The troll looms at the top of the pass, a black obelisk of rhyolite, obsidian, silica and basalt that gives this mountain range in Iceland’s central highlands its name. Kerling means both basaltic columns and, in Icelandic slang, it’s a rude word meaning ‘old lady’ or ‘bitch’. After more than a marathon of slogging across crumbling cols, glacial rivers, snowfields and talus slopes, I climb up a valley wall and cross paths with the ogress. Her dark trunk rises from the scree, 25 metres of volcanic tuff pillar shaped like an empty gown, its folds frozen in stone, seeming to tug the cloud base a little lower. Legend has it that the troll was petrified when caught walking during daybreak.
Runners trudge up the loose trail next to her. One man sinks to the ground, head in his hands, unzipped. Cramps knife through my own legs and, not for the first time today, I fight back the urge to vomit. The Kerlingarfjöll Ultramarathon is no walk in the park, and the stone crone at its centre is as merciless as she is monumental. The race organiser's words of warning ring true: “People lose the will to live here.”
Runners at Kerlingarfjöll Ultramarathon
The Kerling isn’t the only thing that’s black. The day before, on the way to Heathrow, my four-year-old gifts me a shiner with a precision headbutt, bursting a blood vessel and lending me the appearance of the village drunk. In Reykjavík my bag does its usual trick and fails to appear. It’s become such a theme that I almost feel lazy mentioning it. We drive out of Keflavik under a sulphur dioxide cloud, past an active volcano belching magma and long tables of black igneous rubble, which all feel very alien, but not as jarring as the fluorescent lights of the Smáralind shopping mall, where my driver Svenni Sveinsson from Southcoast Adventure – a big, quickwitted adventure guide in his late twenties – cracks jokes about my retail habits as I attempt to quickly provision myself for the mountain race I’m running the next day. “I’m going to have to drag you out of here, aren’t I?” he says. It feels a bit like back-to-school shopping with my father as a tween, when he would call me Earl for no apparent reason.
“Many a man becomes brave in dire straits, though they’re not at all brave the rest of the time.” The Saga of The People of Eyri
Replacement kit in hand, we hoist ourselves up over the oversized 38-inch tyres of Sveinsson’s Jeep Wrangler Rubicon and point the bonnet toward the island’s empty interior, passing herds of wild horses, hardy sheep and dark rift valleys felted with sphagnum and reindeer moss. When I tell him that I’d like to get there in time to eat, he accelerates. “It usually takes four hours, but I’ll be able to get you there in three.” We stop at the iconic waterfall Gullfoss, not to sightsee but to deflate the tyres in the Jeep for the onward journey, one of the most rugged stretches of road in Iceland.
Highland Base buggy
The route follows the mountain road F35 (Kjölur), an unpaved track that cuts across Iceland between two enormous glaciers – Langjökull and Hofsjökull – into the central highlands. From Gullfoss, it’s about 70km to the Kerlingarfjöll turnoff, where we branch onto F347 for the final push into the mountains, passing steaming geothermal valleys and stubborn snow. Rain falls in sheets and the late July air is just north of freezing when we roll into Highland Base, the hotel hosting the Kerlingarfjöll Ultramarathon. “Three hours on the dot,” notes Sveinsson with a hint of satisfaction, as we hug goodbye.
I have just enough time to carb-load on pasta ahead of the race briefing, given by Helga María Heiðarsdóttir, the race organiser, a long-time mountain runner and ski touring guide. Two hazel plaits descend from her baseball cap as she delivers her presentation from a screen in the upstairs lounge, backlit by arctic evening light streaming through broad bay windows. “This is not going to be an easy race,” she says, before walking us through the course. The 60km route packs in over 2,100 metres of vertical gain as it circumnavigates Kerlingarfjöll, an ancient tuya volcano formed when magma erupted beneath a glacial ice sheet during the last Ice Age, now shaped into colourful rhyolite mountains cut by geothermal valleys and steaming vents. “Stay on the trail; if you go maybe one metre off it, you could step into boiling water,” she advises, “On the other hand, you’re not going to be dry on this race. I’m sorry.”
At 8am, Eurovision beats bounce off the hills and we jog across a wooden bridge, then climb steps to Ásgarðshryggur. I fall in behind Andrea Kolbeinsdóttir – though I don’t yet know she’s one of Iceland’s best runners – and make the cardinal error of matching her early pace. The trail climbs into the Hveradalir geothermal area, where steaming pots and fumaroles skunk the air with sulphur, and the clay slides and clings underfoot. Many runners fall and come away streaked with diarrhoea-hued mud. I stay upright but cook my quads early, a bill that’s inevitably paid later on.
Kerlingarfjöll Ultramarathon start-line
The first aid station flashes past at six kilometres. Kolbeinsdóttir is long gone. I eat a banana and look back at a valley in a colour palette of red, pink and burnt sienna, beautiful even in murky conditions. North toward Ásgarðsgljúfur the grade eases and I let my legs freewheel longer than is wise. After a short straight on the Kjölur road we hit the first river. The current is spiteful, the rocks slick as soap, the water glacial-sharp. Later, when feet are swollen and the mind dull, the crossings will feel anaesthetic.
The terrain is almost never a trail, with haphazard rockfields, endless cambers and ankle-trapping boulders. Still, I run too fast. The second aid station appears near Loðmundur at 15 kilometres, before the course winds into small canyons and on to Kisubotnaskáli. Without my trekking poles, somewhere in airline limbo, the loamy volcanic soil, loose scree and steeply pitched scrambles continue to extract a tax on my thighs. Pockets of beauty punctuate the grind: seemingly bottomless chasms; neon-green moss beaded with ocular-looking dewdrops; springwater spigoting from columnar basalt like something gothic and extraterrestrial.
The course climbs Kisugljúfur canyon, passes under Draugafell and north of Grákollur, before continuing into Kerlingargljúfur and across the Kerlingará river. My legs seize with cramps on the steep ascent that follows. I drop into that narrow, airless headspace – the pain cave – and am overtaken again and again. At Sléttaskarð the path tilts into Hverabotn and funnels up a ravine to the Kerling herself, the 25-metre volcanic pillar that gives the mountains their name. Heiðarsdóttir was right: I’ve lost the will to live. Yet it returns slowly, like groping for a rail in bad weather. The final kilometres take us around Skeljafell mountain to cross Tindabikkja peak. Somewhere in this stretch, I hear what I think is an emergency whistle from another runner, only to realise it is a lone ptarmigan calling to its mate, and suddenly desperately miss my wife and daughter. I whimper like an old man traversing the rocky Ásgarðsöldur before descending Ásgarðshryggur back to the finish. After eight and a half hours of running, I’m the 12th person out of 29 to stagger across the Ásgarðsá bridge below the hotel. Not my best day, but a clean entry in the ledger: sixty kilometres of hard mountain running in a truly raw and remote place. There’s always next time.
Kerlingarfjöll Ultramarathon runners
The next morning, I finally get an opportunity to poke around Highland Base. First stop is the geothermal hot springs, where I macerate my battered legs in fragrant water while mist rises into the cold air above. Between this and the plunge pool, some of the delayed onset muscle soreness evaporates. The hotel itself has become a hub for exploring the Kerlingarfjöll area, with comfortable rooms and dorms, a cosy bar and restaurant serving hearty yet refined Icelandic food, and panoramic windows that frame the multicoloured mountains, often lashed by extreme weather events.
After a restorative lunch of pan-fried local arctic char with sautéed potatoes and fennel and a golden pint of Gull lager, I chat over coffee with head guide Ruben Perez Morena, a brawny mountaineer transplant from the Spanish Pyrenees, about the landscape. “If you go back in time, this would have been the edge of the glacier, with 800 metres of ice above us.
“One man only tells half a tale, and more people prefer the worse side of a story which has two versions.” The Saga of Grettir the Strong
That’s why many of the mountains here end in a plateau, even though they’re so high,” he explains. “When volcanic eruptions pushed through, the lava melted cavities under the ice. Once it broke the glacier, the lava spread out flat rather than forming cones.” I ask him about the Kerling. “The rest of the mountain eroded away, but the chimney – the vent – is strong enough to remain standing.” I ask him whether he’s encountered an actual troll. He smiles. “Definitely. Days like today, when it’s foggy, are perfect. You suddenly see shapes in the rocks; it can feel like someone is watching you from the hills. That makes it easy to understand all the folklore here. If you go back in time, this country must have seemed incredibly mystical – volcanoes, lava, earthquakes, glaciers, the northern lights – and without science, people explained it with legends and stories.”
Highland Base baths
Miro Tecilazic, my e-MTB guide, joins us. “Þetta reddast,” he says, “It’s a famous Icelandic saying which means ‘it will be fine’.” There’s a type of fatalism here in the face of the titanic natural forces of the earth, wind and ocean. I’ve encountered the same spirit elsewhere – my wife’s Javanese family’s nrimo and ikhlas, a gentle hati-hati for the road ahead; my Japanese stepmother’s shōganai, it can’t be helped; Ireland’s cheerful ‘it’ll be grand’. “So, shall we go find the Holy Grail?” I look at Tecilazic quizzically. “No, I’m serious,” he says.
“I’ll look after my building and you worry about your journey.” The Tale of Sarcastic Halli
We pick up full-suspension e-bikes and set off along a potholed track. The gentle assist doesn’t cancel the climbs so much as lower the volume on their complaints, and a place that demanded everything yesterday becomes, if not friendly, then at least willing to be visited. Citadels of black rock loom over broad braided rivers. Outside trolls and Hidden People, Kerlingarfjöll has its share of outlaws – the celebrated 18th-century bandits Eyvindur and Halla boiled stolen sheep in hot pools and lasted twenty winters here – and, in more recent decades, its share of seekers.
Italian explorer and numerologist Giancarlo Gianazza is not your average treasure hunter. The Italian mathematician spent more than a decade tramping through the Icelandic highlands, convinced that Dante’s Divine Comedy was hiding a code. By pulling out numerical patterns from the verses and Renaissance paintings (the background of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa resembles the central highlands), he plotted them as coordinates that led him to Kjölur and Kerlingarfjöll. The quest, captured in the documentary Finding Thule, was nothing if not committed: Gianazza and his crew braved foul weather and clouds of flies in search of the Holy Grail, which he believes may lie in a secret Templar chamber beneath the mountains. Miro Tecilazic is leading me to his latest excavation site.
Highland Base interior
We crest a rise above a gravel plain as a Hilux noses into view, stones crunching under its tyres. Þórey leans out of the window, a spill of red curls framing her blue eyes and freckles. She is a ranger here – the person you meet when rules are broken and the first person you look for when the weather comes in wrong. “I’ve been cleaning up your mess all morning,” she says with a smile. “The trail through Hveradalir was carved up.” She tells us about an Englishman named David Heath who arrived years ago with dreams of being burned alive and a conviction he was tied by spirit to the Cathars. His hunches sent Gianazza to new ground; a survey later found a void under a hill. Iceland does this: it entertains the odd and the earnest with the same straight face and lets the weather judge.
To reach the hill, we drop some rather gnarly off-road, weaving in and out of boulders that would shred suspension on the bikes, then proceed on foot down a steep face where a little creek runs, hemmed in by bushes heavy with ripe crowberries. The summit is a neat nipple of a knoll that looks across a river to nothing in particular. There is almost no sign of excavation – only a single piece of milled pine poking from the turf at the crown. It feels underwhelming to me and, I suspect, anything but to Gianazza.
Stories and legend run through Icelandic culture like nowhere else. From the medieval era, Icelanders were unique among the Norse in committing their sagas to writing, preserving the exploits of their ancestors for centuries to come. Even today, Norwegians often look back to these Icelandic texts to rediscover their own Viking past. The tradition lives on: Iceland has more writers per capita than any other country, and books are still the most common of Christmas gifts. And then, of course, there are Iceland’s fairy tales… roads here are sometimes routed according to the whims of the Hidden People.
As I stand on the hill, black-eyed and battered, I think of the sagas that frame so much of this land. Men and women once carved their stories into vellum. Now, people visit from all across the planet to carve them into aching legs and muddy clothing. Either way, the lesson is the same: wisdom is born of suffering, endurance comes in the face of hardship, and the story is always worth telling when the struggle is over. As the mist gathers, the Kerling becomes a silhouette, a sketchy line. The old texts prized witness as much as heroics: someone to name the ridges, count the crossings, admit the stumbles. You don’t slay anything in Iceland; you just add a paragraph.
Rooms at the Highland Base Hotel start from £326 per night; highlandbase.is
