A couple of years back, I guided five hikers along the Laugavegur. All of them were over seventy. All of them had been serious hikers their whole lives, the kind of people who knew what a multi-day trek was supposed to feel like.

By the end of the trail, one of them had been pulled off the route with a bad knee and shuttled back to civilization. Another had picked up COVID somewhere along the way and was crossing rivers with a high fever for the final two days. He pushed through because at that point in the trail there is no real way out. You walk to the end. I more or less held him up at the deeper crossings. He made it.

When we finished, they told me it had been the hardest thing they’d ever done. Wonderful too, they said. But the hardest, by a long way. And the thing they kept coming back to wasn’t the scenery or the route. It was that somebody had been there beside them the whole time. The pace adjusted whenever a knee was complaining. An arm under them at the rivers. The man with the fever got across crossings he could not have crossed on his own.

That’s the gap, more or less, between hiking in Iceland on your own and hiking with someone who lives here.

I want to write about why that gap matters, and why the best hikes in this country specifically reward going with a guide. I run a small private tour company called Lilja Tours, based outside Reykjavík, so yes, I have a stake in the answer. But this is the answer I’d give regardless. The trails in Iceland are not the kind of…

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