January 15 - January 18
Monday, January 16
Today we have the first of our two planned glacier walks. We'll be doing a heli-hike which involves a helicopter flight up onto the glacier and then a 2 hour hike. This will give us a chance to see the glacier much higher up than with our walk planned for Tuesday.
The flight up is uneventful although Doug's a bit freaked out when the pilot insists on taking pictures for the passengers in the back (while flying with the joy-stick thing between his knees)!
We land and put our crampons on. These are metal spikes that you strap on the bottom of your hiking boots which give you good traction on the ice. Apparently when they first started doing tours on the glacier, folks just stuck nails through the bottom of their boots. We're also given ice axes but are assured we won't be having to leap across wide crevasses with just our ice axe to hold on to on the other side.
Sean, our guide, gives us a number of facts about the glacier:
It's up to 150m thick in some spots
The middle of the glacier moves much faster (as fast as 3m per day) than the edges (1 m per day)
It takes about 6 years for the middle of the glacier to move from top to bottom (based on a sight seeing plane that crashed up there a while back)
We spent the next couple of hours wandering around relatively level terrain. As it turns out, the glacier up here is more level than what we'll experience on Tuesday. We get to see a number of ice caves and climb through arches.
On the flight down, the pilot asks us if we want to do a few turns on our way down. As it turns out, he basically means doing a corkscrew which is more fun than I would have imagined.
Tuesday, January 17
Today we have a half-day hike starting at the bottom (terminal face) of the glacier. We ride out there in a 1973 bus which rattles and flexes like crazy! It's about a 45 minute walk from the parking lot and on the way we learn all about how the terminal face has moved over the years.
We end up climbing quite a bit of rock on the morraine (rock debris on the side of the glacier) to make our way up to the ice. Again we have crampons, but no ice axes today.
This hike is far more strenuous than yesterdays. This is mostly because we're climbing up onto the glacier rather than just landing on top of it. The glacier looks quite different from here, with lots of crevasses all around us. You can also see a good difference in the ice between today's lower elevations and yesterday's higher elevations. Today's ice has a lot more rocks and debris (morraine) from the mountain in it than yesterday's ice which was a lot clearer but a lot more jagged. We're very close to the terminal and we periodically hear huge chunks of ice fall to the ground. Our guide once we're on the ice is a Dutch guy name Jost. He's quite good and very entertaining.
We climb quite a ways up and are a bit surprised that we end up leaping over a couple of crevasses (the widest was probably 3 feet)!
Jost explains that very few of the guides do this for more than a year because it's so hard on their bodies. We certainly experience that in just a four hour hike!
Regardless, we survive the hike although Travis receives some minor cuts to the hands on the way back down the morraine. You would think we would have learned our lesson from the Tongariro Crossing, but apparently we haven't. We're both a little sore from our glacier hiking experiences.
For dinner, we drive over to the next town south (Fox Glacier) where there is another glacier. You can drive up quite a bit closer to this one and we take a few pictures. This one has retreated from the cost quite a bit just over the past 70 years.
The South Island is a LOT less populated and we basically just have a lot of pics of the glacier. We're heading to Queenstown on Wednesday, so check back in a few days for another update.
Cheers!
Logistics
The Franz Josef Glacier is the largest glacier in New Zealand and is the most popular. We'll be staying 3 nights here.
The main thing to do here is, well, the glacier!
We'll be taking a couple of tours of the glacier. One we'll reach from the base. The other we'll reach by helicopter.
Doug and Travis arrive in Franz Josef and check out the glacier from afar.
During the heli-hike, Travis climbs through an ice passage.
Upper elevation glacier pic (check out how different this is from the lower elevation pics below).
Doug shows off his ice-axe.
Travis and Doug climb through an ice passage.
Ice cave filled with water.
Upper elevation heli-hike.
Doug and Travis become glacier explorers (and consider starting a fashion trend with tucked in pants legs)!
Panoramic of glacier from the terminal face.
Group glacier hike. We had to jump over a crevasse here.
Doug on lower elevation hike.
Doug and Travis on lower elevation hike.