Ice, Ice Baby (or, a hike on Fox Glacier)

Back in 1996, I came to New Zealand as part of a whirlwind two-week long school trip to learn more about New Zealand's geography. There are a few distinct memories from that trip, although most of them have faded with time (a euphemism for "age"). But one part of our trip I remember was a visit to the Franz Josef Glacier on the South Island. We didn't really have the time to go on an extensive exploration of the glacier back then, nor was glacial action the primary focus of our trip's studies. So we dutifully trudged off the bus, walked up to the face of the glacier, had our guide quickly explain to us how it was formed and how it was receding due to rising temperatures, and then got back on the bus and sped off to our next destination.

This time, we wanted to explore as much cool geography as possible in New Zealand, and glaciers are definitely cool (pun intended). A lot of the geography in New Zealand that we've seen was formed by ice and fire; the valleys carved out by the slow and relentless movement of the glaciers and the mountains that remained behind, and the fertile fields and stark mountains created by the volcanoes that dot New Zealand. We'll have more on the volcanoes in a later post, but our Fox Glacier experience allowed us to see what the Fiordlands looked like once upon a time.

Fox Glacier advances and retreats over the years, depending on the amount of snowfall in the cold months and the rate of melt in the warm months (I'm oversimplifying quite a bit here).  But here's a photo of what the face of the glacier looked like as we approached it:

(Yes, there are people on there.)

And here’s a photo of the rest of the glacier, stretching up to the mountains:

The photos don’t really do it justice, but Fox Glacier is pretty darn big. When you’re actually standing on the glacier itself, the experience continues to be pretty awe-inspiring. All the terrain around you is ice – not just covered in ice, but formed out of ice. There is ice under you that goes all the way down to the valley floor hundreds of feet below. And some of the ice is old – like hundreds or possibly even thousands of years old. Kind of like looking at a night sky full of stars, walking on a glacier really helps put you and your time on earth in perspective.

The actual glacier walk itself was pretty easy – our glacier guide would carve steps and footholds for us in the ice with a big pickaxe (see photo below), and we’d just follow in his steps.

If you’re wondering how on earth we kept our footing on all that ice, the answer is simple: crampons!

[Holly's note: You could do some serious damage at Snow Cheap in these suckers!]

The next photo was taken about 30 minutes after we got on the glacier. In the distance, you can see a wall of ice, which marks the lower icefall – that was our destination.

Along the way, our guide pointed out some of the features of the glacier, which are carved out by melting ice over time. For example, the next photo shows a deep crevice in the ice, eroded out by running water:

Some of the holes we found were big enough to hang out in, and even came with a stream of ice cold water to drink from!

(quite refreshing!)

We didn’t see any ice caves that were safe enough for us to enter, but there was a bit of an ice tunnel that we got to play in:

And don’t worry, she made it out just fine!

Holly getting into the tunnel

Eventually we came up to the lower icefall…

The next photo shows a “valley” in the lower ice fall – this was about as far as we could get.  And we did!

(Holly at the end of the “valley” – we couldn’t go any farther than this.)

As we turned to head back down the glacier, this was the view before us:

It was awesome to think that as amazing and huge as Fox Glacier was, it had at one time filled that entire valley and helped carve out those mountains. Like I said, it really helped put things and our time on earth in perspective.

We truly enjoyed our glacier hike – it probably ranks as one of the coolest things we did in New Zealand, and we’d highly recommend it for anyone who’s thinking about a trip to NZ! I’d also definitely recommend doing Fox Glacier over Franz Josef, which is more popular and thus more crowded.

Next stop – Greymouth!