AEgissufoss

AEgissufoss (Ægissufoss; I think it’s pronounced “AY-jih-szuh-foss”) was a wide river-type waterfall that I found interesting because I was able to photograph it with Mt Hekla in the background. Mt Hekla was said to be one of the more active volcano (at least it was said to still be heaving as of our July 2007 visit) though it wasn’t erupting during our visit. From the car park (see directions below), it was a short walk getting right to the bank of the Ytri-Rangá River for the view you see at the top of this page.

Apparently, we were lucky to even see Mt Hekla on our visit because I understand it’s usually clouded over. But the weather did look like it was changing (for better or worse, we couldn’t tell at the time) as the winds were quite fierce! If you play the video we’ve linked onto this page, you can definitely hear how fierce the winds were!

In trying to learn the meaning of the name of this falls, the closest word I could find in my Icelandic dictionary was the word “ægilegur”, which was an adjective meaning “awful” or “terrible.” Given the many forms that nouns and adjectives can take in the Icelandic language (something known as “declensions” and/or “cases”, which is a concept that I found very hard to grasp without using the language consistently), I’m not sure if this was the correct word being applied to the waterfall.

Route to this Waterfall

From the saga town of Hvolsvöllur (KHVOHLS-vut-lur”), we drove west about 14km on the Ring Road (Route 1). We then took a short detour off the Ring Road along Route 25 (to our left just past the bridge). About 3km on this detour, there was a signed turnoff on our left that led us to the car park for the falls.

Hvolsvöllur was 100km (under 90 minutes drive) southeast of Reykjavík and 50km (45 minutes) southeast of Selfoss.