Today was supposed to be about packing for a winter glamping trip, aka what you need to take to survive in an uninsulated tin can in December but then this video popped up in my YouTube subscriptions today. It features Iceland and specifically Meradalir and you know I can’t resist commenting on that kind of thing!
Tom Scott is one of my favourite YouTubers. I’ll generally take a short break on Monday afternoon when his new videos are out instead of waiting for a patch of empty evening and I generally find I enjoy his Plus videos, which are less formal but more about challenging himself, even more. This one is with The Technical Difficulties. I don’t love all the group stuff they do but their new channel involves each of them having an adventure and filming it, and then they watch everyone’s videos together and I’m loving that. This one, which should still be the most recent by the time this is published, is Tom’s adventure. He’s gone to Iceland because Meradalir is erupting. Watch the video before I say anything else.
Have you watched it? Because very little is going to make sense otherwise and also, there’s nothing I can say that isn’t going to be a huge spoiler for what happened.
Ok. Let’s start with what actually happened..
I saw the words “really angry hill” and saw the texture of the hill behind him in the thumbnail and I was always going to watch this anyway but maybe I would have watched it later this evening rather than immediately if I hadn’t had a suspicion of what was going on.
And I was right! Tom Scott is doing the Meradalir volcano hike! He’s better at filming than me so I very quickly realised that this was going to be a far better record of the trek than I made in my video (I’ll embed that at the bottom so as to not break this up too much). He’s got better weather, his camera isn’t gently rocking or wobbling, his audio is better, he’s comfortable on camera. Excellent, a favourite YouTuber recreates my big day out!
However…
First things first, he got my suspicions going when he said “A couple of weeks ago, my contact here gets in touch and says ‘it’s erupting again'”. Because from the benefit of being in the future, I know that eruption only lasted about eighteen days. I cut it finely enough because I left it over a week between the volcano starting and me flying out. At the time it made perfect sense but from the point of view of someone who watched it in real time, well, “a couple of weeks ago” isn’t a great start.
Second was when the trail looked so deserted. Sure, he says there are hundreds of people and tour buses and whatnot but I can’t see many of them. Maybe he’s just filming around them. But when I did that hike, if I’d fallen over, I’d have knocked my teeth out on someone’s boots, that’s how packed the trail was. If you watch my video, I point the camera at myself once, maybe twice, and that’s because there are too many people around for most of us to be comfortable filming ourselves.
Third was “I have not checked any of the volcano forecasts, because they have those now”. Tom, they have those for a reason and people like you and me are the reason.
From my viewpoint in the future, those are three huge flapping red flags that told me very early on how this was going to end. I’ll let him off points 1 and 2 but it’s only common sense to check the “volcano forecasts” before setting off. For one thing, eruption sites are sometimes closed because of a build-up of toxic gases. If that’s available, it’s something you should check before you go. For another, as we’ve learned and as Tom should know from previous experience, sometimes volcanoes stop. Sometimes paths become dangerous and have to be closed. Check what the volcano’s up to before you set out!
Next, we get the hike. Yes! The uphill sections are so hard! Yes, the rocky section is “brutal”, “ankle-twisting” and “just horrible”. I don’t need my opinions validated by a YouTuber – especially not given the incoming rant – but it does feel good to have someone else say it. I hated that bit, especially on the way back – Tom still understates it a bit but yes! That bit was horrible!
After the rocky bit comes the new path. It was being built when I was there and it was being built when Tom was there. I tried comparing it to figure out whether he was there before or after me, and therefore how big the eruption would be, but it’s impossible to tell. Is the beginning of the path higher? Does it reach all the way to the eruption site? Is the rocky section shorter or longer? You can’t tell!
But the moment he got to the cliff edge and the warning sign and the view wasn’t blocked by 10,000 tourists, that’s when I knew for certain. I was about 95% sure up until then, given those flags, but when the viewpoint was deserted, that’s when I knew. It’s supposed to be the big reveal, the big twist in the tale – “and when he got there, the volcano had stopped!” but yeah, I saw that coming.
Tom later says “the eruption likely ended at 6am yesterday”. If I remember rightly – and I can’t find anything to back me up right now, the eruption was provisionally declared over on Sunday after its last activity being early Saturday morning. So this is probably Sunday. It might be Monday. I was in Iceland both those days! I think this is Sunday because I was out and about in the west with that beautiful blue sky whereas on Monday, I was just up the road at the Sky Lagoon and it was kind of grey and miserable.
But what I actually wanted to talk about was Tom’s prep, or lack thereof.
Folks, Tom got lucky, particularly with the weather. This is very much how not to do a volcano hike.
Tom is known for being sensible and being thorough. He does the research, he checks his sources and although he has a video called “why you can’t trust me”, you generally can. There are a lot of flibbertigibbets and there are a lot of idiots on YouTube. But Tom isn’t one of them. If he’d been at my university, he’d have ended up in the caving club. He went to York and how he avoided the cavers, I don’t know. I met them. They existed.
My point is that Tom is one of the level-headed sane type. If Tom says or does something, you can hold to it.
Which is why it’s so jarring that in this case, he hasn’t done the research. This isn’t an example to copy.
I’m not even talking about not checking the volcano forecast. I’m talking about checking ICE-SAR’s advice on the hike. Right from the start they announced that this is a very different hike from the last one, with the words “for experienced and prepared hikers only” thrown around a lot. I don’t get the impression Tom is a very experienced hiker but you can make up for that quite a bit in preparation.
Route-finding is easy-peasy. If there aren’t literally thousands of people to follow, you can follow the trail markers, or just where the path has been worn by thousands of feet. I grant you, if a fog came down – as it’s likely to do – navigation becomes a lot harder but they do close the trail in bad weather. And when I say they close the trail, I mean that a police car sits blocking the road on both sides and demands to know where you’re going. Whether you can lie to them – just passing by on my way to Hveragerdi – and then park and hike, I don’t know. I wouldn’t and I think you’re a monumental idiot if you do.
Once you get past route-finding, your next major preparation point is clothing. It may be August but in the Icelandic mountains, you have to pack as if it’s December. I wore adequate warm clothes and I packed extras of everything, in dry bags just in case. I had to put it all on in the car park before I even set off. That fog can come down. Heavy rain can appear out of nowhere, even if it’s nice weather in the car park. The wind can howl and freeze the flesh from your bones in the mountains. You might sprain your ankle on those uneven rocks but your biggest hazard is hypothermia.
On a related note, you do generally need half-decent footwear. You might get away with sturdy trainers with good soles. You’d be better off with boots. They don’t need to be Everest-proof and you don’t need to spend a fortune on them but ankle support and good grip will do wonders for your hike. I found the poles invaluable too, both for crossing those rocks and for the descent. I have dodgy knees which get tired after 8 or 10 kilometres and then they don’t want to cooperate with hiking downhill, so I probably physically couldn’t have got down those steep switchbacks without the poles.
And finally, food. Food is fuel. If you’re going to walk 14km across the mountains, you’re going to need more fuel than usual, especially if your day job, and what your body is used to, is sitting at a computer or talking to a camera. If you’re going to walk in bad weather, which is a risk in the Icelandic mountains, you’re going to need even more fuel. And if you’re going to be out longer than planned, be that because it was harder than you expected or because something went wrong, you’re going to need even more.
Tom has overlooked absolutely everything here. He expresses admiration for the search & rescue volunteers and derides “‘unprepared tourists” but he hasn’t looked at ICE-SAR’s advice and he’s less prepared than the majority of the unprepared tourists. There’s no evidence of any warm or waterproof clothes beyond a hoodie, there’s a strong insinuation that he’s only wearing trainers, he has two 500ml bottles of water, a piece of flapjack and a bar of chocolate and that’s it. He’s bewildered by the people who are carrying the necessary stuff, he’s amused by the hiking poles and he has no concept that 6km on London steets are different from 6km up a mountain in Iceland.
In short, for once, he’s setting a really bad example and it’s all the more scary because we’re so accustomed to Tom setting a good example that it would be really easy not to realise what’s happening here. I’m glad the rest of the Tech Dif team call him out because even as he’s watching his own video, he doesn’t seem to really get how underprepared he is and how badly that could have turned out. I set out in blue sky but by the time I was in the mountains, it had clouded over and it was raining and freezing cold by the time I reached the eruption. I could have had a very bad day if I hadn’t had waterproofs, an extra jacket, hat and gloves, a ton of crisps and bread and cheese. I took about two litres of liquid – I had a large bottle plus I had two drinks I’d bought at the airport and I re-used those bottles for the sake of being able to take more and even so, I was kind of rationing it by the time I was coming back down. I don’t think I’d have reached dehydration or danger or difficulty but I was frustrated that I had to be a bit careful if I didn’t want to get thirsty before I got back to the car – I suspect I had most of a large carton of apple juice and most of a large bottle of Appelsin waiting there, because better in the back seat than in a one-man tent.
So, yes. It’s good to see my volcano hike filmed well but it’s incredibly frustrating to see how the hike itself was handled. Don’t take hiking advice from Tom Scott. But do watch his videos. He’s still one of my favourite YouTubers and right now, he’s putting out five videos a fortnight which is incredibly impressive when you consider how many YouTubers are struggling to do one or two a month. Big Tom Scott fan. Just… just flabbergasted by the lack of preparation in this hike.
And speaking of YouTube, how would you like to watch my video on hiking to Meradalir? It’s not done anywhere near as well as Tom’s but I went prepared and you know what? I saw the eruption!