We woke at Básar to another clear morning. Básar is one of the huts and campgrounds in Þórsmörk, tucked in the woods on the south side of the valley, in the area called Goðaland. It is a green, sheltered spot, birch scrub and low trees all around, which is a rare thing in the highlands where most of the ground is bare rock and moss. The huts sit among the trees with the mountains rising straight up behind them and the river out in front.

The crowd here was mostly locals, Icelanders who had driven in with their own trucks and campers and tents for the weekend. There were very few overlanders like us. The tourists came later in the day, brought in on the super jeeps that run the tours. After breakfast we set out for Valahnúkur, which meant first getting across the Krossá.

To get to the trail we crossed the Krossá on the footbridge, the same river we had decided not to drive through the day before. On foot, over the bridge, it is nothing. In the truck it is one of the most dangerous crossings in Iceland.

Valahnúkur is not a long hike, but it is steep. It climbs about three hundred metres to a summit of four hundred and fifty-eight metres, in a loop of around four kilometres, done in about ninety minutes. It is the best short climb in Þórsmörk for one reason: the view from the top runs a full circle, and Þórsmörk is ringed by glaciers.

From up there you can see all three of the glaciers that circle the valley, and every one of them sits on a volcano. Eyjafjallajökull to the south, the one we had watched clear the day before, whose 2010 eruption shut down the skies over Europe. Mýrdalsjökull to the east, the icecap that covers Katla, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the country. And Tindfjallajökull to the north, a glacier over a dormant volcano with a wide old caldera, quiet now for thousands of years. So from this one summit you are looking at ice, and at the volcanoes buried under it. Between them the valley spreads out below, green and wooded, the braided grey Krossá running through it, and the deep canyons cut into the hills. Þórsmörk sits in a pocket ringed by ice on three sides, and from Valahnúkur you see the whole arrangement at once. There is nowhere else in the highlands quite like it.

Off to the north there was a patch of bright, streaked rhyolite that puzzled us, because it looked just like Landmannalaugar, the same reds and oranges and greens in the rock. For a moment we thought that is what we were seeing. Then we looked past it and realized the real Landmannalaugar was much further off, its coloured mountains a pale band on the far horizon, a two-day walk away over the highland. What was close was a smaller stretch of the same kind of coloured rock, the rhyolite country that runs through this whole region, of which Landmannalaugar is only the most famous piece.

Þórsmörk is a hub for hikers, with several long trails running out from it. One heads down the Skógá valley to the coast, past its long chain of waterfalls. Another runs north across the highlands to Landmannalaugar, where we had just been. A few days back, hiking up the Skógá valley, we had watched hikers with heavy packs heading up and over toward Þórsmörk, and this is where they were walking to. Put the trails together and you have a real multi-day trek, days on foot from the coast across the highlands, camping along the way.

After the hike we came down, had lunch, and packed up to leave. The drive out crossed the same many rivers as the way in, but backwards, so the hardest fords came first this time, right at the start, before we had settled into it. We aired the tires down for the crossings and aired them back up once we hit the pavement.

One thing did not survive the day. The fog lights brackets on the truck have given out after so many days of Iceland’s F roads, all that washboard and rock shaking them apart. So tomorrow’s job is to find a machine shop and get them sorted before we carry on.