A trip to Iceland is not complete without a taste of changing weather

The weather on Iceland changes quickly and is often hard to predict. Most people experience rain, snow, hail, strong winds, fog, clear skies and heavy clouds during their visit. We got all of this in one morning.

We started driving into the mountains a couple hours before sunrise, to ensure that we would find the best spots to view the rising sun. As our scouting trip a couple days earlier was ended before we even reached the lake, due to extreme wind and snowfall and no visibility of the road, we had not yet had the chance to explore the area. However I had some ideas of where we could go after studying this place on maps and reading online.

Just as a couple days before, we met great wind and snow on our way up to the mountains. Again we had close to zero visibility of the road, and I felt a bit uncomfortable driving at this moment. Luckily it wasn't as bad as earlier, and we were driving in and out of "pockets of weather". After a while we found a spot next to Kleifarvatn where we could park the car, and we headed down to the beach. At this moment the skies were clear and the wind moderate.

Not long after we arrived, a wall of clouds were coming quickly in our direction. As the weather changed quickly this morning, we decided to get some shots before taking shelter in the car. On the way back to the car the clouds now surrounded us and the visibility was again gone, this time it was no snow, instead it was a shower of hail. While sitting in the car we were discussing wether the weather would change again or not. I hoped that it would clear up, bot both of us were certain that we would not witness a nice sunrise this morning. Oh how wrong we were!

During the storm we decided to drive further down the lake to see if there was any other spots we could photograph. All of a sudden the skies cleared up and a mix of colors were displayed in front of us. In fear of missing the action I quickly pulled over and parked the car in the roadside and ran towards another beach.

I have never seen a sunrise as saturated as this. It wasn't only the pinks in the sky that was saturated, it was also the blues from the incoming storms that where saturated. To our pleasure, we also had all of Kleifarvatn completely by ourself, and there was nobody to interrupt the peace we felt.