The Blafjoll Lava Field: The Ground You Walk Across

Where you are walking

Blafjoll, the Blue Mountains, is a high area of hills and lava plateau to the south-east of Reykjavik. For most Icelanders it means skiing, because the country's main ski area is here and a great deal of what is written about the place concerns lift passes.

The tour has nothing to do with any of that. It meets at a cabin, walks out across the lava in the opposite direction to the pistes, and the ski area is simply the nearest thing with a car park and a building.

What you cross is the lava field produced by the eruption that built the crater. It runs for several kilometres and it is essentially uninhabited: no roads, no fences, no structures except the crater installation itself.

What the surface is actually like

This is the thing people underestimate, and it is the reason the operator is specific about footwear rather than vague.

The rock underneath is four-thousand-year-old basalt, and it is not flat. Parts of it are ropy and smooth, where the flow moved slowly enough for its surface to wrinkle and set in folds. Parts are broken rubble, where the crust was torn apart by the lava still moving beneath it. Between and under those there are holes, cracks and small collapses.

Over all of it lies moss, thick and springy and continuous, and the moss is the problem. It smooths the visual appearance of the ground while changing none of its actual geometry, so a surface that looks like a green mattress is in fact a jumble of blocks with gaps between them. Every step is slightly different from the last one.

None of this is dangerous with reasonable footwear and reasonable attention. It is tiring in a way that a flat forty-five minutes is not, and it punishes trainers, because the sole flexes into the gaps and the ankle has nothing supporting it. Jeans are the other thing the operator rules out, for the ordinary reason that wet denim in wind is miserable.

The gradient is gentle throughout. This is a moderate walk on difficult ground rather than a climb.

The line of walkers crossing the moss towards the cones

The moss, which is older than it looks

Icelandic lava moss is one of those things that is far more interesting once somebody points it out. It is the first substantial thing to colonise a lava flow, it grows extraordinarily slowly, and the continuous carpet you are looking at represents centuries of work.

It is also fragile in a specific and unforgiving way. A footprint compresses it, and the compressed patch does not spring back. Damage shows for decades and in some conditions does not recover at all, which is why marked paths across lava fields in Iceland are marked with a seriousness that visitors sometimes find excessive.

It is not excessive. A group of a dozen people walking abreast across untouched moss leaves a scar that will outlast everyone in the group. Staying on the path is the single most useful thing a visitor can do here.

The weather, which is not Reykjavik's

The meeting point is about thirty minutes from the capital and several hundred metres above it, and that difference is larger than it sounds. The operator warns about this explicitly, and reviewers confirm it more often than they confirm anything else: what the mountain is doing bears very little relation to what the city is doing.

In practice it means fog, often. A clear morning in the city is not a promise of anything on the plateau, and a substantial share of visitors make this walk with visibility of a few dozen metres and arrive at a hole in the ground that appears out of nothing.

It also means wind and rain arriving without much notice, and temperatures noticeably lower than the forecast for the city. Layers and a windproof outer are the correct answer, along with the acceptance that you may see very little of the surroundings.

The fog is worth reframing rather than resenting. Walking across a featureless moss plain in cloud, following a line of people ahead of you, to a fenced hole with a steel gantry over it, is atmospheric in a way a sunny day is not. And the weather stops mattering entirely the moment you go below the surface.

What lives out there

Very little, and that is part of the character. A lava field of this age has moss, some low vegetation in the sheltered pockets, and not a great deal else. There are no trees. There is no water on the surface, because it drains straight through.

The animal you have a real chance of seeing is the arctic fox, which is Iceland's only native land mammal and which works ground like this. They are not tame and they are not rare here, and they are seen from the path often enough to be worth watching for. In summer they are brown rather than white.

Birds pass over. In the sheltered gullies there is more growing than the open plateau suggests. But the dominant impression is emptiness, thirty minutes from a capital city, and that contrast is one of the better reasons to do the walk in the first place rather than wishing it shorter.

Before you book

The walk, in stages

1. The cabin at Blafjoll

   Breidabliksskali, about thirty minutes from Reykjavik on paved road. Gear is fitted here.

2. Out onto the lava

   The path leaves the cabin and the ground immediately becomes old lava under moss.

3. Across the field

   Forty-five to fifty minutes, gentle gradient, uneven underfoot the whole way.

4. The three cones appear

   Low reddish heaps on the plain, or nothing at all if the cloud is down.

5. Up the cone

   A short stepped climb to the rim and down into the crater bowl.

6. The opening

   A fenced hole in the crater floor with a steel gantry across it.