- There is quite simply no other place like it on Earth.

A small island country that has become a Mecca for tourism and a top stop for landscape photographers.

It is a place of extremes and natural beauty that left us mesmerized.

It is a geologic shift or crack in the ground, and then a massive amount of glacial melt is just chugging off of that thing.

This is Iceland, a place where fire, ice, and a lot of wind have created a backdrop for adventure travel that we'll never forget.

We wanted to visit the Highlands of Iceland, and that's a part of the country few travelers go to, because it's so brutal.

There's no room for error there.

Zack Allen and me both traveled to Iceland on separate trips to capture this wild landscape in camera, and away from the crowds.

- Yeah, it's kind of tucked away, and it's it's hard to see what, I mean, you have to go around a mountain basically to see it.

There are some things where it's like I want to go there, but not by myself, 'cause if I get stuck, I got nothing.

- Now we relive the moments from those journeys, and share our experiences with you.

There aren't any large apex predators that will try to consume you at night whilst you sleep.

To celebrate this amazing and rugged place that has become one of the top travel destinations on the planet.

You kind of take us through the, like the first part of your trip.

- First part was a nightmare at San Francisco airport.

- Oh, you're starting too far back.

- Should I go back?

- Yeah, yeah, too far back.

It's a half hour show, Zack.

Come on, man.

When you travel, the world becomes a smaller place.

When you explore with friends that share a love of photography, destinations come to life.

This water is emerald green.

We tell the stories of travel with our cameras, capturing some of the most beautiful locations on Earth.

But every adventure reveals more than what's in the frame.

Thunder boomers.

We see them popping up right now.

The people, the food, and unexpected turns in the journey.

Now they're going to swim right here.

(cheering) Brings the full experience of travel into focus.

- [Announcer] Outside Beyond the Lens, brought to you by Visit Fresno County.

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Stay in Fresno or Clovis and drive to three nearby national parks.

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- [Jeff] The landscapes of Earth are fairly predictable the more you travel.

Places in Europe look a lot like places in the United States.

Forests in Alaska can look similar to forests in the heart of China.

But nowhere on this planet looks anything like Iceland.

With a population of nearly 350,000 people living on 40,000 square miles of land, Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe.

In the summer months when tourism brings throngs of visitors, people who've traveled here outnumber the native population by three times.

Yet most of the tourists that come here only visit a relatively small part of Iceland, close to the capital city of Reykjavik, leaving wide, open, rugged and stunningly beautiful places to discover completely free of large crowds.

I traveled to Iceland in 2018 to shoot another show I was working on at the time.

On that trip, I was able to visit not just the coastal areas popular and easily accessible for adventure seekers.

I ventured into a rarely visited part of Iceland called the Highlands, the middle of Iceland, where there are no towns, zero paved roads, and little chance of help if something goes wrong.

Zack came here the following year by himself on a nomadic photo safari as his interest and skills in shooting still photography and video began to grow.

Zack, David Boomer, and I got together to relive our adventures on Iceland with each other and share some of the imagery we captured while we explored this magical place.

Did you stay in Reykjavik that first night, or did you- - No, I blew straight through, so I went, got the car, went straight to Reykjavik.

- What time local were you on the ground?

- I want to say three or four o'clock.

- In the afternoon?

- Right.

- And you were there what time of the year?

- This was, let's see, August 28th.

- [Jeff] There's a ton of tourism to Iceland.

Iceland's been a big tourism spot ever since 2010 when the volcano erupted.

After that happened, everybody ran to Iceland.

Hollywood productions began shooting in Iceland, and it just put it on the map really for tourism.

And most people when they travel to a place like Iceland, they'll do a tour.

You know, they go and they're part of a tour.

So they're on a bus, and then their itineraries fixed, and they usually stay with what's called the Golden Circle, and it's this area, it's if you drew, if you were to draw like about a 50 mile circle around Reykjavik, you know, from the, Reykjavik's the capital of Iceland on the coast.

And that little circle around Reykjavik has the, you know, it has the Blue Lagoon, and it has- - It has Thingvellir, or something I think, Thingvellir.

- Yep.

- It's a National Park area with the big lake and stuff and that's part of it.

And then what goes out to Geysir.

- And Gullfoss.

- Yeah, Gullfoss.

- [Jeff] Yeah, Gullfoss is the big waterfall that everybody goes to, and we've got some shots of that we're going to show you in a little bit.

There's a couple, there's a geyser out there that's past, just past that.

But you went down the coastal highway towards Vic?

- Eventually I did.

Yeah, I remember Vic was a spot that I really wanted to go to after watching some of the stuff you guys got from the, you know, the time you went.

- Yeah.

- But I ended up actually, I went to Reykjavik, got some supplies, got some camping, you know, food and all that stuff.

You know, stocked up and then went from that city up to Thingvellir area or where Oxarafoss is.

It's one of the first hits that I went to.

- And then what was that like?

- It was, it was interesting, 'cause it was, it was already getting dark.

- Are you cracking your knuckles?

- Yeah.

- This is a national airing television show, Zack.

And you're cracking your knuckles?

Let's clean that up, buddy.

- Take the sound out.

- [Jeff] The Icelandic language is tough to read when spelled out, so we always do our best to pronounce the words and mean no disrespect to the people of Iceland for not saying place names exactly right.

Oxarafoss is one of those locations popular on the Golden Circle route with good reason.

The easy to access waterfall spills over a basalt cliff into an icy pool below, where a boardwalk gives visitors an up close view of the falls.

On my journey to Iceland, I think the amount and quality of the waterfalls on the island are what surprised me the most.

There are literally thousands of waterfalls across the entire country, as water seemingly flows nonstop from every corner of this landscape.

Some of the most beautiful falls we found were just along the side of the road with no fanfare or pull out or interpretive signs coaxing you to pull over and take a look.

This is what Iceland is; a place of raw beauty that hasn't suffered the onslaught of human development that usually leaves places like this designated to national parks or preserves.

Here the entire country looks like this, and the people live in harmony with it.

And that was a pretty easy walk from the car you parked.

Most of the stuff is, by the way.

You don't have to hike.

I noticed in Iceland, there's not a lot, I mean, you can hike.

There's places to hike- - The trails that you can go on.

- But a lot of the beauty is just, I shot from the car or a short walk from the car.

- Yeah, very accessible.

Very easily so, and the country is, what's so great about their tourism, is they make everything really accessible.

- That's true.

- It's the easiest place to like car camp.

- Oh, it is.

- And it's awesome too.

It's very comfortable.

It's just- - [Jeff] Well, the thing I loved about it was there you can car camp anywhere.

You're not going to get harassed by some ranger, "Hey, you can't be parked here overnight."

No, they don't care.

I mean, there's, you can pretty much freedom camp wherever you want in Iceland.

There are no bugs on the island.

There's no mosquitoes.

There are none.

And there aren't any large apex predators that will try to consume you at night whilst you sleep, so I liked that part.

You know, I didn't have to worry about bears or hanging your food or anything like that.

It's just pretty much- - You hear a lot of goats and sheep at night.

- Yeah, there's that.

- I heard roosters, I heard goats every morning.

- Yes, Icelandic sheep are kind of everywhere, and we definitely got some cool shots of those guys walking around and they're neat.

For me, when I was in Iceland, we planned a pretty extensive circumnavigation of the entire island.

We took F Road 35 up to Gullfoss.

- [Zack] Right.

- [Jeff] And Gullfoss was really cool, except that it was super crowded when I was there.

- Yeah, there, it wasn't too when I was, it wasn't too crowded when I was there, but I could totally understand when you were there.

- It's a prime tourist stop.

It's a beautiful waterfall.

It's probably one of the top waterfalls in the world.

It's just a giant crack in the ground, and it's sort of a, it's not your traditional waterfall that comes from a stream that spills over, you know, a face.

It is a geologic shift or crack in the ground, and then a massive amount of glacial melt is just chugging off of that thing.

And also we wanted to visit the Highlands of Iceland, and that's a part of the country few travelers go to, because it's so brutal.

It's there's no room for error.

There are no services.

There's no gas stations.

There's no restaurants.

There's nothing.

- Yeah.

There's not even people that live there.

The Icelandic people don't I even live in the Highlands.

(mysterious music) If the places on Iceland where most of the tourism is focused is considered raw and rugged, then this part of the country is a whole new level of wild.

The Highlands of Iceland are only doable during summer months, only recommended with a four wheel drive vehicle, and only accessible on a limited network of dirt and gravel trails called the F Roads.

The warnings given by the rental car companies about venturing into the Highlands probably scares off about 90% of the people equipped with common sense.

The other 10% are too brave, too stupid, or, like us, a little bit of both.

Once the pavement ends on the F Roads, an entirely new and exciting kind of travel begins.

This is where you see the stuff the 90% that come here won't.

It's Iceland as it's always been; born from fire and shaped by ice and wind.

There are few places left on earth where you can find this kind of solitude and separation from other human beings.

And here, well be on the crowds of the Golden Circle, this setting begins to remind me of something I've seen before.

As we were driving on that section of this desolate road, literally in the middle of nowhere, I started to look around and I'm like, "Man, this looks familiar."

It's been in a movie.

Where is that?

Where have I seen this before?

And it was the opening credits of, and people that watch this show regularly probably have figured out that we're sort of Star Wars geeks, at least Zack and I are.

Dave, not really, but we're training him, but it was Rogue One, the Star Wars kind of spinoff movie, Rogue One.

The opening scene when the bad guy flies in to, you know, kidnap the guy that's going to build the Death Star.

That, all those scenes, were filmed very close to this, and so it was very common in that area to see the dark volcanic rock with the green moss onto the slopes with the milky glacial river.

I mean, it's so- - Massive contrast.

- Big contrast.

I mean, if you love shooting, even if you're just an iPhone or, you know, smartphone shooter, it's such a great, a crazy place to go and photograph, so we enjoyed that, but then what we did is we came back into Gullfoss, which was really crowded the night before.

But we purposely missed, we drove past the geysers before Gullfoss, because they were totally impacted with tourists.

And so we were like, "We can't even get in there."

But the beautiful thing about Iceland is the sun is up at three o'clock in the morning.

- [Zack] At the time you were there, yeah.

- [Jeff] At the time I was there.

So we were, we went back to the geyser at three o'clock in the morning.

- [Zack] You guys are the night owls too.

- [Jeff] And there was no one there, obviously, because everybody's sleeping, and yet the sun was out, or it was light.

And we enjoyed that little part of it.

- Yeah, that's a good, that's a good tip.

(solemn music) - Zack's solo adventure here in 2019 took him in the opposite direction of my trip the year before, but along the same drive that basically loops around the entire country on a route called the Ring Road.

Here the massive ice cap of Vatnajokull National Park is a surreal place to explore as large glaciers make their slow approach to the Atlantic, patiently carving deep valleys through the rock.

Glaciers like this are formed after thousands of years of snowfall compresses into dense ice.

The weight of which becomes so great, it begins to slide with gravity down slope, deepening the canyon of bedrock below it as it moves.

At the face of the glacier, large sections of ice calve off into glacial lagoons where these massive icebergs now slowly float toward the sea.

In 2018 on a stop I took at the Jokulsarlon glacier, icebergs the size of city buses roll in the shallows of the lagoon, as the retreating tide pulls them to the open ocean.

(birds calling) As the ice blocks roll on the muddy bottom of the bay, they stir up the sediment attracting Arctic terns to the floating buffet of small aquatic creatures now exposed to the surface.

The smaller blocks of ice are able to float into the surf and wash up on the sand, giving this popular stop its name, Diamond Beach.

Further east along this stretch of Iceland's southern coast, another unique destination comes into view.

Frigid waters and black sand beaches give way to a monolithic feature rising above the Atlantic called Vestrahorn.

At the foot of the mountain, a forgotten Viking village is slowly losing a battle to wind, rain, and time.

But this isn't an ancient ruin from a loss civilization.

This is actually a movie set that was built in 2010 for a film that was never made.

Yeah, in your footage, when I got your footage and I started looking through it, I was like, "Ah, why didn't we find that?"

I was like, oh my God, and we drove right by it, but we didn't know.

- Yeah, it's kind of tucked away.

It's hard to see.

I mean, you have to go a mountain basically to see it.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- [Zack] And I only learned about it, because of the guy on YouTube that I just, you know, I watch for inspiration, and I ran across.

- Yeah, a vlogger talked about it.

- And I was like, "That's actually really cool."

So I took a look when I got there, and I was like, "Well, there it is."

It was kind of like what we, like, what Brizz said, when we met out in the Valley of Fire.

It just had a calling.

- Yeah.

- Like since I got there, it was like this is beautiful, you know, mountain range right on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

I believe that's the Atlantic.

- Yeah.

With this cool black sanded beach lagoon, waves coming in.

You got these, you know, the black sand everywhere.

These grass tufts.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- It's just, and you got this, you know, this whole village.

You can go in there.

- No, it's surrealistic.

It's why Hollywood chooses Iceland to shoot so many otherworldly landscapes, because it is otherworldly.

It's an austere landscape.

It's, you know, it's foreboding, it's tough, and the weather can be brutal.

I will say when I drove this section of the island, I was covering a lot of ground.

We were driving all the way from say this, - Seydisfjordur.

- Say this.

- The Walter Mitty town.

- Yeah, the Walter Mitty town.

Seydisfjordur, which is my favorite town pretty much anywhere in the world that I found.

It was, that we found.

It is this little whaling, old whaling village on the extreme far northeastern shore of Iceland and- - Has that colorful piano walk.

- Yeah, it's got the, it's got the rainbow colored walk through it.

It's a great little village, and it's right in this little bay.

It's actually where modern whaling was sort of invented and modified.

(thoughtful music) If you ever come to Iceland, make the extra effort to see this place.

Seydisfjordur is removed from the main tourism circuit, so when you come here, you're interacting with the people that call this very special place home.

On travels to the north side of the island, both Zack and I hit some of the same spots.

Up here the volcanic activity below much of the surface of Iceland makes itself much more visible as steam vents and large craters dot the landscape.

Here you can drive right to the base of the Hverfjall volcano and hike to the rim of its crater.

A tough ring volcano erupted about 2,500 years ago and blanketed this entire area, known as Myvatn today, with dark volcanic rock.

Further along this route, Zack and I both stopped at the most popular waterfall on the north side of Iceland, called Gothafoss.

This series of falls is more stretched out, and while the drop is only about 12 meters, the volume of glacial melt pouring over the top is a wonderful and thunderous thing.

Now one of the most recognizable or photographed land features on Iceland is this peak that sorta just sticks out by itself out there.

- Kirkjufell.

- Kirkjufell.

- Off of Snaefellsnes.

- Snaefellsnes.

- Peninsula.

Yeah, Snaefellsnes, like a Snuffleupagus.

- Yeah, it does sound like a Snuffleupagus.

Now we didn't go to this part of the island, and you did.

Share with us, you know, what you found up there, and while we look at your footage.

- [Zack] Yeah, coming into Kirkjufell area here, there's a waterfall that's positioned, and it's like God made this place.

You got this, you know, creek comes out with these waterfalls, as it's a good drop-off, and it's positioned perfectly for someone to stand here.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- [Zack] And it fills your whole frame.

- [Jeff] The symmetry's perfect.

- Yes, and then it's also, you're looking due west and the sunset's right there.

And also you're up just high enough where the the Northern Lights can blow right through.

So you can get all these different versions.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- [Zack] Of that picture.

- [Jeff] For millions of travelers, adventure seekers, and photographers, Iceland has become a giant playground of sorts.

It's almost as if it was put here for the rest of the world to enjoy.

But for me, it's always very important to respect the places I visit and the locals that call these places home.

It's why one of my best days on Iceland was just exploring around the small towns off the main ring road to look into the world the Icelandic people actually live in.

(gentle music) The waterfalls and glaciers are definitely special, but Iceland is so much more than a giant tourist attraction, especially to those who live here.

Understanding that and learning to appreciate it will make travel anywhere more fulfilling.

And if you're a photographer, like most of us are becoming, respecting where you are will let you see a place like Iceland in a whole new light.

(solemn music) Well, cool.

I think this was kind of fun.

You know, I wanted to, thanks for sharing your stories and your awesome video, and still photos too with us.

Iceland is definitely a place, you know, it's one of the top places on planet Earth, in our opinion, for landscape photography, and that's what this show's about.

So we wanted to share that with you guys, and also kind of mix it up a little bit.

In the year of COVID when we didn't get to travel to some of the international destinations we wanted to see, this gives us a chance to share some new footage, footage you haven't seen before from Zack.

And so I hope everyone, you know, I hope everyone loved it.

Zack?

- I did.

- Did you love it?

- I did.

- Address the people in your camera.

- I hope, well, I'll tell you.

I hope that with the reopening of the world, that other people can go and explore this great country and others like it.

- Nice.

Well said, Zack.

Well said.

(rugged music) - [Announcer] Outside Beyond the Lens, brought to you by Visit Fresno County: Nature, diversity, found in the heart of California's Central Valley.

Stay in Fresno or Clovis and drive to three nearby national parks.

By Hedrick's Chevrolet, supporting the spirit of travel in each of us.

Every journey has a first step.

Start your next adventure here.

By Fresno Yosemite International Airport.

Rediscover your love for travel with more options, more flights, more connecting you to the people and the places you love.

And by Visit Yosemite Madera County.

California's gateway to Yosemite National Park.

Explore the outdoor magic of Madera County, and be inspired to discover more.

And by viewers like you.

(jet engine roaring)