From Mývatn, we took two days to drive west to the Snæfellsnes peninsula, stopping for the night at Hotel Laugarbakki about midway. I’ve circled in red on the map, below, our start and finish.

While the scenery is beautiful everywhere in Iceland, we chose to mostly bypass the central north. But if you’re in need of something during your travels in this part of the country, the second largest city in Iceland, Akureyri, is on this stretch of the Ring Road. It’s a port town, accessible to cruise ships.

Approaching the mountains of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, we stopped at Grábrókargígar National Monument. The monument includes three volcanic cones that came into existence about 3,500 years ago when a 60-foot wide, 5-mile long, volcanic fissure opened up. One of the cones, Stóra Grábrók, is accessible via another stairway to heaven.

Here’s a panoramic photo of the interior, taken from the rim of the crater:

The larger, Grábrókarfell crater, is also visible from the rim of Stóra Grábrók, but the third, and smallest, crater is pretty much indistinguishable now.

Sheep pens built in the 1800s out of lava rock, known as the Old Brekka Corral, are visible from the other side of the crater.

We hiked down there to see how the walls were built. It looks like they just grabbed rocks and stacked them atop one another without mortar of any kind. While the sheep haven’t figured out how easy it would be to topple them over, Mother Nature has. Floods have knocked the pens down a couple times, but they’ve been rebuilt.

Surprisingly, the pens were in use until 1992. Like everywhere else in the world, people make do with the resources nature provides.