Iceland for F-Road Backcountry People

It's about two and a half hours south from Landmannalaugar to Þórsmörk, just under a hundred and sixty kilometres that end where highland driving gets quietly humbled by moving water. Þórsmörk means Thor's woods, and for once the name earns it: the valley is hemmed in by three glaciers, Eyjafjallajökull, Mýrdalsjökull and Tindfjallajökull, whose ice walls shelter it into a mild little microclimate of birch woodland, ferns and moss you don't get anywhere else up here. It's green, it smells of leaves, and it sits at the southern end of the same Laugavegur trek you just left the top of, buried under ash during the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption and long since recovered. Getting in is the whole story, and the story is a river. Take the highland bus, keep to the marked trails, and no guide is required for six unhurried hours of walking under the ice. Try to self-drive those fords without knowing exactly what you're doing, and this is the stop that separates owning a 4x4 from having the faintest idea what to do with one.

Backtrack a bit over two hours north from Þórsmörk, around a hundred and forty kilometres, to The Highland Center at Hrauneyjar, and hand the wheel to someone else for a day. This is the F-road experience with the driving promoted to lead role: a full-day guided buggy run with Buggy Iceland through Fjallabak toward Landmannalaugar, across highland tracks and rivers, volcanic desert, Eldgjá, Mælifell and steaming geothermal ground. Collisions, rollovers, river crossings and severe weather are part of the activity, so the guide, helmet and roll cage matter. You'll need an international licence to drive one; passengers must be at least twelve and drivers seventeen. The tour costs about 149,500 ISK per person. Expect dust in your teeth, engine noise in your skull and not one dull kilometre.

Hótel Hrauneyjar, also known as The Highland Center, is a practical base where the paved road meets Sprengisandsleið F26. It offers rooms and hot meals before routes toward Landmannalaugar, Þjórsárdalur, Hekla, Sprengisandur and Fjallabak. Rooms cost about 20,900 to 41,900 ISK per night, depending on the option. Use the stop to rest, check road and weather conditions, and prepare before continuing into the highlands.

From Hrauneyjar it's a bit over three hours and close to a hundred and eighty kilometres north into the central highlands to Highland Base Kerlingarfjöll, and the logic of the trip shifts here: this is a staging point, not just an endpoint. The property bundles hotel rooms, lodges, huts, a campsite, a kitchen, geothermal baths and guided trips into a single spot, which quietly removes the need to be fully self-sufficient in a place that would otherwise insist on it. Use it as exactly that. Clear most of a day for the Hveradalir and Kerlingarfjöll hiking, all steaming rhyolite slopes and hot-spring valleys, then come back and lower yourself into the baths with the highland cold still on your skin. The access roads are remote and seasonal; winter travel requires a professional super-jeep operator. Entry-level rooms start around 86,000 ISK a night. Out here that buys civilisation, and you feel every kilometre of wild map wrapped around it.

You don't even leave the resort for the next one. The guided e-mountain-bike tour launches from Highland Base itself and shrinks the highlands into a tighter, sweatier loop: a couple of hours on assisted bikes over uneven volcanic tracks, through rhyolite hills and geothermal country and out to open mountain views, for around 21,000 ISK. Guide to Iceland calls it suitable for all skill levels; you still need basic cycling ability, weatherproof layers, and confidence riding in strong wind on exposed ground. It earns its slot because not every F-road person wants to stop driving purely to stand beside the parked vehicle admiring it. Some of us would rather keep the backcountry moving under our own balance, motor-assisted or not.

Now the long one. Getting from Kerlingarfjöll to Aldeyjarfoss means committing to the Sprengisandur crossing, and there is no soft version of it: six hours and well over three hundred kilometres of the central highlands' emptiest, most repetitive gravel, the kind of drive where the odometer stops meaning anything and the interior hands you north hour by hour. The reward waits on the far lip of that same Sprengisandur route: Aldeyjarfoss, where the Skjálfandafljót drops twenty metres into a dark amphitheatre of columnar basalt, part of the roughly 9,000-year-old Bárðardalshraun lava field, white water against black stone in the same textbook columns you'll know from Svartifoss. You can take the whole drop in inside forty-five minutes, but spend them carefully: the viewpoints are unfenced, the wet basalt is indifferent to your footing, and the water below is a great deal more powerful than a twenty-metre drop sounds. Treat it as a short, sharp exam on the exact habits the deeper interior is about to test for real, then push on and put a roof over your head at Mývatn.

From Mývatn the interior calls you straight back for the trip's most serious objective. Askja sits deep in the Dyngjufjöll mountains, reachable only along the F88 and only in summer, roughly five hours and a bit over two hundred kilometres from Aldeyjarfoss with river crossings stitched through the drive. What's out there is genuinely staggering: a nested caldera cradling Öskjuvatn, Iceland's second-deepest lake at 220 metres, and the smaller geothermal Víti crater, its milky, mineral-laden water warm enough to bathe in. The history is darker. A catastrophic eruption on 28 and 29 March 1875 collapsed the caldera that formed Öskjuvatn, killed a large share of Iceland's livestock, dropped ash as far as Scandinavia, and emptied at least sixteen farms for good. The terrain is so lunar that NASA brought Apollo astronauts here to train in the late 1960s, and the volcano hasn't retired, showing steady ground uplift since 2021. From the Vikraborgir parking it's a five-kilometre round trip on foot across raw lava to reach the rim, so most of the three hours you spend here is earned with your boots.

The last leg is a comparatively gentle three and a half hours and a hundred and sixty-odd kilometres out of the interior to Dettifoss, and it's the right place to run out of road. This is the most powerful waterfall in Europe by force: the glacial Jökulsá á Fjöllum, grey with sediment, hurling an average of about 193 cubic metres a second over a hundred-metre-wide lip and dropping it forty-four metres into the Jökulsárgljúfur canyon, a gorge the river's own outburst floods carved. It's loud in a way you feel before you hear it, the spray coming off as a vibration in the rock under your boots, which is roughly what the film Prometheus put on screen in 2012 and what Jón Leifs chased in his orchestral work named for the falls. The walk in is short, a kilometre and a half round trip and an hour on site, but the ground is wet, rocky, exposed and cliff-edged with nothing to catch a slip, so the same seriousness the F-roads drilled into you all week still applies. Selfoss waits just upstream if your legs have one more waterfall in them. You started this trip solving the problem of how to reach a place; you finish it at the edge of one that needs no such help to be impossible to ignore.