Photo by Magnús Elíason Facebook

This morning, Magnús Ásgeir Elíasson, a farmer from Hvammstangi, had a sudden feeling that he should check on his horses. It was a lucky intuition, as Magnús arrived to his fields to find a large group of his horses stuck in the snow. Thankfully, he had arrived just on time to bring all of them to safety and warmth, he told Vísir.

Apparently, after he finished the morning feeding, something snapped in him. “As I was walking into the house, I felt someone stopping me and saying, ‘Go check on the horses.’ I then turned around, looked up [onto the mountain] and saw my herd,” Magnús explained. His horses were freezing in the snow.

He worked tirelessly to free the lot of them, before realising that one of the horses, Freyja, was fully immersed in snow, so much so that he couldn’t save her himself. Luckily, neighbours quickly came in aid of Magnús and Freyja. “We worked together to put her in the shovel on the tractor and took her inside the house,” he said.

Magnús has lived in the same valley of Hvammstangi for most of his life and swears that he has never seen weather like that of this week’s storm. He admits that he expected the horses to have scattered to safety and was surprised to see them suffering in the frost. That said, he still can’t understand how the herd got to that dangerous area. “They could have found shelter in all directions. This was the only scrap they could have picked—out of a thousand acres of land—where they could crumble over.”

Thankfully, no animals got harmed in the end. As of the time of writing, they are safe and warm.