The cliff that Skógafoss drops off used to be the edge of the sea. Sixty metres of white curtain comes over it on the south coast of Iceland, with no rock breaking the fall. The Atlantic cut that line when the coast lay here, and the land has since risen and the shore moved south, leaving a clean step between flat farmland and the interior. That old shoreline runs for hundreds of kilometres roughly parallel to the coast, and Skógafoss is only one of many rivers that spill over its rim. So the falls stand alone on a plain, with nothing around them. You walk right up to the foot on black pebbles, a few paces from where the water lands, and the spray is on you within moments while the ground shudders. On a bright day the sun strikes the drifting mist head-on around the middle of the day, and the bow burns strongest where you are standing. What takes the colour away is cloud, not the hour.
A long steel staircase of 527 steps goes up the side, and it changes what the falls are. From the railed platform at the top you stand level with the lip, watching the Skógá bunch and bend before it goes over. The other way, the river runs back inland. Local folklore says the Viking settler Þrasi buried a chest of gold behind the curtain around the year 900. Villagers once got a hook on the iron ring set into its side, but the rotten wood gave way and only the ring came free. It hung on the door of the local church, and now it hangs in the Skógar museum. Above the falls the Skóga strings together more than twenty more, each one different from the last, through a gorge with no road and climbing toward the pass between two ice caps. An hour upstream trades the crowd at the base for cascades most day visitors never reach. Not one of them shows from the bottom.