Meanderings

The Franz Joseph Glacier, along with the Fox Glacier, on the West Coast (or Westland) is one of the few glaciers in the world that can be reached at ground level. The others are in Patagonia. Also, it feels like an anomaly when you are there, because it is a glacier surrounded by mountains and land covered in rainforest.

Now, my assumption about rainforest is that it's, well, hot and steamy and in no way an environment in which a gigantic lump of slowly moving ice would feel at home. But there you are. New Zealand. Land of surprising contrasts.

I had the wonderful experience of walking to the terminal face of the Franz Joseph Glacier a couple of days ago. It's a very popular destination for tourists staying in Franz Joseph. One could say the only destination - the town appears to be in existence only as a place for tourists to stay while they visit the glacier. It is exceptionally small, and the short but busy main street has alternating restaurants and centres for booking various exciting glacier adventure options. The streets that run parallel to the main street are all covered in motels and hostels and hotels. At one side of the main street is a helipad (which, on clear days, gives the town lots of sound and movement, as helicopter after helicopter takes off and lands). And surrounding this tiny grid are majestic green covered mountains, and occasional snow capped peaks, solid white and scattered snow across the top.

There are many ways to experience the glacier - the bog standard (not really, though) glacier terminal walk, half or full day glacier climbs, and of course, helicopter rides over the glacier, with the option of landing on the top and throwing snow at other passengers. Under sound advice from a friend who did the glacier climb last year, I avoided that due to not having the fitness levels of Superman nor the nimbleness of a mountain goat. And due to it being my last week, I am suffering from lack of resources, thus had to give away the idea of a helicopter ride. So glacier terminal walk it was.

To get to the glacier, you can either walk to the glacier carpark, or you can get a return shuttle bus. I am extremely lazy and got the shuttle bus - which is a good way to meet people to do the walk with, as I did: a lovely woman from Switzerland, who was a little blase about glaciers, and couldn't believe that a glacier could exist surrounded by the excessive greenery.

From the carpark, we went to the closest lookout, an elevated hillock where you can observe the glacier and surrounds. The glacier is nestled between two mountains (really, I guess, one mountain in the slow process of being cleaved in two - though not that slow, as Franz Joseph is currently moving forward at rate of a metre a day, which is astonishingly fast for a glacier), and starts off about half their height, but its peak is almost equal to the mountains on either side. The lower face is white and blue with dirt streaked and scattered on it, but at the peak, it seems pure white and the icy blue that you expect from a glacier. The land between the lookout point and the face is flat and rocky, a giant trail of destruction from the glacier's progress. As there had not been a huge amount of rain recently, the river that runs from the glacier was fairly low - but still fast moving and grey white. The colour is due to the glacier grinding down rocks, and creating silt that is carried in the meltoff to the river.

As we descended through lush overhanging vegetation, the ground went from hard packed dirt to soft rounded grey and white striped rocks. We had reached the flat land, and were seriously on our way to the glacier in the distance. The surrounding mountainsides had multiple waterfalls running down them, so there were many little fast running creeks and minirivers to traverse. There were also huge numbers of people toing and froing, from young children to older folks with walking sticks. Not a hard walk, really ;)

There were rocks of all shapes and sizes, ground and worn and softened by the progress of Franz Joseph. Hikers had created precarious stacks of rocks as they had passed, and these were to all appearances sculptures showing passing time. As we got much closer to the face, there was a wall on our right, with incongruous curves where all else about had eroded into more jagged shapes. The rock was red and covered in soft spots of emerald moss.

Up we went, leaping across stronger running streams, causing miniature avalanches of stones, hurriedly donning our parkas as the sun disappeared and an ice cold squall hit us square in the face. We came to the final ropes, beyond which were blue and red parka donned climbing groups, recovering from the descent and waiting to ascend. Franz Joseph itself loomed, the ice at the base a clearer blue than it had appeared at a distance. The ground sloping down from where we stood was littered with pieces of ice, and intricate shapes and hollows, both sharp and rounded, towered above us. As we stood and stared and tried to reconcile the blue and the white and peered upwards into tiny caves and envied those atop the ice, a sudden cracking sound came from our left.

A metre square piece of ice broke from the glacier, slowly tumbling down, hitting and bouncing off the surface, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces until a scatter of fist sized ice stones joined the rest at the bottom of Franz Joseph. Ready to melt down and join the rushing river.