The hot river hike was part two of my horse riding day. The lovely Eldhestar at Hveragerdi were the only people I could find who’d do a guided hike to the hot river valley so I went for it.
The reason no one else does it is because it’s a 3km hike on a pretty obvious path with regular signposts and information boards. You don’t need a guide. However, I’ve tried it before. I got as far as the car park. Then you have to cross a fairly deep and fast cold river and at the time, the only way of crossing it was a log. I didn’t trust myself to balance on a log and I also had no idea where to go after that. If you’re also wondering, you just keep following the obvious path.
I was soaking wet when we got started. I’d worn my “waterproof” mountain boots on the horse and they were so wet by the time I dismounted that they sloshed. Their rubbery orange waterproof clothes had done a reasonable job. I was damp around the collar – my own fault for not fastening it tightly because I hate things close around my neck – and my trousers were damp as if the waterproof orange trousers had leaked – but otherwise my clothes were more or less ok. I had a thin thermal top on, my Solo crop top as a lightweight quick-drying t-shirt, my yellow Solo sweatshirt, then my heated coat for warmth on the cold day and my waterproof jacket over the top. Waterproof trousers over quick-drying hiking trousers and my wet boots. Ready to go.
I was the only person who’d signed up for this hike. Not awkward at all, just me and a tour guide… Of course it was awkward! She was young, over for Germany for six months to work with the amazing Icelandic horses and although our group leader had told me her name when he sent me to see where I had to go next after the ride, I’d forgotten it and by the time I wanted to ask, I couldn’t admit that I didn’t know it. So she shall be “my guide” for the rest of this post. I asked where in Germany she was from, hoping to hear a big city like Berlin or Frankfurt or Hamburg, somewhere I knew. I got “Bielefeld…?” Yes! I know Bielefeld! Well, I don’t know it but I know it’s the place that doesn’t exist. She was very excited that I knew of her town and she also doesn’t know why it doesn’t exist.
There’s now an actual bridge over the river so the first obstacle is no longer an obstacle. We strode on in the general direction of where I thought the hike went and she stopped to show me the signpost with the nice picture of the hike on it. 3km, or thereabouts. I can do that fairly easily in, what, three quarters of an hour? My daily 2.2km walk takes about 28 minutes. So what if it’s raining? We’ll be back in under two hours.
But beyond the signpost we began to climb. I’m bad at climbing. Something in the back of my calves, just above my ankles, very quickly starts to feel like it’s being stretched and then like it’s going to snap. When you walk that something pings back after every step, like a well-maintained piece of elastic. Stretch, relax, stretch, relax, stretch, relax. My legs don’t have the relax bit. It stretches, stretches, stretches and the result is that any slope rapidly becomes very hard work. I get hot and out of breath and it’s not that I’m unfit – I mean, I’m hardly in the same state as a marathon runner the night before the big run, but I’m not so unfit that ten metres uphill should have me in the state it does.
These three kilometres were going to be pretty much all uphill and a good chunk of it was going to be quite steep. The hot river valley, that’s what I’d always heard. Turns out it’s a mountain hike and the valley runs happily across a plateau higher up. When my guide asked “Are you sure you want to do this, as it’s only you and it’s raining so much?”, I might have hesitated if I’d realised what a climb it is.
Now, I can walk for a good long time if it’s reasonably flat. I can climb the mountain if I need to. But I’d be doing it slowly with very frequent stops and that’s the sort of thing I prefer not to have a partner witnessing. Too late now. We were here and we were headed for the stop. I did tell my guide that she’s the one in charge, she’s the one who knows this hike and if we’re running low on time or if I start being a liability, she won’t hurt my feelings if she calls the stop. I mean, she will hurt my feelings but the rational part of me understands that safety is the overriding priority, particularly in the mountains and particularly in weather conditions like this.
So on we went. We came across some streams with stepping stones. The water was quite fast and the stepping stones were wet and I didn’t entirely trust my balance on them. I looked down at my boots – the ones that already had water inside them from horse riding earlier – and I waded straight through the streams. How much wetter could my feet get? Luckily they act a bit like neoprene; presumably the waterproof membrane isn’t very breathable and the water inside soon got warm and stayed warm. Wet cold feet would be miserable. Wet warm feet were bearable.
It felt like forever when we found a bigger stream, bordering on river. “Is this it?” I asked hopefully and my guide gave me a look I’d already learned to recognise – a look that says “I don’t want to tell you the miserable truth but I’m not going to lie to you so I’m just going to grin until you realise you’re wrong”. I knew this wasn’t it but after the climb, I kind of wanted her to pretend it was so we could discover that it wasn’t warm enough and go home. But no. Cross the river and climb the steepest bit so far.
Two more “I think that’s the steepest bit done”s and we reached a kind of valley with a river running through it. There’s that look again. No, this isn’t it. I knew I’d done a lot of “my legs hurt” and a lot of “is this it yet?” and tried to temper it with “I can do it. It’s all good” but now was the time to add in “this is easier” and “wouldn’t this be pretty if you could actually see it?” By now we were pretty much in the cloud. I know there’s a lot up until that first river where you should be able to see back down the hill towards Hveragerði and out to sea but we’d seen nothing but cloud. Up here, we’d missed a waterfall and some mountain scenery and now I was getting a hint of green valley. Well, brown valley. Spring in Iceland is not the green and beautiful sign of hope that it is back home. Spring in Iceland is just winter without the snow and the long hours of darkness.
At last my guide pointed out another sign with a picture of the route on it. “Only another 750m”. That’s not far at all! In fact, out of a 3km hike, that’s fully a quarter of the distance. On the other hand, it’s only about half a mile. Unfortunately, it involved another climb before we finally descended into the famous Reykjadalur, Smokey Valley. In summer, this would be packed with people who’d made quick work of the hike and had sunk into the famous warm waters of the river.
In spring, the valley was brown, the river was brown and there wasn’t another soul up here. My guide dipped her fingers in the water and declared it freezing and she was right, because I tried it too. Not that I’d have gone in anyway – swelled with rain, the river was deep and fast-flowing and the sort of thing you wouldn’t just hop blithely into. It’s all nicely fitted out for visitors, I must say. There’s a boardwalk running alongside it with regular platforms down the side for easy access to the water, benches for sitting on and crosses of raised boards to create something you can at least shelter behind for getting changed. It’s similar to what they’ve built next to the hot spring at Landmannalaugar but better – longer, anyway, for distributing people along the length of the river.
We’d made it. I’d made it. We were both soaked and now we didn’t even get to bathe but we’d done it and the downhill trek would be pretty easy. What time we’d lost getting up through me being slow we could make up getting down through not bathing and we’d be comfortably in time for the bus back to Reykjavik with the afternoon horse riding group. I’d had my main camera out occasionally through the hike up – sometimes it made a good excuse to stop and rest – but it hates rain and it had gone back in my pocket quite early on. But I’d had my GoPro for the horse trip and that one loves the water, so I took a few more photos on the way back down. A handful of the photos in this post are real camera on the way up but a lot of them are GoPro on the way back down
It turned out there was a lot more “up” on the way down than I’d realised. Every time my legs had relaxed with a big of downhill, it was a bit of uphill to face on the way home, but of course, overall we were definitely going down the mountain and it was a lot easier. My guide trotted on ahead and I lost her in the uphill segments and didn’t quite catch her up in the downhill ones and at long long last we turned a corner and there was Hveragerði ahead of us – not really visible under the cloud but we could at least see the bottom. I commented to my guide that Eldhestar sells t-shirts, right? and she confirmed that they do. I wanted one. Partly as a souvenir of the hike but mostly so I’d have something dry to travel the hour back to Reykjavik in.
We reached the bottom. We took a soaked selfie by the car. I pulled out my bag of swimming stuff – the swimsuit had had a wasted journey but the drybag and the towel were both useful now. My soaked waterproofs went straight in the drybag, I used the towel to dry my electronics and then my face and she drove us back to the stables.
Now I could assess. Everything in my bag was soaked. I’d had a spare jumper in there but that was no good now. My boots were soaked through, but I’d known that before we started. My trousers were wet around the bottom but otherwise, my waterproof trousers had done a pretty good job. My sleeves were soaked because I have a habit of pulling them over my hands and the front was damp because I like things loose around my neck but the middle was reasonably dry. My inside layers were wet from sweat. I draped things over chairs in the canteen, my guide vanished to get back to work and I ran across to the hotel to buy that t-shirt. I returned to Reykjavik an hour or so later with the afternoon riders and then…
Well, I spent two or three days getting my clothes dry. I had to go out in sandals pretty much for the rest of the trip, my hat remained wet and ten times its normal weight for an obscenely long time and I had to circulate the clothes between the radiator (which wasn’t even on), the towel rail and the floor just so nothing remained totally drenched for too long. To make up for my lack of dip in the hot river, I got into some properly dry clothes and walked down the road to the swimming pool for the evening and hot water feels amazing on legs that have endured a horse trip and a mountain climb in the last twelve hours. I highly recommend it. I might also recommend saving a trip like this until your last day, so you don’t have to limp and hobble on your next adventure, or go out in the rain the next day in sandals.