Steve Cropley decided to test his long-term Land Rover Discovery’s off-road credentials on a frozen river in Iceland. The results, as you’ll see, were chilling
It was a funny thing to be doing on a Tuesday morning. Swinging a 12-pound sledgehammer to crack the ice of a frozen river, while standing on the same icy shelf I was steadily pulverising, with a couple of feet of freezing water surging underneath[/intro].
The ambient temperature was well below zero and a fierce 50mph wind was adding serious wind-chill. The whole scene seemed distinctly bizarre. Here was I, the proverbial cartoon character sitting in a tree, busily sawing off the bough he’s sitting on.
Still, we had to smash this ice. That was the expert advice. You can’t cross any river without knowing how deep it is. And if we’d attempted to drive out onto the unbroken surface the car would probably have dropped through into the water, possibly damaging itself and certainly with no chance of going forward or back.
Our 20-strong crew had gone to Iceland, summoned by a letter from Land Rover to drive Discoverys ‘on some of the most challenging routes our experts can find’. This was day two and our team leader, David Sneath, had been excelling himself. So far we had tried mountainous snowdrifts and extended expanses of ice, ridiculously slippery hills, washboard roads with chassis-wrecking potholes and rocky, tyre-busting tracks.
Even the expanses of 70mph asphalt road had featured well-concealed patches of ice on which the average mountain goat could hardly have kept its footing. Friendly Icelanders had told us this early winter ice and snow was unseasonal, and that driving conditions would get much worse than this.
Worried hacks kept observing that these same conditions (of which our deftly-powersliding taxi driver made light as he took us to dinner one evening) would be enough to bring the British nation to a halt.
We had seen a lot, but not an icy river. We needed to cross it to complete the mission Sneath had appointed that morning – to reach the spectacular Langjokull glacier, an expanse of ice the size of Yorkshire in Iceland’s south-western inland.
We had done the town of spectacular hot springs called Geysir (geyser, geddit?) and the awesome half-frozen waterfalls at Gullfoss – like a kind of wintry Grand Canyon – but this was by far the day’s biggest obstacle.
Never give up
Sneath is not a man to be thwarted. As project engineer of the current Range Rover, he played a leading hand in convincing a bunch of hard-headed Bavarians – back in the days when BMW owned Land Rover – that they should stick with the more expensive and complicated, but much more effective, low-range transmission for the Range Rover, and so give it the world-beating off-road capabilities of its predecessors.
They had been all for simply sticking another body on the BMW X5. It wasn’t easy, but he and a few key colleagues managed it. You can’t prove such things to serial doubters without being an off-roading expert yourself, and Sneath runs the training-driving-proving wing of the company, a worldwide organisation called Land Rover Experience. Part of that job is to set up stern driving challenges for people like us.
By turns, and swings of shovel, spike and sledgehammer, we gradually shattered the ice. It took 30 minutes, during which time Sneath and his LRE helpers measured the water’s depth in various places with stakes. Ice is amazingly strong stuff. Despite my fears, I found you could stand on the edge of a six-inch crust and bash away without fear. Quite fun, actually.
Our eight Discoverys were lined up on the road leading into the abyss, all of them silver except for Autocar’s HSE V6 diesel, whose dark green paint picked it out from the white surroundings. In this place, you’d choose dark green to be conspicuous.
Weeks before, some bright spark at Land Rover had suggested that we might like to crate up our own Disco and send it in a container, by sea with the rest of the test vehicles, to see if it could cope in Iceland like the rest. It was a bit of a bind to be without it for three weeks, but those regrets melted away when I spotted it in a Reykjavik hotel car park, the engine whirring at idle and the interior nice and warm.
Along the way it had acquired an aluminium skid-plate, so thick you could see it meant serious business, but beautifully sculpted to the undersides so it barely hurt ground clearance. Our Disco was still wearing its 19-inch alloys, but the tyres were now a more aggressively patterned type, needed for ice and snow.
Inside it had an additional Garmin sat-nav system (the standard DVD-based system couldn’t function in Iceland because mapping of the country isn’t complete), the cabin pockets were bulging with energy bars and bottles of water. There was a two-way radio in the upper glovebox and a complement of spades and tow ropes in the boot. We were ready.
Ice up to the doors
In the intervening 36 hours our Discovery had been tested and never found wanting. But this icy river was bigger than anything and I was worried.
Would the six-inch-thick icy plates attack the body? (It looked like it.) Would the river floor have enough purchase? (It was zero degrees in there.) Would we cope with the rocks? (I’d seen them razoring tyres already.) Would I make a fool of myself? (I’d done it many times before.)
Sneath drove slowly into the broken ice in his own well-used LRE Disco. The ice shattered more and the Disco soon bumped to the bottom, with freezing water at the deepest point halfway up the driver’s door. Deep enough. As he crawled steadily across the 30-yard expanse, huge lumps of ice began to collect in front of the car, barring progress.
The car stopped, wheels still turning slowly. He reversed. Then forward ‘with a bit more passion’, which is his expression for giving it a bit more Wellington boot. More progress. Then another hang-up. The skidplate was doing its stuff – breaking the ice and forcing smaller pieces under and around.
But a couple of big sections had half-removed his driver’s side wheelarch cover. As an onlooker, you couldn’t help noticing the unevenness of the river floor and the way the car swayed and heaved drunkenly. It took six runs to get through. This wasn’t going to be easy.
We were fourth to go. The others had made it, but with a struggle, and I felt apprehensive. All right for them, I thought: their bond with the car isn’t as strong as mine. No time to think now, though, I had to configure the car.
Select low range – you need torque and flexibility. Then second gear, plenty low enough. Air suspension at the extra-height setting to add clearance. Terrain Response set for grass-gravel-snow (to soften throttle response and distribute drive to all four wheels). Lastly, switch off the stability control, because we’d been finding the sudden yaw sometimes induced in slippery conditions could cut engine punch just when
you needed it.
Hands at 10-to-two, I pressed gently on the accelerator, enough to build momentum and try to create a bow-wave, if one were possible. The car bucked hugely over submerged stones but kept going straight.
I could hear water flowing past the doors, plus the clonking of huge pieces of ice into the hard parts of my car. No time to worry. Steer straight. Easy on the throttle. We kept going and I almost thought we’d make it. The Discovery stopped at the last minute, though, with the wheels still turning.
David, directing things from the bank, was unconcerned. Take her back 15 feet, he instructed, then give it the beans. Rush the bank. The build-up of ice under the car and the steep bank had conspired against us. More momentum and we’d do it – and we did. Our Disco scrabbled to join the others up the steep river bank, already re-freezing in rivulets from the water others had deposited.
We parked neatly in the line. My companion, another admirer of what off-roaders can do in extremis, was as elated as me. ‘Try that in your Audi TT,’ he said.
On we drove toward the glacier, convoy spreading on the sometimes dusty road to maintain visibility. Then this awe-inspiring natural feature, a white expanse of frozen water reaching beyond the horizon to show the curvature of the earth, hovered into view.
Icelanders play about on glaciers in snowmobiles, and we had some of that in mind, but first we had to get down to the edge, through deep, deep snowdrifts and across a vast expanse of rocks. Our original intention was to get all eight cars down to the snowy shore, if that’s what you call it. But first we had to traverse 100 years’ worth of snowdrifts. And we still had the 50mph breeze building walls of snow as soon as you knocked them down.
Three Discoverys got through and one of them was ours. Sneath, experienced at steering for the right place and using the right amount of ‘passion’, simply bashes a route through with his own Disco. But his tracks were deep and the next one made them deeper and got stuck. David winched him through and then it was our turn.
The technique for attacking snowdrifts is pretty rudimentary. But it needs skill, like all off-roading. Again it’s low range, full-height suspension, stability control off and grass-gravel-snow selected.
Then you simply rush the snow, staying as straight as you can, building momentum as well as you can, getting through as far as you can, but backing off as soon as you realise the situation is hopeless. Which it was, by the time we’d got two-thirds of the way through the bottomless 20-yard stretch of whiteness. That’s when we learned a new skill – the snatch-tow.
Land Rover Experience types don’t talk a lot about this, and they’re careful how they use it, but today they had special ‘kinetic’ tow ropes. These have a degree of stretch in them so you can start from a slack position, then drive forward quickly until it’s taut, a move that doesn’t depend quite so much on the traction of the towing car to get the stuck car out.
I wasn’t too keen to try this with our Disco. I’ve seen tow ropes – the ordinary non-flex kind – pull parts off cars when jolts were applied. Here, there was no choice. We dug a snow hole around my buried front hook, connected the rope to David’s car and he took off in his Disco like a scalded cat.
White-knuckling the steering wheel, I expected a noise like a massive kitchen accident, then to see front parts of my Discovery launching skywards. Instead there was abrupt but cushioned acceleration and my car drove through the drift under pretty good control.
The Disco’s front and rear tow hooks are so strong, it was explained, that you can suspend one by its front hook, with another hanging off the rear.
On the way back to Reykjavik I conducted a surreptitious inventory of my car’s condition – post ruts, post rocks, post icy river and charging snowdrifts and being snatch-towed out. It was fine.
The tools were rattling in the rear. The tyres were a little noisier at a cruise than the rubber I left behind, but not enough to discourage me from keeping them on the car for a while at least, along with that superb skid-plate. These had been extreme conditions, but my car’s condition was unaltered. A fine dinner lay ahead and all was right with the world.