I listened to the rain pattering on my tent when I went to sleep, and it was still raining when I woke up. Rain continued at at varying intensities for much of the day. Hiking paths S3 and S4, as designated by the National Park authority, attracted me due to the views they should provide down onto the Skaftafellsjökull and Morsárjökull glaciers as I made my way up to and down from the peak of Kristínartindar. Unfortunately mist and clouds obscured the hoped for sights. As I climbed the 1000 metre ascent there were tantalising views of the Skaftafellsjökull through the mist. Crevases at the front and edge of the glacier were visible as was the black line of a medial moraine formed from debris collected where two glaciers joined higher up the valley. I saw these by looking down over cliffs and scree through towers of rock lower down the mountain.
The path had started with a pleasant walk through small birch trees, which was replaced by grassland higher up and then heather heath where a Ptarmigan eyed me, beneath its orange eyebrow as it slowly walked away. Climbing further I reached high, steep slopes of dark rock and moss, brightened by some miniature flowers. I stayed once off the path onto loose scree and struggled on unpleasantly sliding rock as I tried to regain the path, did not like to think of the ground dropping away below me into some vertical cliff. Lower down there had been plenty of marker posts, their yellow tips pointing the way. Higher up the posts were very few, but those few were essential to show how to navigate through steep gradients among the rock outcrops and loose stone. At the very top there was a pillar with a box (empty) marked "visitor's book" and a few solar panels, serving what I could not make out.
Near the bottom of my descent back to camp I diverted via the Svartifoss waterfall where water flows over columnar basalt in a suitably picturesque manner. Some remnants of 19th century farms were nearby with helpful information boards. Farming in the area had suffered from volcanic activity, not only the ash produced but also floods caused by ice being melted by the volcanoes erupting under the nearby ice cap. Such floods buried the once extensive grassland and led to people moving their farms up the hillside.
On my return to camp I joined a walk by one of the National Park Rangers. He took me to a tiny hydroelectric power station built in 1925 and in use until 1973. A small hut housed the turbine and generator (a propeller type turbine and a DC generator by the look of it, made in Odense, Denmark). As the hut was roofed with turf it blended in with the valley so as to be almost invisible. It was built with local materials such as driftwood as much as possible to save costs, maybe this was why the pipe up the valley side which supplied the water was made of wood (!) bound together by bent tie rods. Water came from a concrete dam higher up the stream, now broken in pieces, which directed flow into a concrete channel covered with timber, that in turn fed the top of the pipe into the hydroelectric plant.
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