We got a perfect day to visit our last destination in the highlands: Askja Volcano

Askja erupted on the twenty ninth of March 1875 and threw ash across the whole east of Iceland.

The striking thing is that it killed no one, not a single person. What it killed was livestock, and the grass that would have carried the animals through the winter. Ash more than an inch thick covered nearly two thousand square miles of the east, and it poisoned the grazing and ruined the fodder the farms needed. It was not a disaster of the dead but an economic one.

That is most likely what began the great emigration, because in the years after 1875 thousands of Icelanders left for North America. The timing lined up with the opening of the North American plains, where land was going to anyone who would settle it and work it. Most of those who left went to the Canadian prairie, to a settlement on Lake Winnipeg they called New Iceland. The town of Gimli grew from this immigration, and it is still the largest Icelandic community anywhere outside Iceland.

What they found there was treeless plain and hard winters, so they built the way everyone on that plain built, out of the earth itself. They cut the tough prairie sod into blocks and stacked the blocks into walls. We wrote about those sod houses when we crossed the American plains further south, where homesteaders did the same thing for the same reason, and this was the same technique on the same kind of ground a little further north.

The second reason Askja matters to us is science. In the 1960s NASA brought Apollo astronauts here to train. The ground looks so much like the Moon and they came to study the rock before they flew. A monument in Húsavík lists the thirty two astronauts that came.

We left the farm early, and before anything else we called the ranger station to ask about the water level in the Lindaá. That river is the reason you cannot simply drive to Askja, because it has no bridge and after days of rain the level was the whole question. The rangers said it was passable for our rig, so we went.

Here is the number that tells you what the road is like. It is about sixty miles from the end of the pavement to Askja, and it took us close to four hours to cover it.

It is an F-road, which in Iceland means a mountain track that opens only in summer and is legally four-wheel-drive only. For big part of its length it runs through lava, and it is less a road than a line picked through broken rock. The rock is sharp and the track twists tight between the blocks, and in places it was near the limit of what Carioca could do without a scratch or a cut tire. We went slow and read the ground.

We were the slow ones out there and we knew it. Smaller rigs went past us and made it look easy, the short Jeeps and the Tacomas, the smaller campers and the Defenders cruising the same rock we were crawling over. We aired the tires down, and on the sandy stretches that let us keep up with them, but on the lava it did not. Out there the size that makes Carioca a comfortable home holds her back. It is a trade off but the weather and the distance were uncomfortable for us to ride the motorcycle so we crawled our way through.

Herðubreið was with us the whole way. It began at the farm and then ahead of us on F-88, and as the track bent it moved to our right, and then it fell away behind us, so we drove most of the morning with the queen of the mountains turning slowly around the truck.

This is the most delicate ground we have ever driven. Much of it is not lava but bare sand and ash, and there is almost nothing growing on it, not even moss. What holds it together is a thin layer of small stones lying on the surface. The wind long ago blew the fine material away and left the heavier stones behind, and those stones now sit close-packed on top and shelter the sand underneath from the wind. Some of them are old eruption debris, and the fine sand below is largely ash. That stone layer is the whole of the protection. Break it and the wind has the sand again. It is so fragile and so pretty.

That is why stepping off the track does damage at once. A single boot pushes the stones aside and opens the sand beneath, and a tire does far worse and the mark can last for years. Iceland treats off-road driving as a serious offense, and having seen this ground we think the country is entirely right to do so. There is nowhere out here to put a wheel or a foot that does no harm.

Then came the rivers. The Lindaá was the one we had called about, and it was more than a normal car could take. That is why the smaller vehicles have a second way in, a longer and rougher combination of roads (905 and 910) that comes around and avoids the worst of the crossing.

The sky stayed clear all day, and after the rain that had kept us in camp that alone made the drive feel like a gift. Some say the combination of 905 and 910 cut through prettier landscape but F-88 was extremely beautiful to us.

Along the road was the place we met the most rigs like our own. We had crossed paths with a few here and there across Iceland, the big European overlanding trucks built to live in and travel far, the same idea as Carioca in a dozen different shapes. But nowhere had we seen so many as here on the way to Askja. We passed two on the track, a few more were near the caldera, and one last truck arrived just as we were leaving. It is a long way to come to find the most of your own kind at the end of one of the hardest road on the list.

Then Askja itself.

Askja is not a mountain you climb, it is a caldera, which is what you get when a volcano empties the magma chamber beneath it and the ground on top falls into the space left behind. The mountains that ring it, the Dyngjufjöll, are not separate peaks standing around a volcano. They are the volcano, they are the rim of it, and the whole floor you look across is the collapsed inside.

The scale is hard to take in from the ground. The outer caldera covers about nineteen square miles and the main caldera inside it is about five miles across, so this is a big one by any measure.

You do not drive into the caldera itself. The road ends at a parking area with a small ranger station on it, and from there you walk. There are two trails, and we took the smaller one, about five kilometers round trip. It starts at the parking area and climbs the rim on its lowest side, which is the one place the wall has worn down enough to cross on foot. From the top it runs along the inner edge. The whole way is bare rock and ash, marked by posts, and you keep to the line for the same reason you keep the truck to the track. Then the ground opens and the two craters are in front of you, the wide dark lake and the small pale one beside it.

The big one is Öskjuvatn, dark and deep and still. It formed after the 1875 eruption when that part of the floor collapsed and slowly filled with water, and it is the second deepest lake in Iceland at about seven hundred and twenty feet. Beside it is a small separate crater called Víti, which means Hell, and it holds warm milky-blue water.

This is where we kept catching ourselves. People come and look at the blue water in Víti and the black water in Öskjuvatn and photograph both, and both are worth photographing, but the beauty pulls your eye away from what you are standing on. That lake is not a lake in a valley, it is water sitting in a hole where a mountain fell into itself. The peaks all around are not scenery, they are the torn edge of the volcano, and you are standing inside the crater. Once you see it that way you cannot unsee it, and the whole bowl changes in front of you.

We stayed a long while, and then we started the long drive out. By the time we came back around to Herðubreið the weather had turned on it, and the mountain that had watched us in clear light all morning now stood in its own rain, the cloud low on its flat top while we drove out from under it.

We crossed the Lindaá again and came back to the farm in the evening, tired and quiet and glad we had waited for the day we got.

What a day.