Chasing Waterfalls

Half an hour west along the coast road stands its twin and opposite number. Skógafoss falls a clean sixty metres over a rim twenty-five metres wide, marking where Iceland's coastline sat before the sea drew back about five kilometres, and where Seljalandsfoss let you slip behind the water, this one just hits you with it head-on. On a sunny day the spray throws a reliable single or double rainbow across the base, and walking in to shoot that rainbow from the front means walking into a wall of blown mist that soaks you through in about a minute (this is the stop the rain cover was packed for). A staircase climbs the flank to a platform up top, where the view flips to a straight plunge down the throat of it. There's a Viking-treasure legend riding along too: a settler is said to have stashed a chest in the cave behind the falls, and a ring reckoned to have come off it now sits in the Skógar Museum next door. The rainbow, though, is what you came for.

Those two are your entire first day, so bed down in Hella and get an early start, because day two is one enormous drive: close to five hundred kilometres and better than seven hours east across the south and up into the fjords, the sort of haul where the odometer stops feeling real. Break it in Egilsstaðir, the one proper town out this way, before the final run to the trailhead. Hengifoss is the reward for all that seat time, and it makes you earn the last stretch on foot: a forty-to-sixty-minute climb up a moderately steep gravel trail that turns loose underfoot near the gorge. It plunges a hundred and twenty-eight metres, the third-highest waterfall in the country, down a cliff of layered basalt banded with vivid red claystone, and those red stripes, laid down between ancient lava flows, are the whole reason you climbed. From below the falls read thin and enormously tall, the sound arriving as a high steady hiss off the gorge wall rather than a roar. The path also passes a second waterfall on the way up, the columnar-basalt Litlanesfoss, so you bag two falls for a single climb, and the strata up here even hold fossilised tree trunks and lignite from a warmer geological age. Between the hike and the pair of falls, the detour runs to roughly two hours. Call it the most productive gorge on the trip.

The next morning turns north and west toward Mývatn, which becomes home base for the middle of the trip; the northern falls all cluster within reach of it. Hengifoss to Dettifoss is a little under three hours of that road, and it sets you down somewhere that could not be less delicate. Dettifoss isn't tall, only forty-four metres, but it is the most powerful waterfall in Europe by sheer force, shoving an average of around a hundred and ninety-three cubic metres of grey, sediment-heavy glacial water over a hundred-metre-wide rim every second. You clock it in your body before your eyes catch up: the rock underfoot trembles with the discharge, a low shudder coming up through your soles well before the spray ever reaches you. It sits deep in the Jökulsárgljúfur canyon, gouged by catastrophic glacial floods, and it opened the film Prometheus, which was no accident. Everything delicate about waterfalls is suspended here; this is the one you take in as raw tonnage. The cliffs are unfenced and the rock is slick with spray, so keep well back and let it be terrifying from a safe distance.

From the brute it's about an hour and three-quarters back west to something completely opposite in temperament. Goðafoss curves twelve metres down a thirty-metre-wide arc on the Skjálfandafljót, a broad, symmetrical horseshoe with none of the height or menace of the drops you've been collecting, and it sits right on the Ring Road roughly forty-five minutes from Akureyri, which makes it the most accessible major waterfall in the country. That accessibility is a mercy after Dettifoss: paved paths, no scree, mist drifting evenly off the curve, and Akureyri near enough to be the obvious place to eat before you push on. The name means waterfall of the gods, and it was earned the hard way: the lawspeaker Þorgeir is said to have pitched his carved Norse idols into it after Iceland voted to adopt Christianity around the year 1000, which is one way to formalise a change of faith. Work the arc from both banks; each hands you a different half of the horseshoe.

The last of the Mývatn-based falls sits only thirty-odd kilometres on from Goðafoss, but the road roughens and the fifty-minute drive rattles you as it climbs toward the highland edge. That roughness is exactly why Aldeyjarfoss stays quiet while the roadside falls fill up. Around twenty metres of bright white water pours into a dark amphitheatre of hexagonal basalt columns from the roughly nine-thousand-year-old Bárðardalshraun lava field, right where the Sprengisandur highland route begins, and the contrast of foaming white against the black colonnade is the whole composition. The bowl catches the sound and throws it back at you, so it plays louder and more contained than its modest height, a private thunder earned by whoever drove the bad road. A wide lens is the move here, one that can hold the drop and the fanned columns in a single frame; just watch the unrailed viewpoints while you compose, where the ground has a habit of ending sooner than you'd like.

Day four is the one that tests your resolve: the run from the Mývatn area out to the Westfjords is the single longest leg of the whole loop, better than eight hours and something over five hundred kilometres, most of it spent watching the north coast unspool and then threading into the folded fjords of the far northwest. Dynjandi is what waits at the end, and it is worth every hour, the way reaching the Westfjords at all always turns out to be. It isn't one drop but a widening, six-step cascade falling roughly a hundred metres down a stepped face above Arnarfjörður, the broad crown called Fjallfoss with five smaller named falls strung out below it. The trademark shape is a trapezoid, narrow at the base and spreading as it rises, cut that way because softer rock layers erode faster than the hard basalt bracketing them, a signature of the region's flood-basalt geology. Climb the path that runs up alongside the chain and the sound builds tier by tier as you pass each one, the veil thickening and the fjord wind flinging the spray sideways near the top. The lower viewpoint is an easy walk; the climb to the crown is short but steep, and it is the emblem of the Westfjords for a reason you'll be looking straight at.

The final day drops back down the west of the country, and a little over four hours out of the Westfjords the first stop is the one that breaks the definition outright. Hraunfossar isn't a river going over anything. It's spring water seeping straight out of the porous Hallmundarhraun lava field along some nine hundred metres of bank and sliding into the glacial Hvítá, so the whole slope looks like it's quietly leaking clear water in one long blue-white ribbon. It barely makes a sound, which lands as a genuine shock after four days of thunder. Then walk a few minutes upstream to its exact inverse: Barnafoss, a narrow, furious chute squeezed into a slot, named for two children said to have drowned falling from a natural stone arch here, an arch their grieving mother then had torn down. The gentle seep and the vicious chute, a couple of hundred metres apart, are the entire reason both make the list. Both are short, flat walks from the parking area, which after yesterday's eight hours in the car is no small thing.

Another three hours south and east brings you onto the Golden Circle proper, and to the marquee name of the whole trip. Gullfoss drops the Hvítá in two stages angled against each other, and because the lower tier falls sideways into a deep, narrow canyon, from most viewpoints the river seems to pour straight into the ground and simply stop, the spray rising back out of a slot you can't see the bottom of. It's the headline waterfall of the Golden Circle and it pulls the crowds to match, and it survived to pull them at all only because Sigríður Tómasdóttir fought off a hydroelectric scheme that would have drowned it in the early twentieth century. The upper viewpoint is a gentle walk; the lower path carries you close enough to be soaked through, and in winter close enough to be iced in place. Come in strong afternoon light and the rising spray and the two-tier geometry snap into a single frame.

The last one is barely twenty minutes down the road from Gullfoss, and it is deliberately the anticlimax. After four days of height and force and disappearing rivers, Faxi, also called Vatnsleysufoss, spreads only about seven metres high but ninety-one metres across the Tungufljót in one broad, even, unhurried sheet, the horse-mane shape that gives it its name. It is calm in a way nothing else on this trip is: you can hear yourself think, and the water arrives as a soft continuous wash instead of a roar. A salmon ladder runs up one side, drawing anglers alongside the photographers, and a short flat walk is all it takes to reach the viewing platform, half an hour of gentle looking to send you off. This is the broad-and-gentle entry the taxonomy needed, and the reason it comes last is the same reason it belongs on the list at all: a collection of only brutes and spectacles isn't a collection, it's a highlight reel. You opened this loop stepping in behind a wall of falling water; you close it standing in front of a sheet so wide and so quiet it barely seems to fall. One of every kind. That was the whole idea.