Snæfellsnes in a Weekend

An hour west along the north coast from Helgafell, at Grundarfjörður, stands Kirkjufell, the 463-metre peak routinely called the most photographed mountain in Iceland, and for once the crowds are onto something. Everyone is here for the same picture and they all build it the same way: the little three-step cascade of Kirkjufellsfoss, about 2 km off, in the foreground with the arrowhead mountain rising behind it (a silhouette you'll place on sight if you ever watched Game of Thrones, where it played the mountain beyond the Wall). Geologically it is a nunatak, a peak that stood clear above the ice sheets while they ground everything around it flat, which is exactly why it holds that improbably clean pyramidal form. Most people give the marked viewpoint three quarters of an hour, much of it spent waiting for a gap in the tripods, and every one of those minutes beats going up the mountain itself, which is steep, lethal in winter, closed to winter climbing outright, and has killed people who went up for the view anyway.

That first day is deliberately short. From Kirkjufell you follow the road west along the north coast to Ólafsvík, the fishing town that serves as the loop's one basecamp, and stop there for the night. The second day is where the peninsula spends its budget, and it opens a short hop past Ólafsvík out at the very tip, at Snæfellsjökull, the glacier-capped stratovolcano the whole peninsula is named for: 1,446 metres, roughly 700,000 years old, last erupted around 200 CE, and the beating heart of a national park of craters, lava fields, caves and coastline set aside in 2001. Jules Verne picked this exact mountain in 1864 as the way down to the centre of the Earth, which is the kind of literary endorsement money can't buy. There is an uncomfortable footnote written in ice: the summit cap shrank from about 16 km² in 1946 to 10 or 11 by 2008, and in August 2012 it was reported ice-free for the first time in recorded history. This is the anchor of the whole weekend and comfortably fills four hours, its white cap hanging over nearly every other stop on the loop. The roadside viewpoints and marked lowland trails you can wander self-guided; the glacier itself is no place to improvise a route, not with the cliffs, lava, caves and weather that turns while you are looking the other way, so that part takes a guide.

Half an hour down off the volcano and out to the western tip, Djúpalónssandur looks like a beach and reads like a history exhibit. You come down to the black pebble shore through a field of jagged lava, and waiting on the sand are four lifting stones, from 23 up to 154 kg, left from the days this cove was Dritvík, one of the busiest fishing stations in the country: a man had to heave one of them up to prove he was strong enough for a boat crew, and they are still lying there for anyone who fancies finding out. Rusted ribs of the British trawler Epine, wrecked here in 1948, have been left deliberately where they lie as a memorial rather than cleared away. The surf that does that kind of thing is exactly why swimming is banned outright, currents and rogue waves and no arguing with either, so keep off the water and to the smooth Djúpalónsperlur pebbles, and read the cove for what it is: forty-five minutes in an open-air museum that happens to double as a beach.

Six minutes back up the road, the ground opens the other way. Vatnshellir is an 8,000-year-old lava tube, formed by an eruption from the Purkhólar crater row just up the road, and the only way in is a guided tour that runs three quarters of an hour down two spiral staircases into two stacked chambers, past walls streaked with colourful mineral deposits. It is about as literal as retracing Jules Verne's descent gets. Guide-only here is not a shakedown: the cave is gated to protect it, Summit Adventure Guides is the sole licensed operator, and the floors down there are cold, dim and uneven enough that you want a hand on the rail. Adults pay 5,900 ISK and teenagers 12 to 17 pay 2,600, while under-fives are turned away and children 5 to 11 go free (a rare stroke of Icelandic pricing that rewards bringing the kids). A tidy, contained hit of the underground before the coast opens back up.

Ten minutes on, the coast takes over from the caves at Arnarstapi, a small fishing village at the foot of Mt. Stapafell where the basalt has frankly gone to town: sea arches, cliffs and rifts, Gatklettur and Hundagjá and Miðgjá strung one after another along an easy path that runs the shore toward the hamlet of Hellnar. Walk it and you are walking inside a saga, because the place names come straight out of Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, the tale of Bárður, a half-human, half-ogre guardian spirit of the peninsula, who now stands over the village as a large stone statue. It was a serious trading port too, under the Danish merchant monopoly from 1565, so the present emptiness is a fairly recent development. The stroll out toward Hellnar and back fills a comfortable hour, the arches and blowholes revealing themselves one at a time, but keep your admiring done from solid ground: nothing out here is fenced, and the lava at the lip is loose and unbothered by your footing.

Barely twenty minutes east along the south coast, the loop ends the way it should, quietly, at Búðakirkja. A small pitch-black timber church stands alone on a lava field at Búðir with no village left around it, just coast, mountains and sky, which is precisely why it's one of the most photographed churches in the country. The black isn't a mood: it's pitch tar, the traditional weatherproofing for Icelandic timber, doing its old job. The building is stubborner than it looks, too. The present 1848 church was funded and maintained entirely by locals who spent decades campaigning to get their dissolved parish a church at all, then restored it themselves in 1987 alongside National Museum specialists. Búðir was a significant medieval trading port once; now it's a church, a hotel and a scatter of ruins. There is nothing to do here but stand in the wind off the lava field for half an hour and let the silhouette do the work, which is a blunt, quiet way to end a loud weekend, a small dark building to bookend the small holy hill you started on.