07/20 & 21 – Hiking out of the Horn, or so we thought…

Our last day on the Horn meant actually getting up a bit earlier since we had to be at the ferry pick up by 5:30 pm. We budgeted six hours to do the hike, which we knew wasn’t super strenuous given the other hikes we’d done. It was basically up and over one big pass. Of course the weather today was perfect! Would have made for some nice pictures over at the Horn but we were out of time.

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The way out has a lot of water, both running and in snow form, to cross. If this is the only part of the area that people hike, they’d be under the impression that the entire peninsula has flowing water within easy reach. That wasn’t always the case for the other parts! But it was nice to just refill my bottle as needed on the hike out today! We made excellent time and decided to have one last coffee stop before we made it all the way down.

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Seven years ago, I remember this hike as being sort of a big deal for me. I’d never really done any backpacking or long hiking. Glad to report that my fitness is way better now and the hike was no big deal!

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We hit the beach and had a couple of hours to chill. Steve went for his traditional arctic dip.

Another group was there waiting and asked when our ferry was. We said 5:30 pm. They joked that their’s was either 5 pm today or 9 am tomorrow and I replied well there are worse places to be stranded! hahaha 😑 6 pm came and went and none of us had left the landing yet. Another group showed up, with a guide who had a radio. He said the ferry was on it’s way but we realized that this group was from Borea, not our ferry. They rolled up in a huge boat and took everyone but us off the beach. We tried to ask if they’d seen or heard from our captain but no one said much, other than the boats are sometimes two hours late. We hunkered down to wait, and wait, and wait…

We decided that after 5 hours, he just wasn’t coming. Tserka had managed to hike partway up the mountain and activate his international cell service but the signal was super weak. The wind had really picked up as the evening wore on. I was freezing at this point, so we put up the tents. Steve managed to get a call to our guy and what we heard was that the winds were too high to make it in his boat. Well crap. We decided to go to bed with no dinner since we each had one package of ramen or rice left and we didn’t know how long we’d be stuck. That night sleep was pretty much nonexistent. The wind whipped wildly through the valley and we’d not secured the tent very well. Plus we were on a downhill slope, so I’d slide to the bottom of the tent, then inch my way back up. Morning came and we scrounged a mini cliff bar for each of us for breakfast. The bigger issue was no coffee! I did have a dirty chai tea latte pack for each of us though, so that was something! I hiked up to the magic cell service point and texted our captain. We heard nothing from him then, and now almost a week later, still nothing. I got a call to go through to Borea Adventures and asked if they were coming to this location today. They said yes and that they’d heard we were stranded, and they had room for us on board! Yay! We celebrated by cooking our final meal and then watching for the ferry again.

The ferry showed up a few hours later and we made our way back to Isafjordur, the big town up here. Unfortunately, our car was in Bolungarvik, the very small town to the north. We found a taxi parked outside of another building at the docks and went inside. The lady at Sjoferdir Sea Travels was very helpful in pointing us to the bus stop, unable to taxi us up north since she was already booked at that time for a trip south. She did say that we were not the first hikers who had been stranded by our ferry… We hiked down to the gas station for drinks and snacks and some directions for the bus schedule. Everyone was very nice but since they didn’t use the bus service, they couldn’t really help us. I’d be the same way if someone in Columbus asked me about the busses. I finally thought to call the Westfjords tourist center and this guy knew everything! We’d found the correct bus stop but the posted sign didn’t match up to what we’d been told. He said don’t worry, the sign was dead wrong and the schedule had changed at least four times since the sign was put up. We had an hour to wait, then a $45 fare to get us to the town with our car. Luckily this van/bus was able to accept credit cards since my wallet was in the car! Back at the car, we decided that showers and laundry were needed. The public swimming pool here is amazing and has a camping area attached to it. We were able to pay to use the laundry and showers, plus a nice long soak in the hot tubs. In retrospect, we should have skipped the laundry and just done showers. Doing laundry always eats about 2 1/2 – 3 hours. We had to make the eight hour drive down to our bed and breakfast still. Between the the three of us, we had the trip, finally getting in at around 3 am.

What can I say, it wouldn’t be an adventure with out a f@cking ferry day!