I’m going to start this off by saying that this was never on my original itinerary. I planned to spend Friday enjoying the reborn Laugarvatn Fontana, which is now revelling in saying “steam by the lake” to the point that I wonder if they’ll just take that as their new name. It was supposed to open after its renovations in June but as I write this, they’re now saying July 1st and I suddenly found I had a completely empty day and a campervan. I spent a week thinking about Inside the Volcano. It’s expensive and I’ve done it before. Do I really want to do it again? But after a week, I realised I’d been worrying and fretting over whether it would be sold out by the time I made the decision and that told me what my decision was. I was going back Inside the Volcano.
Inside the Volcano is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a tour that takes you literally inside a volcano. The volcano itself is called Þríhnúkagígur, which looks unpronouncable but, like many Icelandic names, it’s a compound word. It means Three Peaks Crater – Þrí – hnúka – gígur (the weird letter is a thorn, the same Th- as in Thor). Three-nooka-gihur might not be a terrible way to transliterate it into something an English-speaker might find less intimidating. You either get picked up from Reykjavik or meet on location in the Blue Mountains between Reykjavik and Hveragerði and then you hike 3km across the lava field towards the three humps on the horizon. I was slightly annoyed at how accurate those 3km are – I measured them with Strava because I count all my walking – and it was 3.07km out and 3.01km back, because it depends on exactly where I started and stopped the counter but that’s still irritatingly precise!
Most volcanoes, when they’ve finished erupting, either fill up with the magma that didn’t make it out of the hole in the top which then solidifies, or collapse in on themselves. Anything shaped like a crater, with a bowl-shaped top, has collapsed in on itself. Craters have quite thin, fragile walls and if they’re not being constantly rebuilt by an active eruption, they can break very easily. But Þríhnúkagígur is weird in that it hasn’t done either of those things – and it last erupted 4,500-ish years ago, so if it was going to collapse it probably would have done by now. It’s hollow and empty.
It was discovered in 1974 by a cave explorer called Árni B. Stefánsson who was lowered in, presumably having no idea whatsoever either how far down he was going to go or the scale of what he was going to find or how much rope he was going to need. In 1991, his brother and a friend joined him in exploring, still going down on ropes and harnesses and in 2010, National Geographic came to film there, which meant figuring out how to get a few more people and heavier equipment in, which meant installing the first modified window washing basket, suspended over the entrance by some wobbly scaffolding. In 2012, it was opened to the public. Just for six weeks. Come visit it during these six weeks or miss out forever.
Here we are fourteen years later.
I went during those six weeks, full of the idea that I was going to see something that almost no one was going to get to see and it’s never closed up. I hiked the lava field, I put on a harness and got lowered into the volcano and then, because the guides were fun and I’d brought my own torch – because a caver’s instincts never quite leave you – they let us take a quick detour to explore a lava tunnel on the way back.
It never closed. I was vaguely annoyed to find it was still open and running later that summer, let alone the next. And the next and the next and ever on. The original plan, back in 2012, was to make the volcano more accessible to visitors by drilling a hole into the side of it to allow a level walkway to emerge halfway up the crater so you didn’t have to mess around with harnesses and buckets and a tiny hole in the ceiling 212 metres up. Nowadays, those plans are unimaginable – to do something so intrusive as to cut a hole in the side of a volcano!
Anyway, finding myself with an empty day and a campervan and a need to stay within the south-west region, I found myself going back to the website and looking at it and thinking about it until eventually I booked it. I drove myself – and you’ll hear more about that in the upcoming “This trip was cursed” post – and found, instead of a car park on the edge of a deserted ski resort, I found a dedicated house, with a kitchen and a dining room and a shop selling actual Inside the Volcano merchandise – t-shirts, hats and even blanket badges! In 2012, almost everyone got picked up from Reykjavik but this time it seemed that everyone had driven themselves and we met our guides, Sóley and Gerða – I’m pretty sure it wasn’t actually Gerða but it began with G and I can’t see any name in the Icelandic lists that looks closer. Anyway, they gave us the safety talk and we gathered all our necessaries ready to start the 3km hike.
That’s another thing that has changed. Where there was a “sort of” path scratched out by three or four weeks’ worth of feet, now there’s a proper gravel path with edges and the occasional industrial-rusted bridge over the rough patches. The open lava tunnels, Langihellir and Djúpihellir, which we explored last time, are now fenced off, just curiosities to glance at as you walk past. Closer to the volcano than I’d realised, there’s a crack in the fabric of the earth which we once had to literally jump over – I have a picture of me standing on a boulder in the middle of it going “I can’t jump that far!” – which is now a bridge and you don’t even look at it as you hike.
It’s pretty flat until you get to the very end, when it suddenly goes quite sharply uphill. Or at least, it feels like it. Looking at the tracking data, it turns out it’s only a 30m climb over 300m which doesn’t look dramatic at all but it felt it!
Next change: where there was once a makeshift office in a shipping container, there’s now an entire mountain base with running water. You go into the dining room to wait and help yourself to hot drinks and there’s more merchandise. The group gets split into two because there’s only room for about six in the basket, and you get into a harness and helmet. That’s just for the basket. You hike up the mountain, which now has a sort of chain ladder set into it to form something a bit more foot-friendly than the plain red gravel and at the top, with views over to Reykjavik and Hafnarfjörður, there’s the basket. If you look closely, the basket has been upgraded in the last 14 years – the most obvious difference is that it has a plexiglass roof over it to keep you dry but it also has a new control panel. I mean, it might not be the same basket at all but it’s the same slightly rickety, slightly homemade vibe. You walk across the gangplank wearing a tether clipped to your harness, step into the basket where one tether gets switched for the other and when everyone’s in, you descend.
It takes about four minutes and the first bit is the roughest. Just below the very top is a narrow slot. The basket has a set of rubber wheels on it to help it move through the gap without scraping and catching and once you get past that, the volcano bells out and you’re hanging in absolutely nothing. It’s not as bad as it sounds. The bottom of the crater is quite well illuminated these days so you can see exactly where the bottom is, so it’s not quite like dangling in an abyss. And 212m doesn’t look so far in a relatively confined space. The website raves about how huge this cavern is – high enough to contain Hallgrímskirkja or the Statue of Liberty and look at the floorspace! I’m not going to deny that it’s pretty tall but it’s not dizzyingly, frighteningly high and it’s bottle-shaped, so it narrows as you get higher up and I can, by no stretch of my imagination, picture either of those enormous things squished in here. And while it’s more spacious floorspace-wise than you might imagine the interior of a volcano to be, there’s no way either of them would fit in this footprint, which doesn’t help.
But it’s a spectacular space nonetheless! The walls are splashed with colour, remnants of the magma that once bubbled and boiled in here. Red from iron, white and yellow from sulphur and the dark almost purplish splashes are just the same as the black lava that you’ll see outside, minus hundreds or thousands of years of weathering. The lighting is a little better than it was 14 years ago and it now has paths marked across the bouldery floor. You might have expected the bottom to be reasonably smooth, since it was formed by liquid but clearly bits of rock have fallen from the sides over the last four and a half millennia. 14 years ago, I was able to scramble across this and down to the deepest part, not out of any serious desire to try to explore the cracks and crevices in the bottom but just to go deeper than anyone else in my group. That’s out now.
You get about half an hour in the volcano, which is enough time to explore the little paths, climb up and down a bit and just soak in the concept that you’re inside a volcano. We were the first sub-group out of our group so as soon as we were out of the bucket, it went back up to fetch the second group, so we got an excellent view of it ascending and descending. When you’re surrounded by something as natural as the interior of a volcano, almost untouched by the outside world, that’s amazing and yet the unnatural sight of a steel bucket hanging from cables just seems to add something to the space, like a focal point, like that little human figure added to a painting of a landscape.
We’d been told to put on all our layers because it’s pretty cold inside Þríhnúkagígur, 3-4°C all year round. It was already a fairly warm day and after walking 3km and climbing the hill, I was hot and sweaty so I put my down jacket over my thin yellow long-sleeved top and that was more than adequate. It drips a bit inside the volcano because it’s in Iceland and it’s open, just about, to the elements so some rain gets in, mostly as heavy drops of water that have gathered inside the bottlemouth rather than small raindrops. You get dripped on. But I didn’t think it was too cold in there.
After half an hour or so, we crowded back into the bucket, clipped in and ascended. Then we went back to the house for some soup and some hot chocolate. I decided to take my opportunity and buy a badge for my blanket. I’d been looking at them since I turned up at the car park base, where I hadn’t had the time to buy one, but since I was sitting around watching everyone else eating soup and waiting for the other half of the group, it seemed to be a good time to do it. Good thing I did, because the shop back at the home base was closed by the time we got back and I’d have been furious if I’d missed out. They also had t-shirt, jackets, enamel mugs, mittens, hats, photobooks and chocolate.
And when we were all ready, we walked back. Well, we walked in small groups and I never saw half the group even leave the mountain HQ despite all the staff overtaking me on bikes. I haven’t been on a bike since I was eighteen or so but I can imagine it might be quite entertaining to bump over a lava field – more entertaining than a forty-five minute trudge wishing you’d had time to get something solid to eat at any point in the last 24 hours and knowing that it would be at least an hour to the nearest supermarket once you’ve got those three kilometres under your feet. But that’s another story, the “This Trip Was Cursed” post that’s coming in a week or two.