Lake Myvatn & Jokulsargljufur National Park

My parents and Dora offered to watch Aiden for a whole day while they chilled out at the cabins in Husavik, so Andy and I took off with Micah and Becky to explore nearby Lake Myvatn and Jokulsargljufur National Park. Lake Myvatn translates to "Lake of the Midges," midges being small biting flies of some sort that can apparently make a visit to the area uncomfortable at best. We did see some very small flies at Lake Myvatn, but they seemed to be localized and weren't much interested in us, so I guess we lucked out.

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Lake Myvatn

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Lake Myvatn is (according to at least one guidebook we had- others had contradictory statistics) the largest lake in Iceland. It doesn't get much more than about 3 feet deep though, and it's surrounded by marsh in most areas so it's not that great for recreation or beach access. But the ducks LOVE it and this is one of the best spots in the world in terms of breeding duck diversity. And we did see LOTS of ducks. Funny thing about ducks though... the males have basically nothing to do with raising the family after baby ducks are hatched, so we saw 99.9% female ducks. And female ducks are all drab and brown, no matter what the species. So the duck watching was pretty tedious and basically consisted of looking at a whole lot of brown ducks with little brown ducklings and trying to tease out what species we might be looking at.

Lake Myvatn

Near our lunch spot on the lake

The Laxa River, outlet of Lake Myvatn

We had a nice lunch on the shores of Lake Myvatn and drove onward to some active geothermal areas in Jokulsarglijufur National Park. We had fun walking around the bubbling pools with all the other tourists, holding our noses. The air was so stinky and gaseous at certain points that we came close to passing out, or vomiting, or doing something else drastic. It was also really noisy, which you can't tell from these pictures, but it sounded like a thousand giant pressure cookers all steaming artichokes at the same time.

Sulfurous geothermal pits

Micah and Becky enjoying the noise and stink

This was the most tourists we saw in any one place in Iceland!

And then onward to Dettifoss, the most powerful waterfall in Europe! If this natural attraction was in the US, there would be wrought iron fences all around it and signs warning of imminent danger in 40 languages. Here there was nothing. Just a truly massive waterfall that you could walk right up to the edge of.

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Micah approaching the Dettifoss canyon

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Dettifoss. That's a person on the top of the cliff on the left side of the pic.

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Here we are, one step away from ending it all.

Another view.

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Becky read in her guidebook to Iceland that Dettifoss has inspired poems for centuries, so we tried to make some up as we drove on to our next destination. Unfortunately, none of us are poets so the best we could do were morbid haikus something like:

Dettifoss.

One step away from

Instant Death.

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This is as close as Micah wanted to go towards the edge. He is no dummy.

Our next destination was the visitor center at Jokulsargljufur National Park (which Detifoss is in) to ask the park guides where we could go for a nice afternoon hike. After browsing around in the visitor center, which had it's own unique charms (see photo below), the park rangers suggested hiking Eyjan (Island), which is basically a cliff-top island in the middle of two very steep canyons. It was a great view from the top of Eyjan, and we wished we had another whole day in the area to explore the rest of the National Park.

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We weren't sure if this interpretive display was a joke, or just really poor English translation...

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View from the top of Eyjan to the adjacent canyon wall.

Hiking on the top of Eyjan. You can't tell from this picture but we're actually on a giant cliff-sided plateau. Small green orchids were everywhere in this tundra area we're walking through.