Exploring: Iceland Grjótagjá Cave and Hot Spring

Hot springs are my favorite.

I've been fascinated them since a junior college class about 15 years ago. I think I was 21.

The assignment was to find something interesting, locally, about our natural world. And to visit it and photograph it.

I don't know if I set out to find a hot spring, I had never been to one before. I was browsing through the library and came across a paperback book, Hot Springs of the Eastern Sierras, published 1997.

It's location was over a mountain pass. One that I was familiar with, but this was before cell phones were common (nor did I have one), no gps, no Google Earth. Together with a friend we navigated the Sonora Pass by paperback book. The directions took us down a dirt road, we covered it slowly, and honestly I didn't think we'd find anything at the end.

But as George Williams III promised in his book, we came to a steep ridge over a river, steam rising above it. And there we were, at a place in the earth where the magma is so close to the surface that we get the benefit of the therapeutic hot water bubbling to the surface.

Think about that for a minute....magma, close to the surface. Somehow it seems really exciting.

15 years later no matter where I'm traveling one of the first things I do is research hot springs in that location. You'd be surprised how many there are all over the world!

Last summer I was given an amazing gift of an opportunity, to photograph my friend Kylene and her soon to be husband (and my soon to be friend) Adam (@customnature) in Iceland, where they were to be married. I already knew Iceland was the rumored land of "Fire and Ice" and so my hot spring mapping began.

The wonders abound in Iceland. You don't need to travel far to find something just plain unusual. It was a photographer and curious person's paradise.

Here is a somewhat famous hot spring, Grjótagjá. Supposedly it's everyone's favorite Jon Snow and Ygrette scene in the cave...you know the one. As magical as that seems, I heard it's actually only the entry to the cave that was filmed, and the actual hot spring was somewhere else. I really don't know.

Regardless, the mystery of scrambling through the narrow opening in the rocks to find the steamy blue water below is all it needs for fame. The juxtaposition of the steamy warmth with the cool right outside made it feel like you were miles away from where you came. To add to the "magma suspense" I always think about when enjoying a hot spring, the whole area was covered in lava fields, steam rising through the cracks.

Here's my sister, Ruby Goat as we started calling her...for her ability to scramble up and over any surface I asked her to.