Light tracks,small groups

Eight is a hard cap, written into our guides' contracts, not a target. It is the number that fits in one vehicle, one hut room and one conversation. It is also the number a cave floor, a boardwalk or a boat deck can take without becoming the main attraction.

We also limit how often we go. No route runs more than six times a year, and we never place two groups in the same hut, cave or boat on the same day. When a cave is full of tourists at 10:00, we are there at 07:00, or we go somewhere else.

Most of the footprint of a Nordvik trip is your flight to us, and we say so on every quote. What we control is everything after you land.

We count it ourselves, with fuel receipts, lodge energy bills and a method we publish. We charge ourselves an internal carbon price of €85 a tonne and pay it into peatland restoration in the Icelandic lowlands. We do not sell offsets, because we do not think they make a flight clean.

All of our eleven guides live within 150 km of the place they lead. Einar was born at Hoffell, Maja in Reine, Jens in Qeqertarsuaq. They are paid 125% of the national mountain guide scale, including the days they spend scouting caves and checking river levels, which are the days that keep guests safe and that most operators do not pay for.

About 82% of what you pay stays in the region where the trip runs: with the farm guesthouse at Hof, the fish market in Höfn, the boatmen in Ilulissat and the hut wardens in the Highlands. We buy fish from the quay and we buy it the day it is landed.

One percent of every booking, before costs, goes to glacier research in south-east Iceland. We choose the projects together with an independent glaciology group at a university in Reykjavík, and we choose them because the glaciers we guide on are also the ones that are disappearing.

Our guides add something else: each winter they log where every ice cave opens and when it closes. That record, now seven winters long, goes to the research group every April.

We carry out everything we carry in, including food scraps, paper and the things guests leave behind in huts. We use no single-use plastic on any expedition. At the end of each trip the guides weigh the rubbish bag and record the weight, in a notebook that anyone can ask to see.

On the ice, we do not use the same cave route for more than two weeks in a row, and we do not walk on moss in the Highlands. You will be asked to stay on the path. It is not complicated, but it needs to be said.