Yes, there are some hot springs and geysers in the United States, but there's only one place in the world there THE Geyser is located and that is in Iceland. The first day that we went anywhere (other than Reykjavik) was to an area called Haukadalur, which means "The Valley of Hawks". There, I visited my first hot springs ever. Having read that Iceland gets it's heat and hot water from the ground and knowing that the mineral water smelled like sulfur, I only half expected what I discovered. The smell of sulfur was almost overpowering. But, as with any sort of smell, I became accustomed to it in a short time.

Walking around the hot springs is interesting. The water is at or near the boiling point, so you would not want to step in the water without a good deal of protection. The area was mostly flat with small pools of steaming water. Being that the temperature was rather cool, there was a good amount of steam and vapor coming off of the pools and puddles of water. Additionally, I was careful not to walk through the vapor as it was blown by the wind for fear of stepping ankle-deep into an unseen pool of water! I was not in a mood to have my feet boiled!

There are two main attractions in Haukadalur. The first is the hot springs itself. The second is the geysers. There were two geysers there. One, which is quite active, is named Strokkur, the junior geyser. He is called junior because nearby there is the much greater Geysir, from whose name the term geyser is derived. This is the first geyser that was discovered. Unfortunately the great Geysir no longer blows his top. Many, many hundreds or thousands of years of accumulated minerals in the water of the geyser built up a bowl or a rocky mineral hill around the opening of the geyser which causes the water to be too cool to explode when it reaches the surface. So today, the great Geysir is a deep pool of hot water at the top of a very rocky hill. Strokkur, a short walk away fives a sample of what Geysir must have been like hundreds of years ago.

Stokkur explodes every 7 to 10 minutes and it's quite impressive! What you see before is a dark pool of water approximately 5 to 10 feet in diameter. Just before the geyser explodes, the water level drops below ground level and then moments later explodes with a great whoosh of hot water and steam shooting 50 feet or more into the air. It is not a good idea to be just downwind of this when the water comes back down. The water is not hot at that point, but I imagine that it would be like a pleasantly wam shower... with your clothes on.

One other interesting feature that I saw was the direct evidence of the use of natural water for heating. What I saw was a small concrete structure with a small chiminey on top. It was the size of a large doghouse. There was a small cloud of steam pouring out of it and a long pipe extending to the restaurant a few hundred feet away. I presume that the hot water was being pumped out for heating the restaurant and for hot water. Very interesting! We saw other, similar examples of the use of hot groundwater for heating homes. Once, we saw a large insulated pipe running for several miles from a spring into a small town to heat it. Not bad, huh?