The hike is not difficult, but this place deserve some additional info to be fully enjoyed This area is famous for some long hikes that reach Porsmork in 4/5 days, but we only describe an half day trail to the main attraction: the Brennisteinsalda colored walls.

If you just want to follow our path, there is no need to sleep here in the refuge (a bit expensive, about 80 euros per person) nor in the camping area that is cold, on a damp ground, with no kitchen, hot shower fare is 5 euros, expensive shop (7 euros a can of beer) and so on.

You can just get there with your 4WD car, park it before the river and walk to the starting point. There are also many expensive tourist bus leading people here so that they can hike and come back.

The main attractions is the Brennisteinsalda and its wonderfully colored slopes. The easiest path to reach them is to walk in reverse direction our trail without rising on top of the volcano so that it will not be necessary to rise on top of the volcano as we did.

We started behind of the main refuge; a thermal stream flows here, this nice birds seems to enjoy the warm water. From the first rise is possible to look at the clearing: tourist and wardens refuges, baths and the tents on the ground. A totally inhospitable area, suitable only to expert and equipped campers.

The incredible landscape appears, the colored volcano slopes can already be seen. But there is much more here to see: a black, glass-like obsidian lava flow, small ice melting lakes, grazing sheeps on a stream crossed grass field. But in a few hundreds meters, grass is replaced by the white volcanic ash brought here by streams.

Rising on the volcano we can have a global vision of the landscape:: sand, grass and lava all in the same valley. On the rising path we can look at the colorful volcanoes slopes, we are not so high in altitude but there is snow on the ground, it'a a bit cold so we take advantage of the hot ground to warm a bit our hands!

The volcano is still active, on the lower side there are many smoking fumaroles. Here we finally get in front of the colors of Brennisteinsalda. If we rotate the pictures, it seems to look at a colorful carpet or at a flower fiedl, but we are in front of this volcano wondering what kind of mysterious event could have created this rainbow colored slope.

After the rainbow slope we reach the main fumarola. Just the time to get some picture before we close to loop walking along a river flowing under a green hill! In the picture you can barely note it but we assure the mountain is dark green in this area.

7 km and just 300 meter uphill difference in height and we are back to the camp site on the opposite side.