Day 24 Fox Glacier

We wake up to another dry day but it is cloudy and misty on the hills around.  The first picture shows the view from our window.  Today is glacier walking day and so we breakfast and make our way to the Glacier Walking venue for 8:30.

Terminal edge

We are told that it is all systems go and get a briefing on the next 4 hours.  They have all the necessary kit available and so we don special boots, take a waterproof top from their store and are given a pair of crampons which we will need when we get to the glacier.  We then get in a coach which takes us most of the way to the start of the glacier.

We leave the coach, split up into groups (each having its own guide) and are led towards the ice.  There is the Fox Glacier river flowing past us at this point but it is known that in the Middle Ages the glacier flowed past what is now the car park.  Since then it has contracted and expanded in phases but interestingly for global warming it has not changed much over the last 60 years.  After about 30 mins walk the first we see of it is the terminal ice face which continually melts to form the river.

Former glacier line at top

We put our crampons on and followed the prepared steps up onto the glacier.  It is a lot colder now but not too bad.  We walked in crevasses and on top of the ice for over an hour.  It was quite hard going but well worth the experience – at this stage the glacier does not look as brightly white as in the promotional photos because we have not had snow lately.  Our informative guide told us all about the history and the mechanics of the glacier’s workings.  In one of the photos you can probably work out the glacier line of thousands of years ago as it carved out the gorge through which it flowed.  After our walk we retraced our steps and made our way back to base!

We returned to our motel, sorted ourselves out for a bit and then drove to the nearby Lake Matheson.  It is the source of an iconic New Zealand photo with reflections of Mounts Cook and Tasman in a still water.  For us it is too cloudy and misty to see the mountains and the lake is rippled by the wind anyway.  You can’t win them all!