Back in the summer of 2014, I rented a car and based myself in and around Borgarnes, on Iceland’s west coast and spent one of the days driving around Snæfellsnes. You can do it in a day but I find it’s such a long way and there are so many things to stop for that by the time I’m halfway round I’m too exhausted to care anymore. I spotted Saxhóll at the very tip of the peninsula, between the lowest slopes of Snæfellsjökull himself and the sea but I didn’t stop. I considered it and then I added it to my mental list of Things To Do Next Time I’m Here and continued.
Fast-forward to September 2017 and I’m there again. I still haven’t learnt my lesson, I’m still trying to drive the whole thing and do everything in one day but this time I’ve had no sleep because of inconsiderate people in the campervan next to mine who left their lights and engine on all night and I also have a cold and it’s been raining most of the week and it’s September. In short, I’m not in a great mood. But I spotted Saxhóll and I remembered my resolution of three years ago.
Saxhóll is a crater, a nice perfect conical scoria crater, the kind you can’t just drive past. It’s made of gravelly reddish rock, nicely coated in young vegetation and it looks eminently climbable.
It’s just off the main road and considering it can’t be more than a couple of hundred yards to the car park, it was the hardest drive I’ve ever done. It’s a very narrow rutted track, far worse than any gravel road I’ve ever driven on and I was genuinely concerned for the van’s suspension when I reached the car park. I say car park. Patch of gravel at the foot of the crater, the side of which is a disused quarry. I eyed the side of it and decided I’d park at the opposite side, just in case the crater collapsed. Then I grabbed a warmer layer and headed off.
Saxhóll has stairs! Rusty-orange iron steps going right to the summit. I will not say this made it easier. These were the kind of steps that are just too small to walk up comfortably. And before you say that it’s cheating to climb a volcano using steps, I’ve already said that this was a crumbly gravelly crater. I promise you, if there weren’t steps, there would be people climbing anyway and the footfall would cause a lot more erosion damage. And besides, it was a lot of steps. Saxhóll is 109m high, which isn’t much until you put in the terms I learnt from a Mountain Leader a while ago, who visualises a 10m contour line as a two-storey house with a roof on. That makes Saxhóll nearly eleven houses high and that’s unimaginable. I did count the steps on the way up and again on the way down but one of them was out by 100 steps and besides, I evidently didn’t write that little detail down anywhere, so I can’t remember – and don’t know, because I can’t count – whether it was 208 steps or 308 or even 408. Enough that I had to stop at least eight times on the way up and for my knees to start trembling on the way down.
It wasn’t the clearest day but the views weren’t bad.
The only thing I was a bit disappointed about is that I was at the foot of Snæfellsjökull and couldn’t see it. In that last picture, it should be right there, dominating the background. Neither head nor hair of Iceland’s most perfect volcano did I see until I reached Akranes that night and saw it in the sunset across the vast bay.
See how huge that left-hand flank is? Saxhóll is sitting somewhere between that and the sea – there’s quite a big plateau in real life that just isn’t visible from a distance like this.
Anyway. I descended Saxhóll, only to be stopped by another tourist.
“Your feet must be so cold!”
I looked down at them. Owing to mostly being too lazy to put on my boots, I’d climbed the volcano in my sandals. They’re mountain sandals. It’s what they’re good at, along with paddling in very cold rivers. And actually, they weren’t cold at all. They’d been busy climbing an unspecified-hundred and something steps and the cold breeze was up around my face, not down by my feet. If anything, my feet were the warmest part of me. Shameful admission, though. A few times when my feet did get cold, I was still too lazy to put on my boots and I occasionally pottered around Iceland in socks and sandals.
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