The road that runs the western tip of the peninsula is not the same road as Route 54. It is narrower, older in character, and the landscape it crosses has been shaped by forces that the rest of the drive only gestured toward.

Route 574 leaves the north shore and angles southwest toward the tip of the peninsula. The change is immediate. The farmland that runs intermittently along the north coast disappears within a few kilometers and the terrain shifts to lava plain, the surface broken and uneven, the road cutting through it rather than around it. The flows here are from multiple eruption periods overlaid on each other, and where the road cuts through a rise you can see the distinct layers, each with its own texture and color, the older flows darker and more fully colonized by moss, the younger ones showing bare rock in places where nothing has established yet.

Near Arnarstapi we turned left onto Route 575, a dirt track that heads north directly toward the glacier. The pavement ended immediately and did not return. The surface was rough from the start, loose gravel over lava rubble with sections of exposed rock where the road had simply given up pretending to be a road and become a track across the terrain. Carioca moved carefully, the truck pitching slowly over the larger rocks and finding its line through the looser sections. There was no other traffic. There was nothing up here that would bring traffic except the glacier itself.

As we gained elevation the vegetation thinned progressively and in distinct stages. The deep moss of the lower peninsula gave way first to shorter ground cover, then to lichen on exposed surfaces, then to bare rock where nothing had established yet or where the wind had prevented anything from trying. The lava fields up here are more recent than those below and less colonized, the individual flows still readable as separate events, each with its own surface texture and color, the darker older material underneath showing only where erosion or road cutting had exposed it. The landscape stopped feeling like a coast and started feeling like something higher and more exposed, the horizon dropping on all sides and the sky taking up more of the view than the land.

The glacier was not yet visible but its presence altered the cloud above the summit in a way that is hard to describe precisely: a thickening and flattening of the cloud base that suggests something cold and massive underneath it. Snæfellsjökull sits atop a stratovolcano that last erupted around 1,800 years ago, and the ice cap covers roughly 11 square miles of the summit. The glacier has been retreating measurably for decades. Early photographs from the 19th century show it reaching several hundred feet lower on the flanks than it does now.

Jules Verne had never been to Iceland when he placed the entrance to the center of the Earth here in 1864. He worked from a published account by a French geographer named Charles Sainte-Claire Deville, who had visited Iceland in 1847 and described the glacier and the volcano beneath it in terms that clearly caught Verne’s attention. Snæfellsjökull appears in the novel as a site of passage, the place where Professor Lidenbrock and his party descend into the earth through a volcanic crater. Verne got the isolation right, and the quality of light, and the sense of the glacier as a threshold rather than simply an obstacle.

The road surface on the final approach to the car park deteriorated further, sections where the underlying lava had pushed through the gravel and the truck moved at walking speed across the exposed rock. Carioca handled it without complaint, though the angles were enough that anything not secured was on the floor by the time we reached a section that was closed due to the very deteriorating conditions.