An advanced hike (at the very least) to the eruption site. The presence of the emergency services was only assured during office hours (a mini post at the beginning of the road). Some of the passages were very steep and slippery, and the layout of the poles was sometimes difficult to understand.
Recording:★★★★★
One of, if not the, most difficult recordings I have ever made. The sound generated by the erupting volcano makes it very easy to saturate the capsules. The atmosphere could also be a problem for the electronics of the recorder. The H2n gave as good as it got.
Overall rarity:★★★★★
Whether it was going there or recording, coming back with a decent rendering of the FAGRADALSFJALL eruption was no easy task. It is certainly one of my most precious sounds.
Fagradalsfjall is a volcano formed in the Last Glacial Period on the Reykjanes Peninsula, around 40 kilometres (25 mi) from Reykjavík.
Between the evening of March 19 and mid-September 2021, the Reykjanes peninsula in southwest Iceland was subjected to a volcanic eruption. For more than 6 months, a particularly beautiful and harmless volcanic eruption hit Iceland in the middle of a remote valley, Geldingadalur, close to the mountains and Fagradalsfjall, and only a few kilometres from Grindavik and the Blue Lagoon.
In the course of one's life, there are only a few occasions when one is confronted with an eruption from the bowels of the earth. I will never forget the days leading up to this eruption. Weak earthquakes shook Reykjavik at random, but one of them woke me up in the middle of the night.
And on the night of the eruption I was having a drink at the Ræktin (a bar that has since changed its name). The waiter, who had become a friend, came up to me and said quite simply: "This is it, the eruption has started". We toasted and continued the evening as usual.
The next day, there was a kind of excitement in the city that was hardly noticeable. But it was there. In fact, it didn't take more than a few weeks for the windows of the souvenir shops to be filled with merchandise bearing the name and image of the volcano.
I waited a while before going there. But it was on May 3rd at 6am that I took the vehicle I had been lent and set off in the direction of what was, for me at the time, only an orange light in the distance in the Icelandic night sky.
Nothing more to say about Icelandic roads, those who have already driven them will understand.
My choice to arrive early in the morning was beneficial for my exploration, but a hardship to get there. And I'm not talking about the long hike that awaited me, but about the time I wasted to find where the car park was located. I ended up following the only car I came across that seemed as lost as I was. All this to land on a meadow that had been set up as a makeshift car park and that had been one of the first places I had ventured to.
follow the smoke
It is finally accompanied by an American from Atlanta who came to celebrate his vaccinations in Iceland that I took the road on foot in the direction of the beast.
My informer, Igni, a native Icelander and former guide in his sixties, had told me that there were two marked paths.
this is the most presentable marking I have photographed
One simple and one for advanced hikers. He had sold me that the "simple" path could be done easily and in street clothes without any problem, at least that's how he did it. At first I agree with him, it's flat, straight and clearly marked.
It's when you have to start climbing that things get tough. The easy path turned out to be almost impassable, with loose soil and stakes that seemed to be placed in a totally random way.
But the rumbling that came closer with each step was motivating. Gradually tiny pieces of cooled lava that had been thrown into the air appeared on the ground.
And finally, after a while, a valley appeared, and in the hollow of this valley, an awakening volcano. We had the choice of going lower and getting closer to the crater, or getting higher up for a better view. We chose the second option, as the valley was filled with noxious gases.
We passed two people leaving, and then the volcano was ours. In fact, my travelling companion quickly moved away, impressed by the spectacle. So I found myself with the volcano all to myself.
And despite this, it was certainly the most difficult recording I have ever done. On a windy hill and unstable ground, finding a place for the recorder was impossible. Many attempts were made to find the right place, down below, to get as close as possible. But then another problem presented itself. The energy deployed by a rumbling volcano is incredible, with low frequencies that systematically saturate the recording. Without professional equipment, I had no choice but to set the gain to a low level, thus sacrificing most of the calm before the storm.
In the end, it was more the experience of this journey that was of quality than the recording itself. I now know that despite the people who accompany me, I must take my time. Finding myself with a third party who doesn't necessarily understand what I want to do can lead to a situation where the recordings are botched, because you don't want to linger on the spot so as not to disturb. From now on I won't bother with these kinds of questions.
The time I lose during the recording process is the time I save in post-production.
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