Begin at the Sólheimajökull parking lot where you are provided with the glacier gear required for the trip. Then undertake a 15-minute hike on a gravel road to the base of Sólheimajökull. At the base, you will be shown how to put on and use the gear. Once on the glacier, you climb on an easy ice wall to learn the basic skills and techniques of ice climbing. After that, you will try to climb in three different locations on the glacier, either at a nice wall or a hole (called a mulan) that you can get into and climb back up.  Sólheimajökull is a small outlet glacier coming from the Mýrdalsjökull ice cap. This is one of the closest glaciers to Reykjavík and takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes to drive there. Mýrdalsjökull, the mire valley glacier, is an ice cap in the south of Iceland. It is to the north of Vík and to the east of the smaller ice cap Eyjafjallajökull. Between these two glaciers is Fimmvörðuháls pass. Its peak reaches 1,493 meters (4,898 foot) and in 1980 it covered an area of 595 kilometers squared (230 square miles). The icecap of the glacier covers an active volcano called Katla. The caldera of the volcano has a diameter of 10 kilometers (6 miles) and the volcano erupts usually every 40 to 80 years. The last eruption took place in 1918. Scientists are actively monitoring the volcano, particularly after the eruption of nearby Eyjafjallajökull began in April 2010.