Landmannalaugar in the snow

Posted on by Juliet Frost

I can’t believe I’ve never done this one! In January 2013, I went on one of the most expensive but also one of the most amazing and exclusive day trips I’ve ever done: a superjeep tour out to Landmannalaugar in the snow! At the time, it was either with Grayline or Reykjavik Excursions; the former I think, but neither do it anymore and although I’ve found at least three companies who profess to run a trip like that, they all fall apart when it comes to booking. If you do really want to do this trip, I know there will be a company somewhere that will run it as an expensive private trip on request but so far, I haven’t found anyone.

I’d actually booked a winter jeep tour to Þórsmörk. I can’t remember why it got cancelled. Not enough participants or the wrong weather? Probably not enough participants. They offered to refund it or transfer me to another trip and I picked Landmannalaugar. In hindsight, I should have picked it to start with because obviously a trip out to Landmannalaugar is just inherently a better idea. What were we going to do when we arrived in Þórsmörk, infamous hiking paradise, in several feet of snow?

I’d got up early to make some hot chocolate for the day but my landlady caught me and whisked the flask away to make proper hot chocolate with milk and Swiss Miss, rather than hot water and Options. It was the sort of guesthouse where Evelyn understood that tourists tend to get picked up quite early for day trips and rather than leaving a buffet out for several hours, if we tell her what time we’re leaving, she’ll have breakfast done specially for us. I’d had some cereal up in my room but I obediently had bread and butter and orange juice while the hot chocolate was made and then I went out in the dark to wait to be picked up. Officially, pick-ups are half an hour before the tour departs and this one was 8 for 8.30, which is actually later than I’d maybe choose for a long day like this. On the other hand, it’s January in Iceland and an hour later means arriving in Landmannalaugar after the sun comes up. This pick-up panicked me a bit because the clock kept ticking on and I kept checking my confirmation and wondering if they’d forgotten me or if I was in the wrong place or if maybe it was the wrong day or – why haven’t they come yet??

Waiting outside my guesthouse to be picked up from the tour. It's very dark, give or take the streetlight and the lights on inside the house.

It came at 8.29, a big silver jeep plenty big enough to tackle the deep snow along the way but not one of the obscenely, comically big things that Iceland specialises in custom-building. Big enough that I wrote in my diary that the tyres were almost as big as me. It only had to carry three passengers, not an entire tour group and here the solo travel thing came in handy. The other two were a couple and couples like to sit together so neither of them wanted to sit in the front seat. I love the front seat!

A silver 4x4 with obscenely big tyres parked on a snowy road next to a reservoir. The entire scene is in shades of green-tinted blue-grey. It's as cold as it feels.

Bad news: it was the wrong kind of snow and I failed to catch my driver-guide’s name, according to my diary. We’ll call him Helgi because it’s a good strong name that doesn’t require me to find any accents or special characters. Anyway, Helgi said there was only a 75% chance of making it to Landmannalaugar and only a 50% chance of us making it back without help. We could try it… or we could go to Þórsmörk via the Eyjafjallajökull museum and Seljavallalaug, the oldest swimming pool in Iceland. We – meet Adrian and Melissa from New York, my travelling companions today – voted to try Landmannalaugar.

It’s a good long drive from Reykjavik on a good summer’s day. 120ish miles, just over three hours. Today it would be longer because road conditions were less than ideal, even in our big car. Somewhere around the turning to what would become the F26 Highland road, we met some people coming the other way and after a long discussion, Helgi remarked “not such good news” but having swapped numbers, said it was “nice to know they’re in the neighbourhood in case of problems”. The Icelandic definition of in the neighbourhood is a little broader than mine; it was still some fiftyish miles to go and it would be the hardest fiftyish miles of the day.

We pressed on. The snow was minimal around the edge of the island but further inland it got thick quickly and our gravel track was nothing but compacted snow half an hour later. Helgi stopped by the hydroelectric plant – the? There seem to be at least five of them along the way – a hydroelectric plant and while the three of us stretched our legs and enjoyed the view, he let a load of air out of the tyres. On a normal road, tyres that flat would be a catastrophe waiting to happen. Out here, our flat wobbly tyres would give us extra grip and reduce how much we sank into the snow.

Me beside the frozen reservoir, leaning tentatively on the metal railings. I'm wearing a black fleece hat, blue fleece jumper and black hiking trousers with boots. Also an orangey-brown padded vest with a fur hood. It wouldn't do up even at the time. Behind me is a scene of black mountains covered reasonably thickly in snow and to my far right, you can just see the volcano Hekla.

Beyond this, any kind of road vanished. In the summer, I couldn’t understand how you knew which way to go but in winter, it was just a huge white nothing. At least in summer there are yellow poles marking the way. In theory they’re long enough to not be buried in winter snow and you can tell how deep the snow gets around Iceland by how long the marker poles are. Nothing out here. How do you follow a satnav across a great empty plain? But Helgi did and even managed to point out interesting things. That road sign, mostly buried – in the summer that’s two metres tall. Are those Arctic fox prints? We stopped. We checked. They were. The fox was nowhere to be seen.

The road ahead. The snow is so deep that a sign warning of a double bend in the road to be taken at 40kph barely sticks out. Other than the rocky edge of a mountain ridge, it's virtually impossible to tell where the snow ends and the heavy grey sky begins.

It wasn’t as easy as in the summer when all this is rock but after Helgi’s warnings, it had gone surprisingly smoothly until we reached what I think of as the gateway to Landmannalaugar – a small low mountain pass, a steep slope and then the last three-quarters of a mile to the campsite car park. Seriously, we’re less than a mile away and now’s when it gets difficult?

White sky and white snow are separated by an outcrop of black rock which has snow ranging from a light dusting to a heavy covering depending on the angle of the rock. It looks like a monochrome picture but in fact, it's merely that the scenery was literally monochrome.

In summer you’d just drive down the road, ford the river and you’d be there. For some reason, we couldn’t do that. We were going to drive straight across instead. But that wasn’t working either. Helgi inched his way forward, fiddled with the gears, muttered, inched backwards, rocked the jeep, tried again, flicked switches, looked out of the window and generally seemed to be having trouble. I couldn’t figure it out. This is why I don’t drive superjeeps in thick snow.

The problem was, it transpired, that there was something quicksandy and marshy under the car, too wet to go over but too sucky to drive through and after a lot of trying, Helgi had to give up and drive up the river. In winter, even though it’s surrounded by snow, it’s at its weakest – cars get caught occasionally in the summer when meltwater makes it higher and faster. Of course, in the summer you can park on the near side of the ford and walk into Landmannalaugar using the little wooden footbridge. In winter, it was an excellent road for a sturdy 4×4, having a nice gravelly bottom that gave us plenty of grip. I’d been starting to think we should just walk this last less-than-a-mile but I’d been underestimating the cold, the difficulty of walking in snow and the fact that there’s a freezing river hidden under fragile snow, along with the footbridge.

Another monochrome scene of snow, sky and rock, but this time there's a river right in front of the car's nose. The picture is taken from inside the car and the windscreen is wet, presumably from the bow wave we're throwing up as we drive.

We’d made it! Even with the swamp we’d made it in quite good time and now we could have a whole hour, maybe an hour and a half, in the hot spring. The huts were locked for winter and the showers and toilets closed with frozen pipes but the porches were available. Really, they’re for passers-by to take refuge, although what passers-by are doing all the way out here in winter is anyone’s guess, but we could use them to change. It’s quite a long scurry along a slippery boardwalk to the spring so once I was changed I put my thermals, coat and boots back on, and my mini crampons for the icy boardwalk and ran for it. Because the hot spring keeps this place less than snowy.

The hot spring: a steaming natural pool, the snow around its edges melted by the heat. Everywhere else is thick snow and behind it is the edge of the 500-year-old lava field, with jagged lava sticking out of the snow trying to coat it.

Strip again by the spring, wish I’d brought a dry bag, plunge into the cold river and wade up to the warm bit and oooohhhhhhhh it was amazing. A hot, steaming natural bath in the middle of a scene of two-dimensional pure whiteness.

Selfie in the hot spring. I'm wearing a black swimsuit and black fleece hat and peering over my glasses at the camera, since they're misted up with the snowstorm and with the steam coming off the pool. Behind me is the spring, which is green around the edges and then there's snow beyond that.

The river is a nice clear cold spring but a second spring runs under the lava field where the residual heat warms it up. Get too close to the lava and you can see that the water’s boiling but in the big shallow pool, it’s perfect. It’s astonishing: the lava field was laid down by an eruption in the nearby Brennisteinsalda volcano, Sulphur Wave, in 1477 or thereabouts. That’s well over five hundred years ago and it’s still hot enough to boil water. That’s truly, really astonishing.

Boiling water pouring into the spring, like a little waterfall. My camera's waterproof case is badly misted up by now but you can make out the steam coming off the water.

I don’t know how long I stayed in there. I hadn’t taken my watch with me. Long enough to take lots of photos – selfies of my frozen face under my snow-dotted hat – I had no intention of getting my hair wet and frozen, or of letting it drip down my clothes all the way home. Photos of the boiling spring. The snow for hundreds of miles around us. Well, thirty or so miles. How weird to think the nearest human beings were nearly forty miles away, other than Helgi who was sitting in the car over by the huts. He’d been in the spring so many times and had no wish to join us today when he could stay dry in a warm car. I’d also been in the hot spring before but in summer, and I’d been in spas before in the snow but I’d never been in a natural hot spring in a volcanic oasis in thick snow. The Earth had produced this spring – ok, I’m pretty sure Icelanders shaped the big shallow pool we were sitting it – and the Earth had dumped the snow and Icelanders have been washing and bathing here for centuries. That’s what Landmannalaugar means, the People’s Pools. The People’s Washing Pools, perhaps. Saturday in Icelandic is Laugardag, Washing Day, but you’ll find pools appended with -laug because it does also and 95% of the time mean pool.

Landmannalaugar from the hot spring. In the foreground is the pool, edged with rocks and damp greenery. Behind is a mountain slope, covered in snow. To the right of the mountain is just whiteness. There are mountains there but you can't see them today.

The big silver car parked at Landmannalaugar, lights and engine on. In the background, you can just make out the campsite buildings. To the right is the lava field with snow clinging to it. To the left, behind the car, is a hint of mountain.

Anyway, eventually it was time to get out. I’d intended to put my clothes back on while standing on the wooden platform that serves as changing room and locker in the summer but I was far too wet and far too cold to do much more than shove my feet into wet boots, wrap my travel towel around me as a skirt and put on my coat. Then I bundled up everything else and ran back up the boardwalk and back through the squelch and into the hut. I tried to follow my own footprints but they were muddy and the snow was falling into my boots and all in all, I was glad to slam a door behind me. Lots of points to the towel. I like a travel towel because they’re really convenient to shove into a drybag in a small day bag but that day I also discovered that they’re surprisingly wind- and waterproof and surprisingly warm for running around snowfields in.

The campsite buildings, long wooden buildings with pointed roofs, in the snow. In the background is the mountain and the lava field and you can just make out the patch of warmth that is the hot spring.

While I waited for the Americans to follow, I roamed around Landmannalaugar a little. Despite the wet feet and the hasty drying and the run through the snow, I was toasty. My first experience of putting dry clothes on in the snow after a hot bath and it had surprised me with how pleasant it was. I stood outside and looked at the winter wonderland, the spring steaming away in the distance and I opened the hot chocolate Evelyn had made me some five hours earlier. The flask lives in a little insulated jacket but even so, I was astonished the chocolate was still hot. Not warm, steaming hot, hot enough that it was difficult to drink. All the points to Evelyn for her hot chocolate-making! Where are we, nine years later, and I can still feel that hot chocolate out in that frozen middle-of-nowhere.

On the way back, we stopped at Hrauneyjar, the Highland Hotel. As hotels go, it’s a bit on the basic side because it used to be accommodation for workers at the closest hydroelectric plant, but it must be a spectacular place for stargazing and seeing the Northern Lights, assuming you can find anyone to bring you out here in winter. We were here for coffee and for Helgi to reinflate the tyres before we returned to a half-decent actual road. Hrauneyjar is the sort of place where you take your shoes off at the door. This is a thing in Iceland because no one wants snow and mud brought inside but in practice, it’s something tourists rarely encounter. It simply doesn’t happen at hotels and guesthouses in Reykjavik and it definitely doesn’t happen in restaurants and cafes. I was very glad to get my wet shoes and socks off and to stretch my legs. It had been an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and while I very much enjoyed the front seat, I was sitting with my bag and coat under my feet and that made it just a little cramped.

The bit of road where we stopped to reinflate the tyres. To the left is a big patch of shiny icy snow. To the right is wet gravel with tyre tracks. It's still icy and snowy but the scenery, such as it is out here, is definitely starting to reassert itself.

At the Highland Hotel, a single-storey brown wooden building that looks from this angle like it's built around a central courtyard with an opaque frozen river running through it.

The big silver 4x4 from behind, parked probably outside the Highland Hotel. The tyres are still big and fat but now they don't look quite so disproportionate. There's a petrol pump behind and the ground is either wet or the ice is grassy. You can now clearly see the snow-dappled mountain separately from the grey sky. It's getting late and it's starting to get just a little bit dark already.

Warmed, dried and coffeed, we got back in the car for our two or three hours back to civilisation. It’s a long way to go for a hot bath, even a natural one. Speaking of natural, once I’d hung all my wet stuff on the radiator back at the guesthouse, I went straight for a shower. The pool is wonderful but it’s also full of stuff – weeds, green algae, orange algae, floating things, mineral deposits on the rock. I hadn’t had a chance to examine myself while getting changed but what I took to be a big ugly bruise on my leg washed off with a bit of soap and my hands had been bright orange all the way home from touching the bottom of the pool. Natural is nice but thoroughly washing nature off is also very nice.