Photo:@the_hunting_photographer | Text: PAUL & FRANZ @k_mar_outdoor | Gunnar @hunting_iceland
The Fog Swallows Everything
As my brother Franz, hunting companion Gunnar, and I load our gear into the Toyota Tacoma in the early morning hours, Iceland still lies in a grey twilight. The sky is one vast, silent overcast. Our Icelandic guide Bjarki – a man of few words, his face weathered by years in the field, with the calm gaze of someone who knows and respects nature – glances up at the cloud cover and slowly shakes his head. Not a good sign. Fog – just like yesterday. But we are determined to try again.
The morning temperature is hovering just above freezing, and with the damp Icelandic wind cutting across the plateau, it feels considerably colder. I zip the Kelvin PrimaLoft Hoody up to the chin and follow Bjarki into the grey.
The drive into the hunting grounds takes us through a landscape that, wherever the shifting veils of mist briefly part, radiates a raw, untamed beauty.
Black lava fields, steep fjord slopes – dark and rocky near the ridgeline, giving way to deep green in the valley below – threaded through with gleaming streams that trace their way down the black hillsides like delicate silver threads.
For hours we stalk through the barren highland, glassing, hoping, persevering. Visibility drops at times to barely fifty metres. The fog brings with it a steady, penetrating moisture – not quite rain, but enough to soak through anything that isn't up to the task.
The Sitka Dew Point jacket takes it without complaint. Bjarki leads us with sure-footed confidence – uphill over slippery scree, downhill through ankle-deep bog – yet the reindeer we are hoping for remain invisible.
All except for one fleeting moment when the mist plays its cruel game, lifting just long enough to reveal the slopes above, where we briefly make out a herd moving across the hillside. But within seconds the fog closes back in. That evening, we return to the lodge once more empty-handed.
The Fjords Reveal Their Secrets
The third morning breaks clear and cold. Overnight, the wind has swept the fog away, and now – at last – Iceland reveals itself in its full, uncompromising splendour: sharp-edged mountain peaks mirror themselves in the dark fjord waters, and the sky sends ahead the first delicate pastel tones of a sunny day.
The air carries that crystalline clarity you rarely find anywhere else in the world – every contour sharp, every sound carrying far. Franz, Gunnar and I exchange a glance in silent understanding. Today, the tide would turn.
We follow the steep coastline northeastward, deeper into the fjord landscape, past enormous basalt formations standing like primordial sentinels over the valleys below. Bjarki suddenly pulls over, raises his binoculars and trains them on a hillside across the valley. He says nothing, passes the glass to me and indicates with a brief nod toward a point high up on the terrain. I bring it to my eyes – and my heart begins to race.
There, perhaps seven hundred metres away on a steeply falling slope, a herd of reindeer moves with calm, sure-footed ease.
A strong bull stands slightly apart from the rest, lifting his massive antler crown again and again against the sky – a vision of impressive wildness that etches itself instantly into memory.
The Moment of Truth
What followed was perhaps the most demanding and exhilarating hour of my hunting life. Bjarki leads us at a brisk, steady pace in a wide arc around the hillside, always into the wind, always using the rocks for cover. The ascent is steep and unforgiving – loose scree, icy puddles between the boulders, lungs burning with effort in the thin mountain air. Halfway up, the wind picks up sharply along the exposed ridge.
The Dew Point goes back on in under a minute – and stays on.
Franz is breathing hard behind me, but neither of us gives a single thought to turning back.
After roughly two hours – with only brief rests – we have closed to within about two hundred metres of the herd. Lying flat, I crawl the last fifty metres behind Bjarki over the final rock ridge, heart hammering. The guide signals Franz and me forward, pointing to a plateau roughly a hundred and fifty metres below us where reindeer are grazing undisturbed. The bull is quickly identified through binoculars that tremble slightly with adrenaline.
Breathe deep.
Find the target through the scope.
In the seconds that follow our shots, an absolute, reverent silence falls – only the cold wind and the faint sound of an unseen stream far below reach us.
The bull has fallen.
Franz, too, had a clean shot – he had taken a mature reindeer cow with a single, precise round.
And now we lie here – two brothers – side by side on the cold rock, saying nothing, each of us lost in the moment. Then we rise simultaneously, and the tension and exhaustion of the last days falls away. Gunnar and Bjarki come to us and offer their congratulations. We embrace – a gesture that says everything, and that captures what we have shared better than any words could. The nerve-testing fog of the first days, the long and punishing climbs, the moments of doubt – and now the quiet joy of not having given up.
Then we descend in silence to pay our respects to the quarry, to do the necessary field work and begin the long, hard task of bringing them off the mountain.
The wind, the wild, the vast sweep of the fjords – Iceland has given us something that cannot be put into words.
Verdict: Iceland – A Hunt That Stays With You
Reindeer hunting in the northeastern fjords of Iceland demands physical fitness, endurance, and a willingness to surrender entirely to the rhythm of this wild, unpredictable landscape. The first days of impenetrable fog were not a failure – they were a necessary lesson in humility.
As for the kit – the Sitka Dew Point and the Kelvin PrimaLoft Hoody did what good gear is supposed to do: they stayed out of the way. Warm when we needed warmth, dry when everything around us was wet, quiet when silence mattered. Nothing more, nothing less.
In terrain like this, the best gear is the kind you forget you're wearing.
