Laugavegur Trekking - Starting at Landmannalaugar

      Our true purpose for traveling to Iceland was to complete the Laugavegur Trek, from Landmannalaugar to Thorsmork.  Most folks will do this over the course of four days, with overnights at either huts or the accompanying campsites along the way.  Some folks choose to continue onwards on a fifth day, to visit Fimmvorduhals and potentially even end the trek at Skogar.

     This is a trip that many folks will travel as a guided tour.  For folks wishing to have a bit of guidance, or have their gear moved from hut-to-hut for them, or have their meals supplied, or simply enjoy a bit of built-in social activity… the guided option is ideal!  Find more details, find a guided tour on this page.

     We’ve done a ton of backpacking over the years… I mean a lot of backpacking.  Long off-trail segments in the Sierras, parts of the GR11 in Spain, three-week trips in the Himalayas, and more than a few remote trips in the Bob Marshall Wilderness here in Montana.  And… we are introverts.  So we opted to do the hike independently.  In fact, we even opted to travel without our stove - opting to try a “cold soak” method of cooking, instead.  If you aren’t familiar with “cold soaking”… it works great for a few meals here and there.  But for five days straight?  Nah… we were pretty jealous of the guided groups around us, with their warm, aromatic dinners.

     If traveling as part of a guided group, transportation to the trailhead is most certainly going to be part of the trip.  But as independent hikers, we had to navigate the public bus system.  It wasn’t too difficult, and we arrived to the middle-of-nowhere around midday.   There’s a small hut here at Landmannalaugar, operated by Iceland’s national park system, because there are a series of day hikes leaving from this trailhead, and a popular hot spring rising truly out of nowhere.

     We struck off on the trail and quickly took a diversion to a series of waterfalls surrounded by oddly-colored mountains.  There’s not much vegetation here, beyond the low grasses and tundra, so the colors are really quite something - green grasses, yellow and brown hillsides, all dotted with steaming white geothermal areas.

     Around one corner we stumbled upon friends and coworkers from another lifetime.  This threw us for a loop, thinking about the odds of knowing anyone in this remote corner of Iceland.... and the chances it would have been the first time seeing them in a decade.

     After a few miles of fairly popular trails, we made one last turn from the day-hiking loops onto the main trail that will now traverse the mountains all the way to Thorsmork and beyond.