Travelation Inspiration: Iceland 5: Skaftafell National Park

Top Tips
- You can see the seals and take a boat tour of Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon.
- Skaftafell National Park has several hiking trails to enjoy. The Geologic Glacier Trail - the only trail that the Visitors Centre provides a free guide to - seems to be the least scenic.
- If you like off-roading, get a 4WD and drive any of the F roads. We randomly stumbled upon a few and they were all magnificently beautiful.

Driving along the Ring Road

Wednesday, September 4

The view from the Ring Road

Skaftafell National Park.

On the way to the park we drove through a vast expanse of black sand flats. In the distance you can see a shimmering black-silted glacier extending into the valley.

We obtained a pamphlet guide for the main hiking route, the Geologic Glacier Trail (marked S1) to the Skaftafell Glacier from the Visitors Centre. Along the trail the pamphlet corresponds to numbered signs to give you a little information about the way some geological formations develop, and the history of the park.

Skaftafell Glacier as seen from the Geologic Glacier Trail (S1)

We drove further along the road a few minutes to another parking spot From here we walked up the S2 trail to a waterfall, ascending a steep path to several viewpoints of the waterfall and the black valley flats.

Hiking up the S2 trail in Skaftafell National Park

Driving into Skaftafell National Park

Driving along the Ring Road, west of Skaftafell National Park

A typical Icelandic town with adjacent waterfall

Fjallsárlón Glacier Lagoon

Our next stop was the Fjallsárlón glacier lagoon. This is smaller than the Jökulsárlón lagoon, and much quieter. Several people had taken picnics to enjoy in this scenic area. Of course no one was picnicking on the ice – there was a recent story in the paper about some folks that had a picnic on an iceberg in this area and it broke and floated away, so they had to be rescued.

Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon

We did stop at the Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon. Even if you see the Fjallsárlón on the way it’s still worthwhile stopping here. Boat tours are available at around $35/pp for a 40 minute ride on the lagoon, which you can arrange from the shore when you get there. We didn’t do the tour since we’ve been to Alaska and seen glaciers from the water before. The calved icebergs in this lake were much larger than the other lagoon, and there were several seals swimming in the lake.

On the way to our next guesthouse, we followed the F985 for the heck of it, which led to the Skálafellsjökull glacier. This 4WD road had a steep and steady ascent, taking us several planes up the mountain. For me, it was a bit of a nerve-racking drive watching how high we were getting. Eventually we were looking down over the vast glacier below the road. I was getting way too uneasy with the height at this point so we turned back.

The cliff face of the F985

View from above the Skálafellsjökull glacier on the F985

Lake on our randomly selected drive down the F985

Icelandic sheep, I wonder how they catch the sheep when they need to be handled, the sheep are sprawled everywhere that we could see.

Golden landscape on the F985

Accommodation

We stayed at the Guesthouse Skálafell, chosen for its convenient location along our route. This was a quaint family-run establishment, where we stayed in comfortable warm cabins on a farmstead. We were served a homemade 3-course dinner for an additional $40 each, which involved a self-serve salad bar, soup, a generous portion of lamb roast and a dessert of Skyr with fresh wild blueberries. Skyr is a skim milk yoghurt that is offered just about anywhere in Iceland for dessert. It’s thicker than Greek yoghurt but doesn’t have the Greek yoghurt sour tang. The yoghurt is clearly made in small batches as we saw plenty of individual variation among cartons, and the vanilla yoghurt has plenty of vanilla seeds in it so it's obviously naturally flavoured. We fell in love with the stuff, having it for breakfast, as a protein smoothie snack or for dessert almost every day.