Iceland Hiking

Yesterday was the day we had planned for the most hiking of our trip - and I'm posting this morning rather than yesterday because it turns out that a 12 mile mountain hike isn't very conducive to staying awake past 10:30 pm! I spent a portion of yesterday really, really wishing we were close enough to visit the Blue Lagoon again - it would have been worth every penny after yesterday.

We started the day in Vik with the black sand beach, Reynisfjara. This was a quick stop but very pretty! We had a beautiful, sunny morning and the black sand stretched out to some beautiful rock fixtures. This is definitely not a swimming beach - you have to stay a long ways back from the water, as lots of people are killed here each year because the beach has "sneaker waves" every so often that will reach 20-30 feet further up the beach than normal waves and will drag people in. It's still a beautiful sight as long as you stay back, though! We saw a few, but people were aware and ran back in when one was coming.

From there we drove through some more amazing landscape. I think one of the fun things so far about driving through Iceland is that the landscape frequently changes drastically every 10-15 minutes driving. We went from mountains to wide open prairie fields to long fields of these cute green boulders (I fully expected to see one of those little round trolls from Frozen pop up) to wide open, black sand flats throughout the day.

Our first drive took us to one of the most beautiful things we've seen here yet, Fjardrarglufur. (And yes, one of our entertainments on this trip so far has been listening to Google Maps try to pronounce Icelandic. And listening to ourselves try to do the same.) This was a short little hike, but absolutely worth it, especially since our sunny day was continuing.

Finally, we drove to our last and longest hike, in Skaftafell National Park. We knew we wanted to come here for one of the most famous waterfalls, Svartifoss, which is surrounded by the same sort of rare rock fixture as Giant's Causeway. We chose to do the long (S3) hike instead of just the short one to the waterfall, though - and although every muscle in my legs is still very, very angry at me, and the hike ended up being 2 miles longer than we thought, it was incredible.

A little ways into the hike, we were able to see these incredible colored mountains - I'm very disappointed that we lost the sun by this point, because the photos here just can't capture the colors. They were multicolored and absolutely stunning.

A little bit further and we were able to see one side of the glacier in the park. Can you see the waterfall? It's freezing as it hits the ground, making the cool ice shape underneath it.

At this point we were finally mostly done with going up....although we got a whole lot higher on this hike than we expected to! As you can see, we had quite the incredible vista.

A little further in the hike and we were able to see the other side of the glacier, which was flowing down the valley. At about 8 miles in at this point, we took a break and stared at the glacier flowing, the striations and the tiny icebergs at the base. 

Throughout the hike, we were lucky to see beautiful fall colors across all the ground cover plants - still some green, particularly the moss, but tons of oranges and reds and yellows and even pinks in the grasses and shrubs.

All in, as I said, we hiked about 12 miles through the mountains. It was one of the most challenging hikes I've done physically in quite awhile, ranking right after Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, although there were no extremely hard portions of the trail, or chains to haul yourself up and down steep bits - just continual steep slopes, steps and some shifting rock fields. This wasn't a hike where I worried at any point I wasn't going to be able to make it past a portion of the trail - just one where by the end, all of my muscles were threatening to stop going. It was also up there with Cradle Mountain as one of the most beautiful and rewarding, as it's not every day you get to see a flowing glacier or a freezing waterfall or incredible mountains like those. So, although we could hardly walk to our table for dinner that night, and we both slept a solid 10 hours before waking up this morning, it was absolutely worth it! (It also didn't hurt to have the chocolate cake covered in the best ice cream I've ever eaten, native Icelandic berries and, oddly, pop rocks with not even a little bit of guilt.) Luckily today will be less hiking and more driving and sightseeing, but so far Iceland is astonishingly beautiful and fully living up to all its hype.