Chilling with some glaciers.

View Larger Map

Am starting to head up the West Coast. Spent one day at the town of Fox Glacier to do a glacier walk. Weather was dreary; incessant rain, blustering wind, and the ambient cold of the glacier itself didn't help matters at all. The company that took us out on the tour provided us with a complete ensemble of cold and wet weather gear though, so we (there were 8 of us on the tour) were well equipped to deal with the elements.

Definitely not as pretty weather as Wanaka. The West Coast gets hit with a ton of storms coming off the Tasman Sea, and the Southern Alps mountain range (right on the coast) acts as a buffer for the rest of the South Island. The high altitude of the mountains combines with the plentitude of rain to create a couple of glaciers. Fox Glacier and Franz Joseph are the two biggest, about 23km apart from each other. I toured Fox because it has a reputation for being less touristy than Franz Joseph.

The rain did not hinder the tour at all. We spent about 4-5hrs out on the glacier; the highlight of the tour was definitely seeing the giant meltholes, caused by warmer water melting paths and crevasses in the glacier. The guides made sure no one fell in; it was a long way down to the bottom. We were fitted out with clamp-ons for our feet, basically metal shoes with about 15 1-inch spikes in the bottom for better traction on the glacier. In some spots the paths the guides went on had been smoothed out by the rain, so the guides just looked around for where the path should be, took out two pick-axes (one for each guide), and started chopping away at the ice until the formed basic steps.

The glacier valley. At one point it filled the entire valley, but has since receded. It is about 18km long in full.

The climate is so wet that right up until the glacier started there is a rainforest. Had to walk through it a ways to get high enough to climb out onto the glacier.

The group out on the ice.

A melthole. Camera lenses stuck in the rain.

One of the meltholes was so big we got to walk around inside it and through some nearby crevasses. The intense blue color is caused by the ice being deep enough that it has a very low oxygen content.