Falljökull glacier hike tours all climb the same icefall below Öræfajökull, roped up behind a certified glacier guide. Pick the level that suits your legs and check dates with free cancellation.
Updated July 2026
Quick answer
Three guided tours walk Falljökull, and all three leave from the Tröll Expeditions base at Skaftafell. The easy hike costs $105 for 3 hours, with about 90 minutes on the ice. The advanced hike costs $162 for 5 hours and roughly 3 hours of walking on the glacier. The ice climb costs $251. Crampons, helmet, harness and ice axe come with every ticket.
Key takeaways
top rated The Hike That Gets You Highest
Five hours from the Skaftafell meeting point, with about three of them on Falljökull itself, climbing far enough up the icefall for the crevasse field and the views back over the national park. Groups are limited to ten and the minimum age is 12.
Live availability for the $162 advanced hike. Morning departures fill first in July and August, and the guides reassess the route on the day: the icefall shifts, and the line that worked last week can close.
One operator, one glacier, three levels. What changes between them is how long you stay on the ice, how big the group gets and whether you climb.
from $105Most Booked — 4.6★, 1,618 Reviews
from $162Top Rated — 4.8★, 1,149 Reviews 
from $251Smallest Group — Max 6 People The ice climb sits at the top of the price list because it runs with six people and a rope setup. Read the middle column first: time on the ice is what separates these tickets, not the total length of the tour.
| Tour | Price | Total | Book | On the ice | Group | Min age | Climbing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ice climb and hike | $251 | 4 hours | Check | About 3 hours | 6 people | 12 | Yes, roped |
| Advanced hike | $162 | 5 hours | Check | About 3 hours | 10 people | 12 | No |
| Easy group hike | $105 | 3 hours | Check | About 90 minutes | 14 people | 8 | No |
Prices are per person in USD from GetYourGuide, checked in July 2026. Hotel pickup and food are not included on any of the three; hiking boots and waterproofs rent at the meeting point.
Falljökull drops from the Öræfajökull volcano into the Skaftafell valley as an icefall, which is why the ice above the tourist route looks broken into blocks. The figures below come from the national park, from Iceland's Civil Protection agency and from the research team that measured this glacier for nine years.
Falljökull means the falling glacier, and the name describes the shape. The ice pours off the Öræfajökull volcano and drops toward the Skaftafell valley steeply enough to fracture into blocks, which is what glaciologists call an icefall.
It is an outlet glacier of Vatnajökull, the largest ice cap in Europe by volume, and one of roughly 269 named glaciers in Iceland. On the way down, the ice splits around a rock ridge called Rauðikambur. The northern tongue is Virkisjökull. The southern one, the one every tour walks, is Falljökull.
Hvannadalshnúkur, at 2,110 m the highest point in Iceland, stands on the caldera rim above you. On a clear morning the guides stop and point it out from the middle of the glacier, which gives you the scale of what you are standing on.
Three features come up on every Falljökull glacier hike. Crevasses are the splits that open as the ice bends over the slope, some of them deep enough that a head torch does not reach the bottom. A moulin is a shaft melted straight down by draining meltwater, round and smooth-walled, and guides keep groups well clear of the lip.
The blue you see inside those splits is compressed ice with the air squeezed out of it. Fresh snow scatters all wavelengths and reads white, while dense old ice absorbs the red end and sends back blue.
Dark bands run through the white in places. That is volcanic ash from Öræfajökull, which erupted in 1362 in one of the largest explosive eruptions in Icelandic history and again in 1727. Each layer marks a year the ash fell, and the ice has carried it downhill since. You will also see glacier mice on the surface: loose balls of moss that roll slowly across the ice and keep growing.
Falljökull did something in the mid-2000s that few glaciers get caught doing. Between 2004 and 2006 it crossed what the research calls a dynamic threshold: the active upper glacier detached from its lower reaches and began thrusting over that stagnant lower ice rather than pushing it along. Phillips and colleagues published the measurements in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2014, using radar, lidar and GPS fixed to the ice.
The numbers on the neighbouring tongue tell the same story from a different angle. Virkisjökull's margin has retreated more than 1,000 m since 1996, and the retreat has accelerated over the last decade.
This ground is unusually well measured. The British Geological Survey and the Icelandic Meteorological Office ran a glacier observatory here from 2009 to 2018, with weather stations, on-ice GPS, stream gauges and seismometers feeding data year-round. Your guide has watched the same thing by eye: the moss line on the valley walls marks where the ice stood a few years ago.
Three glacier tongues sit within a few kilometres of the Skaftafell visitor centre, and they are not interchangeable. Skaftafellsjökull is the one at the end of the park's S1 trail, a 4.1 km loop of an hour to an hour and a half that ends at a viewpoint over the ice rather than on it.
Svínafellsjökull, ten minutes west, is off limits. Fractures found on the Svínafellsheiði slope in 2014 and again in 2018 show around 60 million cubic metres of mountainside creeping 2 to 4 cm a year toward the glacier, and Iceland's Civil Protection agency advises against travel on it, guided tours included.
That leaves Falljökull as the walking glacier at Skaftafell. If you searched for a Skaftafell glacier hike and landed here, that page covers the naming in full. Sólheimajökull, the other glacier people compare, sits about 200 km west on the south coast and belongs to a different day of driving.
Film crews have used the ice around Skaftafell for decades, and your guide will point out where. Interstellar shot its frozen planet on these glaciers, Game of Thrones filmed north of the Wall nearby, and a James Bond crew drove across the ice further east for Die Another Day. Batman Begins used the same corner of the country.
The reason is practical rather than romantic. A road runs within a few kilometres of a working icefall, the light stays low and even for months at a time, and the valley behind holds no buildings, pylons or fences to keep out of frame.
That history has a side effect worth knowing about: photographs sold as Falljökull online often come from a neighbouring tongue, or from a helicopter, or from a cave that melted out three winters ago. What you walk is a working glacier with grit on the surface and meltwater cutting through it, and it looks better in person than most of the marketing.
Same meeting point, same gear, same guides. Read down the third column if you are choosing on time rather than price.
| Level | Price | On the ice | Group | Min age | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy group hike | $105 | About 90 min | 14 | 8 | Families, tight schedules, a first look at crevasses |
| Advanced hike | $162 | About 3 h | 10 | 12 | Walkers who want the upper icefall and the views back over the park |
| Ice climb and hike | $251 | About 3 h | 6 | 12 | Anyone who wants to swing an axe on a vertical wall, no experience needed |
Fitness matters more than experience on all three. Crampon technique takes ten minutes to learn at the ice edge.
You meet at the Tröll Expeditions base 20 minutes before departure. It sits on Route 1 at Hof, 1 km west of Hofgarður and about 9 km east of the glacier itself. Parking there is free and signposted from Route 1, which is separate from the 1,040 ISK you pay to park at the national park visitor centre.
The guide fits your gear at the base: crampons, helmet, harness and ice axe on every tour, plus climbing boots and ropes on the ice climb. Hiking boots and waterproofs are not included and rent on site if you did not pack them. Hotel pickup and food are not included on any of the three tours, so bring water and something to eat for the walk.
A 10-minute ride on the Tröll bus takes the group from the base toward the glacier car park, then a walk of 15 to 20 minutes gets you to the edge of the ice. That walk is longer than it used to be, and it grows most years as the snout pulls back up the valley.
Crampons go on at the ice edge. The guide runs a short safety briefing on the spot: how to plant your feet, how to hold the axe, how far to stay from an open crevasse. Nobody needs previous experience for any of the three tours.
The easy hike gives you about 90 minutes of walking on Falljökull, and reviewers say plainly that more of those three hours goes on the approach than on the glacier. The advanced hike gives about three hours on the ice and climbs high enough for the crevasse field and the view back over Skaftafell National Park. The ice climb splits its glacier time between walking and a roped session on a wall or into a crevasse, with the guide placing an ice screw and running the safety line.
Guides finish with coffee and Icelandic chocolate, which sounds like a small thing until you have been on ice in a headwind for three hours.
Start with time on the ice, then check the minimum age, then look at the price. The easy hike gives roughly 90 minutes on Falljökull, which is enough to cross the first crevasse field, look into a moulin and understand what you are standing on. Book it if you have children between 8 and 12, a tight driving schedule, or doubts about three hours on crampons.
The advanced hike doubles the glacier time and climbs into the broken ice higher up. It suits walkers who cover 10 km on a normal weekend and want the view back over Skaftafell National Park from a height. Reviewers who are fit still describe finishing tired, so treat the five hours as five working hours.
The ice climb is the odd one out. You spend part of the session standing around while other people climb, which is the trade for a group of six and a rope on a vertical wall. Book it for the climbing, not for distance covered.
Each tour has its own write-up with the full itinerary, inclusions and recent reviews: easy group hike, advanced hike, ice climb.
Waterproof shell on top and bottom, warm mid-layer, hat and gloves. Stiff-soled hiking boots that cover the ankle, because crampons do not clamp properly to soft trainers.
Skip cotton. It holds sweat, and standing still on ice while the group takes photographs is when you get cold. Sunglasses matter more than people expect on a bright day: fresh snow on the glacier throws light straight back at you.
| Item | Provided | Bring or rent |
|---|---|---|
| Crampons, helmet, harness, ice axe | Yes, every tour | Nothing to do |
| Hiking boots | No | Bring stiff-soled boots or rent at the base |
| Waterproof jacket and trousers | No | Bring or rent at the base |
| Gloves, hat, warm layers | No | Bring, in every season |
| Food and drink | No, coffee and chocolate at the end | Bring water and snacks |
Guides cancel for wind, rain that turns the ice greasy, and lightning near the ridge. The call usually comes the evening before or the morning of, and the operator refunds in full when they cancel. That is separate from your own free cancellation, which runs up to 24 hours before departure.
Southeast Iceland gets its weather off the North Atlantic, and a forecast written on Tuesday for Friday is a rough guide rather than a plan. Build a spare morning into the trip if the glacier is the reason you drove out here.
If your tour goes and the visibility does not, the walk still happens. Cloud sits on the icefall often enough that guides plan routes for it, and blue ice reads better under flat light than under hard sun.
The meeting point, the glacier you walk, the one you can only look at and the one that is closed. All four sit inside 15 km of Route 1.
Tours run every month. What changes is the light you get and the surface you walk on. Bars show average daylight hours at Skaftafell; the figure below each is the average daytime high in Celsius.
Winter departures start later and finish before dark. Around the solstice the working day at this latitude runs to about five hours of usable light.
Small ice caves and meltwater tunnels open on Falljökull in winter, and they melt out again through spring and summer. No guide can promise you one on a hike, and any operator who does is selling you weather.
The window runs roughly November to March, the same period that produces the cleanest blue ice on the surface. If a cave is the whole point of your trip, book a tour that names a cave in its title rather than hoping one appears on a standard glacier hike.
June and July give you almost 21 hours of daylight and a soft, wet surface underfoot. The trade-off is the walk-in: the snout has retreated far enough that the approach from the car park takes 15 to 20 minutes before crampons go on.
Summer is also when the crevasse field reads best. Winter snow bridges the smaller splits and hides them, while August leaves the ice bare and the shapes obvious.
Skaftafell sits 335 km east of Reykjavík on Route 1, which is four and a half hours of driving without stops, and most people break the trip at Vík, 147 km west. From Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon it is 57 km, about 50 minutes.
Skaftafellsstofa, the national park visitor centre, opens at 9am for most of the year and 10am from December to February, closing between 5pm and 7pm depending on the season. Parking there costs 1,040 ISK, paid at the kiosk or online. The Svartifoss trail, 5.8 km and about two hours, is what most people pair with a morning on the ice.
A morning hike leaves the afternoon open, and everything worth stopping for sits within an hour's drive. The Svartifoss trail from the visitor centre is 5.8 km and about two hours, ending at a waterfall framed by hexagonal basalt columns.
Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon is 57 km east, roughly 50 minutes, with Diamond Beach across the road where the icebergs wash up on black sand. Drive that after the hike rather than before: the lagoon holds its light late, and the tour has a fixed start time you do not want to be late for.
If you are heading west afterwards, Vík is 147 km away and makes a sensible overnight stop. Fuel up before you leave the Skaftafell area either way, because the stations thin out fast in both directions.
We loved this hike. It is our favourite activity we did in Iceland. It is sad to see how quickly the glaciers are receding. The hike is doable for various levels, and the guides taught us how to use our crampons.
Our guide gave us a fascinating and extensive tour of the upper and lower glacier. No experience of crampons needed. Good amount of time actually walking.
My mum is 60 and had some difficulties to begin with before finding her groove. Maria took the time to guide her, support her and pace the group. The glacier is fantastic, absolutely breathtaking.
We were with a very small group and had fantastic weather. The route was doable even if you have never climbed before, and the ice climbing was fun, even if it was a bit challenging.
Crevasses open under snow bridges and the surface moves. Every operator here works with a certified glacier guide, and that is the only legal-feeling way onto this ice.
The same guides run all three tours from the same building at Skaftafell, so switching from the easy hike to the advanced one is a question of hours and fitness, not logistics.
Crampons, helmet, harness and ice axe are handed out before you leave the base. Boots and waterproofs rent there too if your packing was optimistic.
Ten people on the advanced hike and six on the ice climb. Above the first crevasse field, group size decides how fast you move and how often you stop.
All three tours refund in full up to 24 hours out, which matters in a place where the forecast changes overnight.
The easy hike takes children from 8, the only one of the three that does. The advanced hike and the ice climb start at 12.
Four dates that explain what your guide points at on the way up. The bar height shows how much ground the glacier lost or gave up at each step.
1996
Retreat measured from here has passed 1,000 m on the Virkisjökull tongue, and the rate has picked up in the last decade.
2004 to 2006
The upper glacier separated from its lower reaches and started thrusting over that stagnant ice instead of pushing it down the valley. Phillips and colleagues published the radar, lidar and GPS measurements in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2014.
2009 to 2018
Weather stations, on-ice GPS, stream gauges and seismometers recorded the retreat through the whole period.
Now
The walk to the ice edge lengthens most seasons as the snout pulls back up the valley, and the moss line on the valley wall marks where the ice stood a few years ago.
Sources: British Geological Survey glacier monitoring, and Phillips et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 2014.
No. The ice moves, crevasses open without warning under snow, and nobody should step onto Falljökull without a certified glacier guide and crampons. The legal free alternative is the national park's S1 trail, a 4.1 km loop to a viewpoint over Skaftafellsjökull. Every guided option is listed on the three levels on this glacier.
The easy group hike is $105 for 3 hours, the advanced hike is $162 for 5 hours and the ice climb is $251 for 4 hours. All three include crampons, helmet, harness and ice axe, and all three cancel free up to 24 hours before departure. Hotel pickup and food are not included. Full write-ups: the three-hour easy hike, the five-hour advanced hike and the ice climb.
In practice, yes. Tours sold as a Skaftafell glacier hike walk on Falljökull, because Skaftafellsjökull is a viewpoint walk and Svínafellsjökull is closed. The full explanation of which glacier is which covers the naming and what each tongue offers.
The easy hike suits anyone comfortable on a two-hour country walk, with about 90 minutes on the ice. The advanced hike asks for three hours of walking on crampons with some gradient, and reviewers who are fit still describe finishing winded. Crampon technique takes ten minutes to learn at the ice edge. The advanced hike write-up covers pace and fitness in detail.
The easy group hike takes children from 8. The advanced hike and the ice climb both start at 12. Families with younger children usually walk the S1 trail to the Skaftafellsjökull viewpoint instead, then book the easy hike on this glacier for the older ones.
Small ice caves and tunnels open in winter and melt out by spring, roughly a November to March window. No guide can guarantee one on a standard hike. If a cave is the point of the trip, book a tour that names a cave in the title.
Waterproof jacket and trousers, warm layers, hat and gloves, and stiff-soled hiking boots that cover the ankle. Crampons do not hold on soft trainers. Boots and waterproofs rent at the Tröll Expeditions base if you need them.
Tours run year-round. Winter gives blue ice and the ice cave window but around five hours of light in December. Summer gives up to 21 hours of daylight and a longer walk-in to the ice. Check dates for either season on the tours from the Skaftafell base.
Drive Route 1 to Skaftafell, 335 km and about 4.5 hours from Reykjavík, 147 km east of Vík and 57 km west of Jökulsárlón. All three tours meet at the Tröll Expeditions base 20 minutes before departure, where parking is free. Parking at the park visitor centre costs 1,040 ISK.
