The Vatnajökull North Rim

Two million people a year visit Iceland and almost all of them stay within two hours of Reykjavík. The northern rim of Vatnajökull is a day’s driving from any of that, and for eight days the only structures you will see are four huts and a set of turf ruins where an eighteenth-century outlaw overwintered.

The easiest thing we run, and still not easy

Grade II here means no rope skills and no altitude — it does not mean short days. Day four is twenty-two kilometres across the Dyngjusandur with no water between the ends of it, on sand that takes about fifteen per cent more out of you than the map suggests. Parties consistently find it the hardest single day in the catalogue below Grade III.

This is the route we send people to when their enquiry says they want the Greenland crossing and their experience says they should not have it yet.

Kverkfjöll

Where the glacier sits on a geothermal field, so there is ice above steam and a river coming out of a hole in the ice at 30°C. It is the strangest ground in Iceland and the photographs of the ice caves are extraordinary.

We do not go into the ice caves. They collapse, they collapse without warning, and people have died in them. You will see them from the outside, you will be disappointed for about four minutes, and then we will walk up onto the geothermal bench and you will stop caring.

Why the party is eight

This is the one route where we take eight rather than six, because nothing is roped, the huts sleep eight, and the extra two make the price work at €4,900 rather than €6,200. We are not going to pretend there is a philosophical reason.

Who it suits

Anybody fit who walks. It is also the best route here for someone travelling alone, because eight people in a hut for four nights becomes a group faster than six on a rope ever does.