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Adventurous Souls
Eleven guide Alan Bernholtz skis
down an untracked slope on the
ICELAND’S TROLL PENINSULA IN WINTER Troll Peninsula on the northe
edge of Iceland.
BY BRIAN E. CLARK
’ve skied on five continents - from Morocco to
Switzerland to New Zealand to British Columbia
Ito Chile and beyond - but none of them quite pre-
pared me for the Troll Peninsula on the northern
edge of Iceland.
Way up there, where rugged mountains rise
more than 5,000 feet above the Greenland Sea, I
found a luxurious lodge - actually, a restored and
vastly expanded Icelandic farmhouse, complete
with a sod roof - that serves as a base for a remark-
able heli-skiing operation in the winter.
When conditions are right, schussers can bag
runs dropping 4,500 vertical feet - all the way to the
frozen beach - then hop back in a chopper to do it
again on another untracked slope.
Guests can also hike, fish, go fat-tire bicycling,
soak in hot springs, surf in thick wetsuits, go horse-
back riding or just kick back in a thermal pool and
wait for the aurora borealis - northern lights - to ap-
pear.
Known as Deplar Farm and owned by Eleven
Experience, the lodge is a remote outpost in the
Fljot Valley, where a productive trout stream flows
nearby and mountains rise thousands of feet on
both sides. It was in those mountains that I skied
with guides Alan Bernholtz, a San Fernando Valley
native; and Michael Barney, who grew up outside
Milwaukee.
Photo Courtesy Eleven Experience
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