For most of the twentieth century, Kerlingarfjöll was a summer ski resort. Iceland's national ski school ran courses on the Snækollur snowfields into the 1990s, until the glaciers thinned and the lifts came down.
What replaced them is a walking landscape, and the shift explains why a kerlingarfjöll hiking day tour from reykjavík now exists at all.
The range sits at the western edge of the Kjölur route, roughly halfway between Langjökull and Hofsjökull. It is a rhyolite massif, not a volcano in the familiar cone sense, formed by subglacial eruptions beneath an ice sheet that no longer exists. Rhyolite weathers into ochre, rust, sulphur yellow and pale green. Peaks rise past 1,400 metres. Snækollur, the highest, holds snow through August in most years.
Beneath the ridges lies Hveradalir, one of the largest high-temperature geothermal fields in the country. Fumaroles vent at boiling point. Mud pools work continuously. The ground is warm enough in places that snow will not settle on it, which produces the striped contrast that photographs so relentlessly: white drift beside bare orange clay. Icelandic folklore gave the range its name — kerling, an old woman, for a troll said to have been petrified by daylight in the pass.
Access remained the constraint. The F347 is a mountain road, unpaved, closed for much of the year, with river fords that disqualify ordinary rental cars. That is the practical argument for guided kerlingarfjöll hiking day tour from reykjavík tours: the vehicle, not the trail, is the barrier. Highland Base, the year-round facility at the road's end, opened its rebuilt hotel and geothermal bathing complex in 2022, and remains the only serviced hub for hundreds of square kilometres.
The nature reserve itself charges 0 ISK; fees apply only for specific facilities and parking. Facilities operate 07:30–22:00 daily. The address is simply Highland Base, F347, Kerlingarfjöll, Iceland — no street number, because there is no street.
What makes the massif matter in 2026 is scarcity. Iceland's coastal ring is thoroughly travelled. The interior is not. Kerlingarfjöll offers a highland landscape reachable and returnable within a single day from the capital, which almost nothing else in the Icelandic interior does. A kerlingarfjöll hiking day tour from reykjavík therefore compresses an expedition-scale environment into a schedule that ordinary travellers can hold.
12 hr
