Tinna Adventure: Turning rescue-squad know-how into East Iceland’s most personal jeep tours.

The push to start the business was seeing travelers only driving past East Iceland without stopping to explore. Later, Helga and Ingólfur’s daughter Hrefna was working for a tour operator in Reykjavík, handing travelers a rundown of things to do in every region of the country. When she checked what East Iceland had on that list, there was nothing. “It was zero,” Helga says. “We were shocked when she told us, and we knew we needed to fix this.”

The adventure begins

Helga is born and raised in East Iceland and was the first woman in Iceland to graduate and work as a lathe machinist, making metal parts for ships, trucks and big machines. The couple met at the Industrial School in Reykjavík, where he was training to become an auto mechanic. Together they moved back to Breiðdalsvík, East Iceland, where they started a family and worked for Helga’s father at his machine and car repair shop which they later took over. They soon got their first super jeep since they both shared a passion for adventures out in the wild where weather or driving conditions are not an obstacle. “The worse the condition, the better,” Helga says with a glimmer in her eyes.

As many Icelanders living in small towns Helga and Ingólfur were also in the rescue squad and on regular shifts on the ambulance as trained Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs).

The idea behind Tinna Adventure goes back further than the business itself, or to a gravel mountain pass called Öxi, west of town. It’s the shortest route between Djúpivogur and Egilsstaðir. In winter, travelers on rental cars kept running into problems. Sliding off the road and getting stuck. For years, when that happened, Iceland’s volunteer search-and-rescue system sent people like Helga and Ingólfur out to help. “The rescue squad was making sixty to eighty call-outs a winter and not getting a single króna for it,” Helga says. Worse, if a rescue volunteer damaged a car while towing it, the rescue team was responsible and with no insurance to cover the cost. “That’s obviously ridiculous. We weren’t rescuing anything. We were just getting people out of situations they got themselves into.”

“I want to show people the land without people in it.”

So the couple, who already had insurance through their own business, started using their own super jeep instead and began charging people who needed this type of help. “And after a while, we thought, why aren’t we creating trips for people who want to experience adventure in the highlands? And Tinna Adventure was born.”

They started guiding in 2014, off the back of the machine and auto shop, which fit perfectly with this side business they felt was giving the region the attention that it deserved.

“We have so many gems, like Stuðlagil, the puffin colony in Borgafjörður Eystri, and more. But honestly, I think those WOW moments are everywhere; where there’s nobody else around. I want to show people the land without people in it‚ give them the chance to see something beautiful without a soul in sight. And then there are all sorts of interesting spots; geologically, it’s an extraordinary area,” she explains with pride.

The Icelanders came, chasing the weather

Tinna Adventure grew slowly at first. Then, unexpectedly 2020, COVID became a turning point. Travelers who could still enter Iceland but wanted to avoid crowds found their way east, into a region built around small groups, single-family bookings, and empty roads. “We weren’t busy at that point,” Helga says. “But through COVID we were growing fast while many travel companies were struggling. I found it sort of remarkable.”

“We chase the weather.”

Icelanders do not plan summer holidays so much as react to them. The forecast comes out, the country checks it like a stock ticker, and everyone drives toward the sunshine. In 2021, the sunshine was in the East, and the rest of the country was under weeks of rain. “We chase the weather,” Helga explains. “So they came in numbers that the region had never seen before. A lot of them had never visited the East before, arrived expecting a detour and left stunned by the beauty. “

What adventure looks like to Helga and Ingólfur

Much of what Tinna Adventure offers, Helga and Ingólfur narrate themselves. Their short, all-season tour, called Streiti, walks guests into a lava conduit, a headland called Streitishvarf, where basalt and rhyolite intruded into each other some 2,000 meters underground before Iceland’s post-glacial rebound pushed the whole formation up to the surface. “You can actually see how the two, basalt and lava, melt together,” Helga says, still charmed by it after years of guiding the walk.

Their reindeer tours, which run each year from mid-October to mid-June, follow the herds as they winter along the lowlands of the east coast in jeeps. It’s more of a gentle hunt than a scenic drive, since the animals turn pale in winter and blend seamlessly into the landscape, most drivers pass within meters of them without even noticing. Helga and her team make a habit of checking in with local farmers before each trip, and they often already have a pretty good idea of where the herds are from previous outings; she reckons there’s been only one trip in all their years that they came up empty. When they do spot one, she reassures nervous guests with a simple phrase: “I just tell people, lie down and enjoy the sight. Iceland has only a few wild land mammals, and none of them, including reindeer, are anything to be afraid of.”

The trip that is designed for people looking for wild winter adventure is Tröllakrókar, a winter run into the highlands of Lónsöræfi toward a formation called Tröllakrókar, tall rock spires that normally take hikers two or three days to reach on foot. Tinna Adventure drives there instead, always with two vehicles, since Helga and Ingólfur have a rule about never going up alone in winter. The trip is priced per vehicle rather than per seat – one person to eight, and refunded in full if the weather shuts it down, which it often does; Helga admits they haven’t sold many of these compared to their other tours. But the ones who take this trip tend to come back.

“Miserable weather is the fun part.”

What people are actually chasing on a trip like this, Helga says, isn’t good weather at all. “Miserable weather is the fun part,” she says, snow blowing sideways, views that open up toward Snæfell and out to Lón, the particular satisfaction of towing your own vehicle free after getting stuck. Guests compare notes on driving technique, needle each other a little, and by the end of it, in Helga’s words, “you basically start acting like a local out there.” It’s the kind of trip that’s nearly impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

Staying small, on purpose

The company has stayed almost entirely a family affair. Ingólfur’s younger brother Valdimar now guides alongside them and, in Helga’s words, “completely comes alive doing this.” Their daughter Hrefna still helps out when she’s off shift from the fire department. A colleague’s spare car fills in as a backup vehicle. That’s the whole roster.

Which may be the reason why their good reputation keeps spreading. Increasingly, Helga says, people are searching for something small, local, and family-run, and finding Tinna Adventure at the top of the list.

Turning sixty this year, Helga has thought about what the future holds, and landed on the same answer she and Ingólfur started with. “We decided that from day one that it would just be the two of us,” she says. “Nothing complicated.” What keeps it interesting for the couple, twelve years in, is the sheer variety packed into an ordinary week: Getting grease under their fingernails at the shop one morning, narrating two-thousand-year-old lava conduits that afternoon, an ambulance shift or a search-and-rescue callout the next day. “That’s what we love about our work,” Helga says proudly. Which is probably the spirit that got them into this in the first place.