Vatanjokull, a huge glacier, takes up a large part of Iceland in the southeastern corner. This specific portion of the glacier, which is called a tongue, was right behind our hotel. Well sort of right behind…more like 4 km down an extremely rough trail that required a 4-wheel drive vehicle.

If you don’t know, a glacier tongue is a small finger shaped portion of a glacier that usually comes down off the mountain. The scale of this tongue and the entire glacier is impossible to understand in this photo. Sometimes a photo just doesn’t do a location justice (think about trying to capture the beauty of the Grand Canyon in a photo). You’ll have to trust me when I say, what you can see in this photo is probably less than 1% of the entire glacier.

Again, you can’t tell from this photo, but there are dozens of icebergs in the water that have broken free from the glacier. I didn’t know either until I piloted the drone over them. The distance from where I took this photo to the icebergs in front of the glacier was just over a mile. I guess that gives you some sense of the scale.

I had this wonderful spot all to myself from about 9pm to 11pm. It wouldn’t surprise me if I was the only one to visit this spot all day…. Just based on the condition of the trail and the location. You could tell it doesn’t get many visitors like Iceland’s more popular spots.