Join famous thru-hiker and combat veteran Thomas “Jabba” Gathman and renowned photographer and adventurer Chris Burkard on a bikepacking trip as they navigate some of the most remote and difficult terrain that Iceland has to offer. The adventure begins below…

“I would say it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and I’ve done a lot,” Jabba says. “I’ve been through U.S. Marine Scout Sniper Training, two combat tours, I’ve done some very difficult things backpacking and had some of my hardest days doing that, but I would say this adventure trumped most of those, especially being new to the sport of biking. I kept thinking: I am in Iceland right now. A few days earlier I was at the Mississippi River, and now I can’t feel my hands and feet and I’m biking through volcanic sand with not a human in sight in any direction.”

How Do You Introduce a Professional Thru-Hiker to the Land of Fire and Ice?

Jabba (also known as The Real Hiking Viking) is a U.S Marine combat veteran and famous thru-hiker with thousands of backcountry hours and countless miles hiked, but he had never set foot in Iceland before. The country was an entirely blank canvas of new sights and smells. He had received an invitation to come ride a new route from the northernmost tip to the southeastern coast with Chris Burkard, a photographer, explorer, and avid cyclist with an affinity for the island and multiple bikepacking expeditions under his belt.

“Chris and I started talking over Instagram during my big 5,000-mile ride in 2022 when I started getting into biking,” Jabba explains. “We stayed in touch over the years, both working with MountainSmith and eventually linked up in Denver when he came to show his film, The Forgotten Coast, about his bikepacking and rafting expedition along Iceland’s south coast.”

Having crossed Iceland via bike in a myriad of ways, Chris had glimpsed of a new route starting in the Raufarhofn, a tiny town on the northernmost tip of Iceland, and traversing through the interior bordering the northeastern edges of Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest glacier, and eventually ending in the fishing village of Hofn, located on the Southeastern Coast. The challenge was finding someone willing, and some would say crazy enough, to tackle 321 miles of Iceland’s most remote and challenging terrain. It’s not particularly bike-friendly.

“This trip dropped in my lap from my good friend and talented cartographer Snorri, who built it,” Chris recalls. “I really loved the fact that a route designed by somebody is sort of their extension of how to experience an area. It’s storytelling, in a way. I didn’t really want to give him much feedback and just gave him some guidelines from where I wanted to roughly start and finish. it just sat in my memory bank for a year and I remember thinking: who is going to ride this route with me?”

On a short trip to Denver in February 2024 to screen his film The Forgotten Coast, Chris reconnected with Jabba and felt like he would be the perfect fit for an expedition of this magnitude.

Chris remarks, “Like many relationships these days, I meet a lot of people online. You get this quasi-interpretation of who they are and their interests, and I felt like he was such a unique character, with his background in the military and long-distance hikes, especially in the winter. I was fascinated by that. I’m attracted to people like him who inspire me, someone whose approach to life is different and not following some formula. I wanted to spend time with him because I felt like I could learn something from him.”

After a chat over a recovery session at Denver Sports Recovery, Jabba accepted the invite and spent some time in the saddle preparing for the ride, knowing that Chris would handle logistics and his job was to show up with the proper equipment and be prepared for long days pedaling through difficult terrain.

“I was going into it super, super excited, really pumped on seeing what Iceland was all about, but definitely no concept of what I was about to see along the route,” Jabba says. Chris’s images were all I really had to go off of; random posts with random names of places I couldn’t even try to place on a map. It was like I didn’t read the book before seeing the film, in terms of seeing the country.”

Fast forward six months and Jabba is pedaling through lava fields and soft sand just south of Myvatn, an environment in stark contrast to the previous week in hot and humid Mississippi. This region is the island’s most remote, filled with vast lava fields, expanses of black sand, and little to no wildlife or plant life due to the extremely harsh weather known to frequent the interior. In 1965, NASA conducted a training exercise in the same area for the Apollo mission, considering the landscape similar to the moon due to its barren nature and geological diversity.

Allotting seven to eight days to complete the route, Chris and Jabba planned each day considering the weather and their ability to resupply in a thin network of huts that stretched in 30- to 50-mile increments through the region. It’s crucial to bring enough food and calories to sustain each section, and many of the huts only have water to boil.

“This route was more complex than others because the resupply points were scarce and complicated, with some very big stretches between resupply,” Burkard recalls. “I’ve done a north-to-south crossing in the past and multiple other bike crossings, but this one was vastly different because of the geological formations that it passes. The isolation of the route was challenging at times. The amount of space that was open with no landmarks, doing 40- to 50-mile stretches with almost nothing around you. You kind of feel lost, very insignificant within that landscape. There’s not some great hut to look forward to or a cozy little town.”

Encountering NASA on another training mission around Askja, the timing felt a bit coincidental and inspiring to share with astronauts preparing for space. The ride took Chris and Jabba into a brutal headwind and into terrain past the end of the road, providing some firsts for Jabba and opportunities for them both to dive a little deeper into personal grit to continue onward. In these moments, optimism and a positive attitude are often key for success, a large part of the reason Chris felt Jabba would be the perfect partner for this expedition in the first place.

“What’s beautiful about thru-hikers like [Jabba] was his sense of positivity. It just radiates. It didn’t matter what got thrown his way, he always had a positive attitude. It was almost like the harder it got, the more he smiled,” Chris remembers.

Jabba states, “You can either laugh through that kind of shit or be upset through that kind of shit. It’s all about your perspective on something that’s hard, right? This 15 miles was the most fun for me, I was laughing and joking even though I ate shit 2 to 3 times, at one point going clean over my handlebars on a descent, tearing my rain pants to smithereens.”

Jabba’s approach to what many would call highly adverse situations comes at least in part from his background in the military, with a slightly sarcastic sense of humor but emerging positivity that brought a little bit of sunshine while crossing a frigid river during 40-degree drizzle in the technical sections of the route with no road and only the icy blue fingers of the Vatnajokull glacier for company. That’s the kind of partner you want when conditions are at their worst.