Iceland in Summer

The water in Silfra fell as snow on Langjökull and then spent about thirty years seeping through lava to get here. It arrives so filtered that on a good day you can see around a hundred meters through it, which is the whole point. You float face down in a drysuit over a crack in the ground, with the North American plate on one side of you and a great deal of very clear nothing underneath.

It is cold. Two to four degrees, all year, and only your face and hands find out. Thirty to forty minutes in the water, six people to a guide, hot chocolate after. Anyone the snorkel rules leave out spends the morning walking the rift with the coordinator instead, and gets to the hot water first.

Then Þingvellir on foot, where Iceland's parliament began meeting around 930 and a lawspeaker recited the laws from memory to whoever turned up. The afternoon is the other end of the thermometer: hot baths beside the lake at Laugarvatn, and rye bread lifted out of the black sand after a full day baking in the ground. Icelanders call it thunder bread. Ask why after dinner, not during.

Every geyser on Earth borrows its name from one in a valley in the south of Iceland, from an old word meaning to gush. Geysir itself mostly rests these days, which is one way to handle being famous. Its neighbor Strokkur, fifty meters away, does the work: every six to ten minutes, usually fifteen to twenty meters up, and the whole group still jumps at the fourth one.

Then Gullfoss, 32 meters in two steps into a canyon. In 1907 its owners agreed to let a dam be built across it. Sigríður Tómasdóttir, born on the farm beside it, fought the deal for years and is said to have threatened to throw herself in. The dam never came.

The evening is the good bit. Seljalandsfoss, which in summer you can walk all the way around behind, and a short way along it Gljúfrabúi, a second waterfall hiding inside its own gorge. You reach it by wading in, and the water is very much the cold end of the week. Bring the shoes you love least.

At about two in the morning on 23 January 1973 the ground split open beside the only town on Heimaey. Within six hours almost all of its 5,300 people were on the mainland, most of them by boat. Fewer people live here today than left that night.

The eruption ran for five months and built a new mountain at the edge of town. The islanders answered a volcano with the coldest thing they had: crews pumped more than seven million cubic meters of seawater onto the lava, and it stopped about a hundred meters short of closing the harbor. One of the houses the ash buried has been dug back out, and you can look inside it.

Then the other reason to cross. The cliffs of these islands hold the largest puffin colony on the planet, somewhere around 800,000 pairs, and you get the afternoon on the cliff tops above them. Dinner by the harbor the lava nearly took, and the boat back in the long light.

Every October since 2010, the seventh grade from the school in Hvolsvöllur, the town you have slept in for the last two nights, walks out to a sign in front of Sólheimajökull and measures how far away the ice has moved. By 2021 the answer was more than four hundred meters. They were still at it in 2025. Fifteen years of homework, and the answer keeps getting bigger.

Today you walk on what is left: crampons on, a guide in front, on an eleven-kilometer tongue of ice sliding off Mýrdalsjökull. It is a careful walk rather than a climb.

Before the ice, Skógafoss, sixty meters of falling water with a settler's chest of gold said to be hidden behind it. Somebody once got close enough to tear the ring off its side, and the ring is in the museum down the road. After the ice, Reynisfjara, the black beach, where you keep well back and let the waves do whatever they like. Vík tonight.

On day 2 you floated in water two to four degrees above freezing. Today is the other end of the thermometer.

The morning is the drive back west from Vík, the same coast in reverse, and it is a travel morning. Nothing to report. Then Reykjadalur, a valley above Hveragerði where steam comes straight out of the hillside. About an hour uphill on a path through ground that smokes, and at the top a stream fed by hot springs: hot where they come in, cooler further down. Walk along it until it is the temperature you want, and get in. Everybody's number is different, and everybody finds it.

Back in Reykjavík for the farewell dinner, where a group that has snorkeled a fissure, walked a glacier and sat above a cliff full of puffins tries to agree on the best day, and does not.

On day 1 you sat in a hot tub with strangers. If your flight allows it, the city pools are open this morning, and it is a different tub entirely when everyone in it has waded into a gorge with you.

Then the goodbyes. A group chat renamed to something nobody outside it will ever understand. A camera roll that is mostly puffins and the backs of drysuit hoods. At least one person already looking at next summer. Hugs outside the hotel, which is where this was always going to end.