A SILENCE BROKEN ONLY BY THE WHISPERS OF ELVES

SUNLIGHT SCATTERED on the surrounding snow as we hiked single file, crampons strapped to our boots, up Sólheimajökull, Iceland's southernmost glacier—a 650-foot-thick tongue of solid ice spanning 17 square miles.

- BY ALEXANDRA KIRKMAN

Black peaks jutted out like dorsal fins from the jagged, white-capped hills around us—forged by eruptions of the volcano Katla, which churned far below ground near the frozen behemoth on which we stood.

A 90-minute trek brought us to our destination point, an ice ridge twice our height, where we sipped a whiskey toast, gazing briefly at the cloudless azure sky before beginning our descent.

Minutes later, a blanket of white unfurled overhead, smothering the sun in a steady snowfall. The storm cast this already virtually soundless vista into absolute silence—exactly what I'd come to Iceland with Tom Marchant, cofounder of luxury travel outfitter Black Tomato, to find. It's “a Narnia-like landscape,” Marchant aptly observed, “where the silence is so pure it's almost discombobulating.”

In that incongruous silence, just a couple of hours outside Reykjavík, we reached the glacier's base to behold small icebergs studding the lagoon created by its meltwater, and dazzling ice walls striped with layers of inky volcanic ash—an astonishing testament to the colossal forces of nature that have clashed for millennia in this country often called “the land of fire and ice.”

Utter soundlessness is not an amenity listed on travel-booking sites. But in a world where life seems louder by the day, some are finding that turning off their mobile phone isn't enough to give them the peace they crave. Over the past year, Black Tomato—whose trips start at around $15,000 per person, and can run into the hundreds of thousands—has seen a notable uptick in requests for destinations offering natural, unfettered silence. Some 80% of its clients come from the U.S.