From the Seal Center we drove east on the Ring Road toward Blönduós, turning off onto Route 715 after about 40 minutes. The canyon sits just off the main road in the Víðidalur valley, with a signed car park and the rim reachable on foot in under two minutes. The approach gives no indication of what is there — flat farmland, a gravel track, unremarkable in every direction — and then you step up to the edge.

The canyon is roughly 0.6 miles long and drops 130 to 165 feet into basalt column walls — the same hexagonal fractured rock produced by slow lava cooling that appears throughout Iceland, here exposed vertically by the cutting action of the Víðidalsá river over thousands of years. The river drops through the gorge in three named waterfalls collectively called Kolufossar: Efrifoss, Kolufoss, and Neðri-Kolufoss, each falling into pools at the base of the dark walls. A 1.5 mile rim trail follows the canyon with two observation platforms along the route.

The Víðidalsá is one of Iceland’s significant salmon rivers, and Kolufossar marks the point where the run ends — the waterfalls are too high for salmon to pass, making this the effective upstream limit of the migration on this river.

The folklore attached to the canyon centres on the giantess Kola, who gave her name to the canyon, the falls, and the farm above. She was said to catch salmon from the river by hand at night and cook them in a nearby hot spring. A natural ledge on the western canyon wall is called Kolurúm — Kola’s bed — and a hill in the hayfield above marks where she and her treasure are said to be buried.