23 July, 2016

Mum came to visit, and we found a few days to get some hiking in. The weather forecast wasn't particularly spectacular, so we focussed on waterfalls off the beaten track rather than trying to get up any new peaks.

This led us up Brynjudalur, the "other" valley in the bottom of Hvalfjörður, after following some pointers in the 25 walks around Hvalfjörður book I'd picked up a while ago. We drove up to the forest station, which looks like another underused local gem, we were the only car there, on a saturday afternoon, then headed up the river valley.

A quite nice, somewhat moist walk up the valley, on scattered bits of track, generally just admiring the plantlife as we continued upstream. We hoped to get as close as we could to the obvious waterfall at the head of the valley, and then come up and back down via the "unnamed" beautiful waterfalls from the book.

The falls in the head of the valley are marked on the map, but normally unnamed, I found one reference to them being "Skorhagafoss" named after one of the farms down the valley, but that's far from confirmed. We hiked uphill NE, then back around looking around the south/upvalley side of Þórisgil, then over and down the other side of it.

Þórisgil and the waterfalls in it are spectacular. Totally worth the trip alone.

We had a bit of a wander getting back to the car, with some adventures in birch forests and swamp, the usual sort of riverside adventures in Iceland. All in all a good day out, thankfully the rain held off most of the day!