Today we hiked up the Skógá valley, following the river past waterfall after waterfall. It is one of the great hikes of the south, and you can do as little or as much of it as you like. We did a piece of it.

It starts at Skógafoss. The river Skógá comes off the cliff in a single straight drop of about sixty metres, wide and heavy. The parking lot was full. This is right off Highway 1, one of the most visited falls in the country, and at the bottom of it there were lots of visitors.

But the crowd thins as you go, in stages. The first thinning is the staircase. There are around five hundred steps up the side of the fall to a viewing platform at the top, steep and unbroken, some people take one look and stay at the bottom. Climb it and there are fewer tourists.

Then you reach a gate, and beyond the gate the trail turns into the real hike, up the valley alongside the river, and that is where most of the sightseeing tourists drop away. Once we were through the gate and climbing, the crowd was behind us.

And then it is just the river and the falls. The Skógá comes down the valley in a long chain of waterfalls, one after another, twenty-six of them along the way, and the path follows the water up past all of them. Some are tall and thin, some are broad, some come down in steps, and the valley keeps opening as you climb. We walked about four miles up. By the end there were only a handful of hikers ahead of us or behind, and the noise of the parking lot was long gone.

The people we did meet up there were carrying heavy packs, coming and going, and that is because this trail does not stop. It keeps going, over the pass called Fimmvörðuháls, between two glaciers, and down into Þórsmörk on the far side, about fifteen miles one way. The hikers with the big packs were doing the long thing, camping along the way, crossing the mountains on foot. We were doing a morning of it, and turned back when it felt right. That is the good thing about this valley. You can take four miles of it or fifteen, and every mile of it is gorgeous.