Laugavegur Trekking - Thorsmork and Fimmvorduhals

    Thorsmork sits inside a wonderful natural area, surrounded on three sides by the Tindfjallajökull, Eyjafjallajökull, and Mýrdalsjökull glaciers.  (That’s redundant… if a word ends in “jokull”, it’s already got “glacier” in the name.  Kinda like Bankastraeti Street, Skolavordistigur Street and Laekjargata Street are all redundant in the Reykjavik section.  The “strait”, “stigur” and “gata” already cover the “street” part. But I digress.)

     There’s a hut, and a national park office, and a handful of snacks available at Thorsmork, as it is similar to Landmannalaugar at the other end of the trek - accessible by road, and great for day hiking travelers to explore from.

     There’s a very large and braided riverbed in front of the campsite at Thorsmork, which one must cross to continue onwards to Fimmvorduhals or Skogar.  A long series of hops, skips, jumps and careful steps will lead one across this braided riverbed to a movable bridge that spans the main flow.  Part of the national park attendants job is to move this bridge on a near-daily basis as the river ebbs and flows across its huge river bottom.

     At the far side of the riverbed is the trail to Fimmvorduhals.  We opted to do this segment as a day hike.  So after a good night sleep at Thorsmork, we left our campsite set up, and struck off early for this recently-active volcanic area.  The trail was steep at times, but the surroundings were incredibly green.  Very few trees, but a blanket of deeply-green grass in every direction, broken only by steep, dark-brown cliffs eroded by the almost daily rainfall that comes up from the coast, just a few dozen miles away.

    At one point, while enjoying the surrounding green, we noticed one odd-shaped cloud in the distance, towards Reykjavik.  One cloud on an otherwise perfect day.  A bit more observation made it clear this was no normal cloud.  This was the plume of a brand-new volcano that had started since we were on the trek, just over the last four days!

    Once we reached what seemed like the top of the climb, there was an impossibly-flat plateau to cross, followed by a somewhat sketchy ridgeline to another steep section of trail.  But eventually, we reached an area of black volcanic rocks, jumbled into an impossible pile.  There were two clear craters, which had spewed out lava  just over a decade ago, that then cooled in place, making for an incredibly rough terrain.  The trail continued onwards to Skogar from here, but our plan was to explore this jumbled pile of rocks a bit and then return to Thorsmork.

    Once back in Thorsmork, we checked the bus schedule and realized that our quick downhill had meant that we could catch today’s bus instead of tomorrow’s bus back to Reykjavik.  Given the option of a warm dinner and a warm bed and another night of the Book Band at Rúblan Bókakaffi, we took down the tent and opted for the bus ride back.