Today we moved from Hveravellir to Kerlingarfjöll, the next stop south on the Kjölur route. It is not a long drive, about an hour and a half, but it takes you into the gap between the two big glaciers. Kerlingarfjöll was the thing we had come to this road to see. Today we got a clear day to visit it.

We broke camp at Hveravellir in the morning and drove south on Route 35 toward Kerlingarfjöll and the Highland Base there. There is a nice hotel, a campground and a small airstrip so we knew this would be not a remote site as many other places in the highlands.

The sky was clear the whole way, which does not happen often in the highlands, and it opened the country up in every direction. The glaciers stood out one after another. Langjökull to the west, Hofsjökull to the east, and Vatnajökull as a white line far to the southeast. On the west side stood two big mountains, the kind of old worn peaks that were probably volcanoes once, long dead now.

Kerlingarfjöll is a volcanic mountain range, and it is often called one of the finest places in the highlands and this explains the hotel and the airstrip. It is not crowded since the access is through F347 and rental cars are explicitly forbidden of travelling on F roads. So the group of visitors were a mix of other overlanders in big and small rigs, Icelanders on their own campers and small packs of tourists that are brought in in super jeeps to the hotel.

The rock is rhyolite, which is what gives the mountains their rust-red colour, and this is the second largest rhyolite area in Iceland after Torfajökull. Most of the volcanic activity here happened under ice, long ago. Hot springs run through the range and have stained the ground around them yellow, red, and green. The highest peak is 1,477 metres. The name comes from a troll woman, Kerling, a pillar of rock about 25 metres tall that gave the whole range its name.

We reached Kerlingarfjöll around noon, had lunch, and then set out on a long hike.

The trail runs 2.5 miles from the camp to the top of the circuit, loops another 2.5 miles around the mountain, and comes back 1.5 miles to camp, 6.5 miles in total. It took us five and a half hours.

The switchbacks at the start get you up the first climb, and they are steep, but they are not the hard part. The hard part is the length and ruggedness of it and the several uphill sections that are mostly slanted, not flat and covered in sand and gravel. This is a demanding trail.

The reward is the view, and it grows the whole way. Early on we looked down over the valley with a glacier on either side of it. As we climbed, more of the country came into view, and the big peak beside Kerlingarfjöll drew closer with every turn.

Then the trail came over a rise, and the full view opened at once. We stopped and looked at it for a while before going on though the loop trail.

We got back to camp in the late afternoon, tired, and glad we had gone up. We knew we were lucky to visit such beautiful place with perfect weather conditions.