Continuing the autumn theme of trying to get into some Caves before the mouths filled up with snow, we picked a rainy, windy, generally miserable sunday afternoon to go for a short trip to Tanngarðshellir. (Tooth Garden Cave, or Garden of Teeth Cave, or whatever you feel is more dramatic) This is a quite short cave just up near Bláfjöll, the local ski resort. I'd recently plugged in all the gps points out of the back of the new guide book that came out this summer, so we just headed off up there.
Turns out you just park at the ski resort and walk 600m the other way. We actually saw at least one other entrance on the way over. Compared to the lava fields near Krýsuvík, there's a hell of a lot more garbage littering the area so close to the ski resort.
Oh, and the weather was shit. Terrible driving rain and wind, but once we were in, we could take off some of the drippy goretex. Einar took off as soon as he had a torch, as suspected, there was nothing to bother him, he didn't have to duck anywhere, and with no holes to speak of, nothing to really worry about either.
The eponymous tooth garden is probably the bit right in near the entrance, but it seems to have been damaged a bit since the picture in the guide book. No matter, the start highlights here are the brigt red enamel on some of the rocks. This was quite surreal, and well worth a visit. It's a very easy cave, with just one squeeze, and a couple of low roofs, and it's also quite short.
Because of the heavy rain though, the roof was dripping down quite heavily, so we ended up a bit wetter than we'd really expected. Also of note is that this cave has a draught through it, there seems to be a bit of a hole down the right hand fork at the end. I quite liked the river bed and flow in this cave, giving us channels most of the way through the cave, culminating in the "tongue" formation at the end of the left fork.
Of course, as before, another cave where I really would have loved another flash :) Next time :)
The cave being fabulous though, meant that we must be punished for our fun on the way out. Stepping back out of the cave was really quite a shock. We thought it had been pretty shit weather on the way in, but it was terrible now, howling wind, freezing rain, low visibility, and blowing straight at us.
Just as well it was only 600m or so back to the car! Back in the cars, we all split off home for warmth again. Thanks Lee, Alda, Einar, Iveta and Jonas for the company!
