Drangsnes ATV tour: the Westfjords ride nobody books
ATV tours on the Strandir coast from Drangsnes and Djúpavík — what the one-hour and three-hour rides cover, and why the drive there is part of it.
Drangsnes is a village of fewer than a hundred people on the Strandir coast, the east side of the Westfjords, about three and a half hours from Reykjavík. It has three hot tubs set into the sea wall that anyone can use, a boat to the small island of Grímsey in the bay, and one tour operator. Activity tours EHF run ATVs from here. They run two rides; neither is bookable through us at the moment — ask us and we check with them. Almost nobody books them, because almost nobody drives to Drangsnes. That’s the case for going.
The one-hour ride
1 Hour Drangsnes Adventure, €128 when we last sold it, an hour and a half including the briefing and kit. You ride out from the village along the shore and up onto the tracks above Steingrímsfjörður. It’s a taster: enough to feel the machine and see the fjord from a height, not enough to get anywhere far. Good if you’re passing through between Hólmavík and the Ring Road and want an hour of something that isn’t driving.
Downside: an hour and a half is short for a €128 ticket, and the first stretch of it is the safety briefing.
The three-hour ride
3 Hour Djúpuvík Adventure, €277 when we last sold it, three and a half hours all-in. This is the one. Djúpavík is up the coast on Reykjarfjörður, a former herring station with a hotel in the old women’s dormitory and a factory you can walk through. The tour is built around it — check the meeting point on the tour page, because Djúpavík is over an hour’s drive north of Drangsnes on gravel and you don’t want to find that out at nine in the morning. Three hours on an ATV along that coast, fjords opening one after another, is long enough for the ride to stop being a novelty and become a way of seeing the place.
Downside: three hours on gravel is tiring. If you’ve never ridden an ATV, your forearms will know about it. And €277 is a real price for a half-day.
Getting there
There is no tour pickup. You need a car. From Reykjavík, the road is tarmac as far as Hólmavík; from there it narrows, and past Drangsnes it’s gravel and slower than the map suggests. The operator lists both rides all year, but the road north of Drangsnes is one of the first in the country to close in snow. Book for May to September unless you’re already up there and can see the road for yourself.
The operator has no Google rating on our records yet. That’s not a warning. It’s a small company in a small place, and we’d ride with them.
Our honest take
Book the three-hour Djúpavík ride and build a day around it: hot tubs in Drangsnes before or after, a night at Djúpavík or Hólmavík. Skip the one-hour version unless you’re literally passing through. The tradeoff is the obvious one — Drangsnes is not on the way to anything, so this is a two-day commitment out of a trip that probably has ten days total. If you’ve already planned the Westfjords, it’s the best half-day on the east side of them. If you haven’t, this isn’t the reason to add them. Dynjandi is.
