Words by

Andie Sophia Fontaine

Photo by

Chris Burkard

Cyclist and photographer Chris Burkand has just achieved a new milestone: cycling directly across Iceland, from east to west, in nine days.

Chris first made news in Iceland last year, when he broke the WOW Cyclothon record and successfully cycled the Ring Road in 52:36:19. Chris is apparently quite enamoured with Iceland, and decided to set a new challenge for himself. Not content with merely cycling from one end to the other, Chris opted to deliberately cycle from the easternmost point to the westernmost.

Some nine days later, after many grueling hardships over 975km, Chris finally made it to Látrabjarg, Iceland’s westernmost point.

View this post on Instagram

It Goes! 9 days & 975KM of dirt, snow, volcanic ash, river crossings sand, rock & tarmac from the furthest East to West point. A beautiful line straight through the heart of Iceland’s most rugged and formidable landscape- as close as you can get to all the major glaciers. I’m so proud of the whole team- @emilybatty1 @ericbatty @adammorka for absolutely making this one of the best trips of my life. After a year of planning, scheming and mapping this route I am so grateful & humbled we were given a perfect weather window to complete it. We had massive workarounds, contingency plans and safety protocols in place… but in the end it all went smoothly as possible with no mechanicals and shockingly no real flats- the landscape was challenging enough and I am grateful we didn’t get the full brunt of Iceland’s weather on top of that. 🤯 Pushing & pedaling a 90LB bike is something we will not soon forget. Our only hope is that this route is worthy of people going back and repeating it. All the details are in my @strava Many thanks to @icelandair for getting our bikes there safely and to @lululemon @schwalbetires @srammtb @iamspecialized @tailfincycling @sonyxperia @sonyalpha for the support. 📷 @jordanrosenphotography

A post shared by ChrisBurkard (@chrisburkard) on Sep 1, 2020 at 4:33pm PDT

You can follow Chris’ incredible journey across the country on his Instagram account, with his stories over the journey labeled as ISL-TRAV and numbered in order.

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