Húsafell’s Canyon Baths are a little bit mysterious. You don’t get to just turn up at the door – indeed, there is no door – but instead you meet at the activity centre in Húsafell where a guide drives you to the edge of the canyon and you have to walk down into it. It’s not on Google Maps and they’re deliberately very vague about where these baths actually are – in fact, they’re so vague that even after travelling there and paying attention, I still can’t find them on Google Maps. Presumably they want to turn them into a tourist attraction without letting them become quite as big as the likes of the Blue and Sky Lagoons, and as they’re just outside in the wild, the only real method of controlling access is to be secretive.
Needless to say, this was the first thing on my list for my trip to Iceland this summer. I had the Canyon Baths booked for Monday morning and that meant whatever I did on Sunday, I needed to be at Húsafell overnight instead of getting up early to hare up the valley. And I managed that! I got up on Monday morning at the usual earlier-than-I-would-like camping hour, had a leisurely breakfast, attempted to dry my swimming stuff from a trip to Hvammsvík the afternoon before and then at about 9.30am, I moved my van out of the campsite and into the public car park and sat down at a bench to await my tour.
It is a tour. It’s very much a tour. A tour guide brings a minibus to you, drives you the ten minutes to the car park at the top of the canyon, gives you time to enjoy the baths and then ushers you back at the appointed hour. Our guide, Freyr, said that the tour is advertised as including a hike and that’s because some of the tours park a little way down the hill from the gate to the canyon and you have to hike up to the gate before taking the 64 steps down into the canyon. For our benefit, to maximise our time in the water, he parked right by the gate. Honestly, I don’t know why this isn’t standard procedure. I don’t see that hiking from further down adds anything to the experience except eating into bathing time.
As I said, it’s 64 steps down into the canyon and then the steps run out two-thirds of the way down and you just slither your way down the last bit of the hill. Freyr presented us each with a towel at the top – I’d brought my own, and a drybag to take it home in because it never occurred to me that towels might be provided but it was a very nice touch. On the right, there are changing rooms. They’re unlabelled but I went into one and Freyr there and then designated that one as ladies and the other one as gentlemen. They have an infrared heater on the wall, benches covered in some kind of furry skin that looks like a cow but is too furry and there are (presumably used and upcycled) horseshoes nailed to the wall as hooks. Between the two changing rooms are showers, operated by pulling a rope and if you give it a minute or two, it sprays natural hot water. However, because the drainage is the river below, you’re not allowed to use any kind of product, including soap, in this shower. It’s a rinse rather than a standard Iceland pre-pool “make sure you’re spotlessly clean before you go in” shower.
Attached to the far end of the changing cubicles is a tiny office where cleaning supplies and bits and pieces are kept, as well as a miniature shop so you can buy drinks for the pools. Then there’s a bridge over the freezing glacial river. On the left of the bridge, the river forms a natural cold pool and on the other side of the bridge are the hot pools.
There are two of them. The lower one, Urður, is the warmer. Freyr said it was 38 or 39 degrees but I reckon it was more like 40-41 degrees. Urður is named after a witch – actually, one of the norns the three witches or goddesses who pull at the threads of fate. Urður herself is fate and Freyr told us something that made sense at the time, which is that you get into the hot pool and cease to exist in the present – that is, you can forget all your worries and responsibilities for the time being. I’m not sure that it doesn’t make more sense to me for the pool to be called Verðandi, the norn of the present, therefore.
The upper pool is a little cooler and its name is Hringur, which just means circle. It’s inspired by Snorri Sturluson’s pool just 20-ish minutes down the road at Reykjholt. Snorralaug, Snorri’s pool, is the only hot pool to be mentioned in the Book of Settlement. Of course, Snorri came a good couple of centuries later but so did the writing. To be honest, I can’t actually find Snorralaug in the Book of Settlement. I know it probably wasn’t called that in the book, because Snorri wasn’t born at the time, but I’ve searched for every combination of “pool”, “laug”, “hot”, “water” and anything else I can think of, so I’m entirely relying on the internet being correct when I state that it’s in the Book. Snorralaug is much smaller but it’s a similarly perfect circle, neatly paved with a nice decorative stone edge.
I got Freyr to write these names down for me afterwards. “Do you know what Snorralaug is?” he asked, writing it down too. “Yes, Snorri Sturluson!” I said. I swear, something in his eyes lit up. “You know Snorri Sturluson? Have you read Snorri’s Edda?” I replied that I had, a little dubiously because I can never remember whether what they call Snorri’s Edda in Icelandic is what they call the Poetic Edda or the Prose Edda in English. I’ve read both, so yes, whichever it is, I have read it. “I’ve got goosebumps!” Freyr declared. A tourist who’s done a bit of background reading is clearly such a rarity, and a tourist who has opinions even more so – the opinion being that yes, I agree, Tolkien was indeed inspired by the Eddas but there are entire paragraphs he straight-up stole. Compare the list of elves in the Prose Edda with the list of dwarves in The Hobbit.
Anyway, that’s me showing off about being vaguely cultured. Let’s go back to the pools.
I was first out of the changing rooms, mostly because I was determined to get a few selfies and a few clips of video without the rest of the group in them. It was only a small group, six of us in total. There was a German family with a teenager who clearly didn’t want to actually go in the hot water. There was a French couple and there was a solo American woman. It’s not like the pools were overcrowded and when everyone else arrived, most of them were taking photos too.
It was a bit chilly running over the bridge to the pools so I leapt straight in Urður. Lovely and hot! The canyon is narrow so even at 10.25am, the sun was nowhere near high enough in the sky to make it down to the pools. Mindful that I’d got a bit pink in Hvammsvík the previous day, and mindful of the pre-soak shower, I’d put on suncream early enough in the morning that it had sunk in and wouldn’t come off in the shower or the pool but I didn’t need to. No sun before about midday, even in summer. Below the pools, the canyon meandered off towards the valley but above, it seemed to come to a sudden stop. It was certainly pretty and a lovely secluded place to have a hot bath.
I tried to leave enough time after the next people joining me before going to investigate Hringur that it didn’t look like I was trying to avoid them. I just want to try out both pools! Hringur was actually a much more comfortable temperature; probably warmer than Freyr’s estimate and probably around 38 degrees.
Oddly enough, there are no temperature controls employed here. The water comes straight out from the side of the canyon and the only difference between the two pools is the rate of flow of hot water into them. It’s not an extra supply of cold or a thermostat, it’s just letting the water drip more slowly into Hringur.
Before we got in, Freyr had pointed out the cold pool and said that we were welcome to dip in there too, if we were brave enough. I didn’t intend to, not really, but somehow the entire group had a go at one point or another, except the German teenager. The American lady spent some time just luxuriously swimming in there while Freyr took photos for her. I tried it three times. The first time was a teeth-gritting wade out until I was around hip-deep, followed by a quarter-second submersion as close to my shoulders as I could get in a quarter of a second, followed by a scurry back to lovely warm Urður. I’m not a subscriber to the belief that cold water is exhilarating or makes you feel good or anything like that but I began to feel like I’d like to do it again. So I did. This time the dip was maybe a whole second, followed by another run for Urður. The third was long enough to bob up and down for a handful of seconds before retreating in a slightly more controlled way back to the hot water. I’m not a cold water fan at all.
We had about an hour in there, mostly thanks to Freyr parking as close as he could get. I left reluctantly – I could always spend double the time in a hot pool – but I dried and dressed most effiently and was out again taking photos of the pools with no one in them before anyone else was ready. That’s when I got Freyr to write down the names and had the Edda conversation.
Freyr also pointed out that the wall of the canyon behind the changing rooms is pure raw obsidian, the largest obsidian wall in Iceland. So naturally I went to have a closer look at it. It is indeed obsidian – it’s smooth and glass-like and fractured and black as night. Then Freyr stepped up beside me and said in a stage whisper “It chose you! From the canyon” and dropped a rock into my hand in the manner of a spy passing on a secret note. It was a little cube of raw obsidian! You’re not supposed to take rocks from Icelandic nature anymore but I think if the canyon chooses you (or if your tour guide thinks you’ve earned it by taking an actual interest in his country), it’s probably ok.
We climbed the 64 steps out of the canyon and I used the excuse of taking photos most of the way up to avoid looking like I was too out of breath to do all 64 in one go. It’s worth taking your time and taking photos, though. This is that rare thing; a commercialised hot pool that hasn’t been overrun by tourists. Yet. Come back in five years and see if they’ve set up a car park and a restaurant à la Hvammsvík. Freyr took back the damp towels and we drove back to Húsafell.
So, what did I think? Well, I’d have liked to have more than an hour in there but an hour is enough to not feel desperately short-changed. I enjoyed how it’s limited to just the members of the tour group and the nature of the road up means it’s likely to stay at minibus-sized groups rather than ever grow to coach groups.
One thing I did feel a little uncomfortable about was the number of cameras watching the pools. The pools are private and accessible only by these tours but if you know where they are, there’s nothing physically stopping you going on your own. They’re outside in nature, in a canyon. So the cameras are there to make sure only authorised visitors come here. But it does feel just a little bit 1984 to look around and realise there are at least six cameras pointed at you at any time. Who’s watching them? No idea. Are they monitored 24/7? Surely it’s not worth it – do they have some kind of authority who will come flying down here to throw out interlopers in the middle of the night? Or are they like doorbell cameras, motion activated when tours aren’t there?
Oh, I’m sure most of the big lagoons also have cameras but the idyllic private setting of these pools, in their secret location hidden almost inside the earth, and so beautiful, make it feel a bit more jarring than it would somewhere like the Blue Lagoon, where I’m 99% sure they also have cameras, not least because it’s far too big for the lifeguards to physically watch every corner of it. And make no mistake: the Canyon Baths are beautiful and idyllic and I could have happily stayed in there forever.
I Am A Polar Bear 