03
M O U N TA I N B I K I N G
WORDS AND PHOTOS BY MARY MCINT YRE
R AW POTENTIAL Mud, sheep, fish and a single trail in Iceland’s Westfjords. Mud and rain speckled my lenses. I squinted at the mucky, rock-strewn road in fading light and gripped my handlebars tighter. Focus. Exhale. Let go. At the next corner, Carston and Eric are stopped. Odd, I don’t usually see them until the bottom. Brakes shrieked in damp protest as I pulled up to a gooey red mess spilling across Eric’s nose, mouth and chin. “Are my teeth still there?” he asked through swollen lips, shivering under the evening drizzle.
We’d just spent the day biking in a remote farm valley in Iceland’s Westfjords, piecing together sections of sheep trail. Sprawled across the springy, memor y-foam moss, Eric had happily stuf fed his cheeks with blueberries, dribbling juice while extending brimming handfuls toward Carston and me. We were minutes from the car when a mud hole swallowed his front wheel axle-deep. After futile attempts to seal the triangular gash cutting through his upper lip with Steri-Strips—the glue dissolved instantly in the rain—we piled into the car and headed for the hospital to get stitches. For an hour and a half, we wound along coastal roads, hugging the edges of the dark fjords. The road dove into the mountains, passing through a 4-mile-long, single-lane tunnel before the lights of Ísafjörður glimmered ahead. It was the Westfjords’ biggest town and only community with medical facilities. The on-call doctor arrived in three minutes. He sewed the wound up slowly, with frequent
164
feet (50 meters)
suggested amount to extend Óliver’s Trail if you ride it
audible, inhaling exclamations, a common Icelandic ar ticulation that was especially unnerving in this situation. He sent us home, calling out, “No biking, of course!” as our three muddy figures disappeared down the fluorescent-lit hallway. Yeah, right. “The mountain biking scene in Westfjords is at an early stage,” friend and Ísafjörður local Vidar Kristinsson wrote several months earlier, “I promise you it will be a suffer-fest and rocky.” I assumed, since he’s new to biking, that the riding might be smoother than his ringing endorsement suggested, and we packed our bags to explore the new trails. The Westfjords comprise nearly 9,000 square miles of jagged coastline; a spur of volcanic mountains rising 3,000 feet above glacially carved fjords jutting into the North Atlantic. Despite being inhabited for over a millennium, it remains an isolated, wild place, with a population of 6,870 people spread
9,000
square miles
of jagged coastline in the Westfjords
6,870
population of the Westfjords
Carston Oliver and Eric Porter wonder if skis might’ve been the better choice. The pair, plus photographer Mary McIntyre, had come to discover what Iceland’s Westfjords had to offer the fat-tire set, only to have it snow for a week straight.
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