Eli Burakian likes spending time outdoors. Lots of time.

The former Dartmouth College photographer got his start with a camera when he spent three years as caretaker at Dartmouth’s Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, exploring the mountain’s trails and getting to know its whims. He eventually turned that knowledge into a book of photographs—”I definitely wasn't a good enough photographer for a book when I lived at Moosilauke, but it was where I fell in love with photography,” he says. Not surprisingly, it led to any number of books—Hiking Waterfalls in New England, Climbing New Hampshire’s 4,000 Footers, and others—that managed to combine photography and the outdoors.

And then there’s his fondness for setting hiking records and ultra-running. “I’m not fast,” he says about that last pursuit. “I’m just good at suffering.”

Which, it turns out, can be handy. In August, Burakian spent 13 days (and 2.75 hours, in case you really need to keep track) hiking the length of Iceland, from a lighthouse a couple of miles shy of the Arctic Circle at its northernmost tip to the lighthouse at its southernmost point.

Eli Burakian in Iceland

Burakian’s had lots of adventures, often centered on achieving Fastest Known Times, but they’ve been around here. He created what he calls the “Triple Ascutney Loop”; did the Cohos Trail through NH’s Great North Woods (his 2019 FKT for an unsupported hike—that is, carrying everything he’d need—was beaten two years later); set an unsupported-hike FKT for the Midstate Trail from Massachusetts’ border with NH to its border with CT; and put together a Live Free or Die route up and down New Hampshire.

All that time, though, another hike nagged at him. Well over a decade ago, he’d read about a guy named Jonathan Ley, who in 2006 did a north-south hike of Iceland. “This was before it had become a tourist hotspot,” Burakian says. “He’d brought an SLR (camera) with him, and the images just blew my mind. That adventure just stayed there. I’ve been thinking about it a long time.”

Then, in 2018, two Australian ultra-runners, Meredith Quinlan and Jess Baker, did a north-south traverse setting a self-supported FKT (they resupplied along the way). And the following year, British adventurer Katie-Jane L’Herpiniere did a south-to-north unsupported traverse for the pure adventure of it. “The weather on this volcanic island is notoriously brutal, you can’t avoid rain, sandstorms, glacial rivers, strong winds, snow and vast emptiness,” she wrote. Or as Burakian puts it, “You can get hit by a windstorm that knocks you off your feet and the largest thing you have to hide behind is a rock the size of a basketball.”

L’Herpiniere did her unsupported hike in 15 1/2 days, and Burakian was convinced he could go faster—and get some stunning photographs along the way. As it happened he had some spare time: After a decade as the Dartmouth College photographer, he left that job this summer. “I realized I didn’t have to rush this thing, and could do it the way I wanted,” he says. “My only goal was to basically do it in somewhere between 11 and 13 days, to push myself physically and mentally, and to enjoy the process.” Oh, also, since it’s possible to get swept away while trying to cross those Icelandic rivers, he promised his wife that when he had to choose a path, he would always choose the safest way. “Whether it was a park ranger or some guy on a motorcycle who always seemed to provide an answer at just the right time,” he says, “I was able to choose the most beautiful scenic off-road route every time I had to make that choice.”

So, early in August, he flew to Iceland, took another plane to Akureyri, caught a bus to Húsavík, on the north coast, then spent hours trying to hitchhike to the lighthouse that would be his starting point. He got there August 8 around 7 pm.

“It was so emotional! I was a mile from the Arctic Circle, next to the ocean, and right off the bat I was experiencing that Icelandic light. I can’t even put it into words. You get these pinks and yellows, and on one side there was blue sky and on the other, clouds with light coming through and storms out at sea… as a photographer it was mind-blowing. I just started walking—I walked eight miles that first night and camped on the tundra.”

The route follows along the edge of Asbyrgi Canyon on the northern edge of Valnajökull National Park. I didn’t see many trees after this point on Day 3. (All photos and captions by Eli Burakian)

What followed was a succession of days, and landscapes… and sheep. “A lot of the island around the perimeter is populated by sheep,” he says. “That’s the only real wildlife you’ll see, since farmers let them roam for the summer months.” The second day he camped on a black sand beach, and that night huddled in his tent—which he buttressed with boulders—in 40 mile-per-hour winds.

Two thumbs up for my Tarpent Moment DW tent, which held up to incredible winds and just used two stakes and one pole. I often bolstered my setup with small rocks and boulders as needed.

A couple of days later, after passing through a national park along basaltic cliffs and through canyons with 400-foot-tall lava formations—”You’d go over a pass or get a new view and keep thinking, ‘It can’t get more beautiful,’ and then it did”—he got to the Dettifoss waterfall, reputed to be Europe’s most powerful by volume. “I’d never seen anything like this,” he says. “I could not stop crying. There were thousands of people around when I walked in, and it did not take away from the splendor.”

Supposedly Dettifoss is the largest waterfall by volume in Europe and it was certainly the largest I had ever seen. The power was so intense it literally brought me to tears.

Over the next few days, his course took him over mountain passes, past the Krafla volcano, by Lake Myvatn with its volcanic islands—”There’s nothing normal in Iceland, everything is dominated by this volcanic landscape”—and finally into the mid-section of the country, known as the Highlands, where a 90-degree day could be followed by a 20-degree night and two inches of snow.

In the highlands I could see for endless kilometers, where sunsets, sunrays and rainstorms all moved about the horizon.