Key takeaways
- The capital and its bay north-west, Reykjanes south, Snaefellsnes on the far horizon.
- Table mountains: eruptions that happened under ice.
- This is a high plateau in the North Atlantic. Cloud sits on it regularly.
- Arriving at a fenced hole out of white nothing has its own quality.
What is actually out there
The crater sits on an open lava plateau with nothing tall between it and most of south-west Iceland, so on a clear day the rim gives you an unusually wide sweep for somewhere so easy to reach.
To the north-west is Reykjavik and the bay it stands on, low and pale on the edge of the plain, with the mountains behind it. It is a strange view of a capital city: from up here it reads as a thin band of buildings against a great deal of water and rock, which is a fair description of the place.
To the south and west is the Reykjanes peninsula, running out towards the airport and the sea. It is the flattest, blackest, most obviously volcanic ground in the country, and from this height the lava fields on it read as distinct flows rather than as one undifferentiated plain.
And on the far horizon to the north-west, when the air is genuinely clean, is Snaefellsnes: a long peninsula with a glacier-capped volcano at the end of it, well over a hundred kilometres away. Seeing it is the mark of an exceptional day rather than a good one.
The mountains with flat tops
The most distinctive thing on the skyline in several directions is a mountain shape that does not look volcanic at all: steep sides rising to an abruptly flat summit, like a table or a loaf.
These are table mountains, and they are among Iceland's most characteristic landforms. Each one is an eruption that happened underneath an ice sheet during a glacial period. Meltwater and ice confined the lava so it could not spread, and it piled up steeply and quenched into fragmental rock instead. If the eruption went on long enough to break through the top of the ice, the final flows spread out flat across the surface.
When the ice retreated, what was left was a steep-sided mountain with a flat cap, standing over a landscape that had been under a kilometre of glacier.
Once you know what they are, they are visible everywhere in this part of Iceland, and looking at one from the rim of a crater you are about to be lowered into is a compact lesson in what the island is.
The lava plain from the rim, mountains on the horizon
How often you actually get it
Less often than the photographs suggest, and this deserves saying plainly rather than being discovered on the day.
The crater is on a high exposed plateau half an hour from the coast in the North Atlantic. Cloud forms on it readily, sits on it persistently, and is entirely independent of what the weather is doing in Reykjavik. It is completely normal for the city to be sunny and the plateau to be in fog thick enough that the three cones are invisible from a few hundred metres away.
The operator warns about it in plain terms, and reviewers repeat the warning back more often than they repeat anything else about the day.
So treat the view as a bonus rather than as part of what you booked. What you booked is underground and entirely unaffected by any of this.
The fog, which is worth having
Having warned about it, it is worth arguing the other side, because visitors who get the fog often end up describing it more vividly than those who got the panorama.
Walking for three quarters of an hour across a moss plain with fifty metres of visibility is a genuinely odd experience. There is no horizon and no landmark; there is the path, the person in front of you, and moss. The cones do not appear until you are close to them, and the crater does not appear until you are on it.
Arriving at a fenced hole in the ground with a steel gantry across it, out of white nothing, is a better piece of theatre than arriving at it in sunshine. So is standing on the platform and watching the fog and the daylight recede together.
And there is a practical point underneath the aesthetics. The one part of this day that weather cannot touch is the part you came for. A hundred and twenty metres down, it is the same chamber in any conditions, which is more than can be said for almost anything else on an Icelandic itinerary.
Three
Reykjavik and its bay, the Reykjanes peninsula, and Snaefellsnes on the far horizon on an exceptional day. Fog on a great many ordinary ones.
When the odds are best
There is no month that guarantees anything, but the odds are not flat. Settled high-pressure days give the best chance, and they are more common in the earlier part of the season than at either end of it.
Time of day matters less here than in the mountains proper, though morning departures more often catch clearer air before the day has had time to build cloud over the plateau.
The most useful advice is to look at the sky when you leave Reykjavik and then let it go. The correlation between city weather and plateau weather is weak enough that predicting from one to the other is close to worthless, and the walk happens either way.
