Walk under a cliff of black stone stacked like organ pipes

The columns at Reynisfjara are basalt, and they are that shape because of how lava loses heat. A thick flow contracts as it cools, the contraction cracks it into vertical columns, mostly six-sided and roughly half a meter to a meter across, and at Reynisfjara they stack up the cliff in ranks. The organ comparison is the one everybody arrives at on their own, and it is close enough that it is hard to see anything else afterward.

Reaching them is nothing. A short walk from the parking lot over flat black sand, and they are there at the back of the beach. What takes time is the briefing that comes first.

The briefing is about the sea, which is behind everyone while they look at the rock. Sneaker waves run up this beach far further than the waves ahead of them, without warning, roughly every fifth to seventh wave. The rule is a distance from the water and it does not bend, and it gets said before anybody has taken a coat off.

The cave in the cliff is Hálsanefshellir, and the lava that made it cooled around ten thousand years ago. Offshore, the Reynisdrangar stacks come out of the water, the tallest of them sixty-six meters. The story locally is that they are trolls caught out by the sunrise and turned to stone, which is more or less the story that gets invented about any rocks standing in a line like that.