Deplar Farm

The Troll Peninsula is the section of North Iceland that most visitors driving the Ring Road never reach. It juts north from the main road toward the Arctic Circle between Akureyri and Varmahlíð, a peninsula of fjords, fishing villages, and mountains that rise from sea level to over 1,000 metres in distances short enough to produce genuinely extreme vertical relief. The sheep farm that became Deplar Farm sat at the head of the Fljót Valley here for generations before Eleven Experience acquired and renovated it, transforming the agricultural buildings into thirteen suites while preserving the structural character of the original construction.

The architecture is honest. Old Icelandic farm buildings were built to withstand conditions that modern construction in more temperate climates never has to consider, and the renovation of Deplar Farm respects the logic of what was there: thick walls, low profiles, materials calibrated to the landscape. Inside, the suites are warm and contemporary, with views across the valley to the mountains that supply the heli-skiing. A geothermal infinity pool sits outside the main building, heated by the volcanic activity that runs under most of Iceland’s accessible surface, and it faces north toward the fjord. In January, the Northern Lights cross directly overhead, visible from the water on clear nights with a frequency that the south of Iceland, choked with visitors to the Golden Circle, cannot offer.

The heli-skiing programme is what draws winter guests with sufficient technical ski ability and budget. The Troll Peninsula mountains have no ski infrastructure — no lifts, no marked runs, no patrolled terrain. Guides with deep local knowledge identify lines, assess avalanche conditions, and manage groups of four to six guests in helicopters that drop them at ridgelines with descents running 800 to 1,200 metres vertical through powder that has in many cases never been commercially skied before. The quality of this terrain, combined with near-zero lift dependency, makes Deplar Farm a destination that serious heli-ski operators in Canada and Alaska reference as a comparable operation.

Summer reframes the property completely. The geothermal pool in July, under a sky that never fully darkens, with wildflowers on the valley slopes and Eyjafjörður accessible for kayaking 20 kilometres north, is a different kind of Iceland from the tourist infrastructure of the south island. Fly-fishing on the Fljót River, which holds Atlantic salmon, runs alongside hiking and whale watching from Akureyri or Húsavík. The 24-hour daylight is disorienting in the way that all genuinely novel environmental conditions are disorienting, and Deplar Farm is one of the few properties in Iceland that puts guests fully inside it rather than merely adjacent to it.