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Driving Up The Bolafjall Mountain, Part 1 / Horrifying Drive

Driving Up The Bolafjall Mountain, Part 1 / Horrifying Drive

January 2019 · 3 min read · Westfjords

In the Westfjords of Iceland, there is a small village Bolungarvik, where I wanted to camp after a long driving day. Next, to the town, there is a Bolafjall mountain (638m from sea level). This offers really great areal views of surrounding areas. This surely was a location I wanted to go up to. At the top, there is also a radar station and this is the reason why its possible to drive to the top with a car. Some people even say that during certain weather conditions you can even see Greenland from there. Not sure how because it is mathematically impossible due to earth curvature.

Time was about 0.30AM when I reached the village of Bolungarvik. Together with my girlfriend, we decided to drive up there at that same evening because it wasn't raining at least and I didn't want to risk it to go tomorrow morning.
It was all fun when we saw that the top is in thick clouds and I desperately wanted to see the view from up there. We still decided to go and hoped that maybe we will drive above the cloud layer.

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Roads were really thin and it was a little scary to drive on them. Tensions were starting to build up when we reached the height of clouds. The first photo is taken exactly at that time and its the only photo I took during a drive up, needless to say, I had other concerns at that time to think of than getting a good shot :D

When we reached to the clouds, my gf started to freak out because we didn't see literally anything. Visibility was maybe 1 to 2 meters. Edge of the road was about a meter away from us, if we were to drive off the road we would be falling hundreds of meters to our death. The higher we get then higher the tensions. To make matters worse, the road started to get really steep and this was the point I started to worry because I was insecure of our 2 wheel drive car be able to pull itself up. There was no way we could turn around on the road because there simply was no room. I shifted on second gear and floored the gas.
After some 5 scary minutes we were up.

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This is exactly the sight we saw up there. We didn't get through the cloud layer and it was a nice disappointment to see basically nothing at all. The edge you see on the photo is 638 meters straight drop to the beach below. We stayed there for a couple of minutes and the decision to go back because there was nothing to be seen and no possibility to get some good shots.
I made the decision to drive back up there in the morning if the mountain top is free of clouds.

These are a couple of shots I took on the way down when we were below the cloud layer again. I was feeling sorry of the brakes of a car because I braked about 10 minutes straight when driving down. I did a couple of quick stops to get some shots.

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I did drive up there the next morning and the sight we saw... too amazing. More of this tomorrow in part 2, Stay tuned!




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