I am
spending a couple of days in the North on the peninsula Skagi. My parents are
renting a summer house in the little fishing village Skagaströnd. (A small but
quite interesting place, by the way, I think I will honour it its own blog
entry a bit later.)
Behind Skagaströnd
rises the beautiful Mt. Spákonufell into the sky. With its nearly 650 m it is
not a huge mountain though it seems high because it is so close to the coast
line. On top of it is a big plateau and I was excited to hike up there. So
today I went up.
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| Mt. Spákonufell |
Spákonufell
can be translated as the “Mountain of the Prophecy Woman”. One of the first “land
takers” at Skagaströnd was woman Þórðís. It was said that she was able to see the future and that she hid a
treasure on her mountain and only a woman which is not baptized or member of
any other religion would be able to find it. No chance for me then ...
Though the walls
of the plateau on top are rather steep it was easy to hike up the mountain. We
took a break at Álfasteinn, the Elve’s Stone. There I was changing hiking fellow because my parents decided to
go back and I met an Icelandic woman who was hiking up and decided to join her.
And it turned out that I am good enough in Icelandic now to communicate with
anyone in Icelandic!
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| Chilling on Álfarsteinn (Elve's Stone). I don't know if the inhabiting elves were happy though that I was sitting on their stone ... |
That was fun because she, Anna Margret, told me
she would be hiking guide for a group of visitors coming next week and she was practicing
the way up the mountain. She also told me that it was possible to see six “sýslur”
(counties) from the plateau, all the way to Borgarfjarðarsýsla where I live.
The path
was mostly easy to walk and we got a nice view on valley Leynidalir and on the
sea both West and East of the peninsula. More and more mountains occurred in
our view the higher we went, old snowfields from last winter and small streams
far down in the valleys.
Blueberries
and crowberries were growing all along the mountain slopes, mostly not mellow
yet, though, anyway, we were stopping every few minutes to stuff ourselves with
the first mellow berries we found. (Anna Margret’s GPS device told us later
that we were walking for two hours and stopping for 1.5 hours eating berries …)
The last
few metres to the plateau we had to walk on a little ridge, and it was both
beautiful and scary to look down the steep hills at both sides.
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| The mountain ridge with Skagafjörður in the background. |
The plateau
itself was perfectly flat on top and completely overgrown by fluffy white
mosses. The view was great: mountains and sea and mountains and sea … The world
is somehow so different on mountain tops, it is almost not possible to see any
valleys in the distance and the world seems to consist of many many mountains …
No place on
Iceland is without a guest book, no matter if it’s on a farm or the top of a
glacier … The guest book of Spákonufell was situated in a treasure chest on a
stone pile on the plateau and it contained the book, a colourful kite, a pile
of retro postcards and a stone with a rune symbol …
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| Anna Margret opening the treasure chest. |
So what can
I say about hiking up Mt. Spákonufell? It’s a rather easy hike even though the
path is steep in some parts. It takes about one and a half hours to walk it up
though not in the end of the summer when the berries mellow and one stops every
few minutes to eat them … ;) It’s fun to walk on the flat mossy plateau and the
view is wonderful. Highly recommended!
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| Me on the plateau. |
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