“In the beginning I just drew a line,” says Chris Burkard, endurance athlete and world-renowned photographer.
“It would be so cool to go from here all the way to here on the northside of all the glaciers. That was the initial goal. How close can we stay to the interior? We don't want to go in and out of all these towns. We wanted it to be really pure, straight through the heart of the country.”
Iceland is a country whose heart feels ancient in a way few other places on earth do. Glacier ice and lava cover 10% of its surface and the sparsely inhabited interior is rugged and remote. It almost invites the type of old-school exploration Chris and fellow adventure athlete, Eric Batty, were proposing. The plan was to traverse the interior of the country: a 600 mile straight shot from the east coast to the west coast. If successful they would pioneer a new cross-country bike route. But being the first comes with its own set of challenges.