ABOUT
Who We Are
Founded by Herbert Hauksson in 1996, Mountaineers of Iceland is the oldest snowmobile tour operator in the country.
Mountaineers operate 6 vehicles, 4 super jeeps, 5 large passenger trucks, 1 bulldozer, 1 road grader, 12 Yamaha Viper snowmobiles and 106 Yamaha Venture snowmobiles and is one of the largest snowmobile rentals in the world.
On an annual basis Mountaineers serve well over 50 thousand clients in more than one thousand tours, with just under 300 thousand clients since 2014.
Mountaineers have had two serious non-injurious incidents due to human error since 1996, where the assistance of the Ice-SAR volunteer units has been required. The first was three years ago and Mountaineers took several precautions to learn from that incident and again in January 2020. In 2019 Mountaineers cancelled 19 operational days due to bad weather. Mountaineers will take every possible measure to ensure an incident free operation as before.
Incident report
07. January 2020
On the 7th of January all snowmobile tours were cancelled by Mountaineers except for one tour with a group of 39 fellow travelers. The group scheduled for a snowmobile trip and a tour of an ice cave. At noon on the group arrived at the Mountaineers base camp at Geldingafell. It was known that bad weather was expected at the end of the day, around 15:00 or later that afternoon. Mountaineers operate their own weather station on location and according to weather conditions from Met offices and Mountaineers own weather station the timeframe for the tour was before storm and therefore the decision was made to operate the tour. This decision was based on the weather condition and the timeframe for the itinerary.
The group then ran into complications and the Icelandic SAR volunteers where called in for assistance.
Our own incident report can be viewed below:
