We thought about going back to see more puffins, but we did need to cover a lot of road across the north of Iceland. We hit the road at 7am heading for Dettifoss, Europe’s largest waterfall by volume of water.
We crossed back across the mountain ridge and left Route 94. We cut across the foothills of the mountain range on the west side of the Lagarfljot delta, following route 944 then switching over to Rt 925. These roads were mostly all gravel / dirt but it was interesting to get off the main route for a bit.
After we got back to the Ring Road, we crossed a long stretch of barren land, with very strong crosswinds and dust storms. It felt like hurricane force! The driving was a continuous and exhausting fight against wind gusts that threatened to blow the van off the road if your attention wavered. This part of the drive lasted about an hour and a half. The extreme winds, however, lasted well into the next day. When we picked up the van, they warned us to keep a tight hold on the doors when opening them. I guess this was why 😉. They also warned that snapped off doors weren’t covered by insurance.
We arrived at the Dettifoss parking lot at about 11:40 am but there was no clue that a waterfall even existed until after a 2 km hike when you get close to the cliff edge. All around it’s dry, flat, rocky, barren, desert-like land. As you near the cliff you begin to notice a misty spray and hear the roar of water. At the edge you see the large gorge cut by the waterfall / river. While this is nowhere near the size of Niagara, there’s a LOT of water in a very desert-like landscape.
We hiked along the edge, and since it was a sunny day, there were double and sometimes triple rainbows in the spray. As we started back, we noticed that a ranger had opened up a trail that descended to a much closer view of the waterfall so, of course, we hiked down to check it out.
We left for lake Myvatn a bit after 2 pm, crossing a moderate mountain ridge, still fighting the windy conditions. On the west side of the mountain a rest stop had an overlook of Myvatn. The name Myvatn means “midge lake”. Fortunately we came prepared with bug headnets. Also a plus, midges don’t bite and Iceland has no mosquitoes. This is the area of mud pots and geysers, but we decided to skip this for lack of time.
We ate “lunch” in the Myvatn area at around 4 pm and scouted out the 3 campgrounds in the area. We ended up deciding on the Hli∂ campground, which wasn’t very crowded, and moved on to look over birding locations in the area.
We spent some time birding at Álar on the Myvatn western shore with the campervan as our bird blind against the strong wind. It was very windy by the bay where we saw flocks of waterfowl. Pam put the spotting scope on a short tripod and sat in the van with the side door open and David took pictures from the front passenger seat. Without the van as shelter, there was no way that we could hold our optics steady in the wind. The camera might have had successful stabilization, but it would have been hard to appreciate the birds in the scope.
