up and scanned left and right looking for tail lights as we slashed blindly through the snow. Her eyelashes were coated white, frozen in place. I wondered how long we should drive without knowing our direction. Should we stop and wait? And if no one could find us? Would we dig ourselves a shelter?
Whose dumb idea was this anyway?
A white light appeared ahead. I was fairly certain I wasn’t dead yet. A moment later a snowmobile appeared through the fog and snow and relief washed over me. The guide stood like a colossus on his machine, steering with one hand. In the other hand, he held a GPS. He was a day early and a dollar over, the picture of competence. We arrived at the hut twenty minutes later to find that everyone else was already on the Jeep, waiting.
As I limped down the aisle of the Super Jeep to my seat, more than one person eyed Jen and me with annoyance. I lifted the plastic bag with my drenched snow boots from the seat and thought, I am, unequivocally, one of those people.
But, I can learn from my mistakes. The next day when Jen and I saw a glacier, we stayed in the car and drove right past it.
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Below are two of the humor Substacks that I’m enjoying:
This is so funny! So many lines in this made me laugh out loud, but especially you confidentially saying you wanted a large helmet, and then later "How could the boot guy have trusted me to gauge the size of my own head after he’d seen my sneakers? It was just bad business."
Do you recommend this, overall?
Girl, you crack me up every time! A limitless supply of adventures.