Formerly the Franz Josef Glacier, it was renamed after it was rediscovered by Theos Dios and myself. If you have ever seen a picture of a glacier in geography book then it is probably this glacier. It is reasonably unique in that it descends into rainforest, there are only three glaciers that do this. One other is in Argentina, and the third one is 20 km down the road from here.
We drove from the small township of Franz Josef, 4kms, to the car park, and then walked another couple of kms to the edge of the forest. From there you look over the river bed that runs from the bottom of the glacier. A largely boulder strewn landscape through which runs the defrosted bits of glacier, identified by the milky colour as it contains Glacial Flour. This moon-like area also hosts a multitude of other smaller streams of crystal clear water that come from the various streams and stunning waterfalls that feed into this vast flat bottomed canyon.
But dominating the view is the glacier itself. The bottom sits wedged between two sheets of rainforest, and the top becomes part of the snow capped mountain range. It appears as though it would be no problem to walk over to it and just keep going until you were up among the craggy mountain tops. But this is the first of the day's illusions of scale; a decent walk towards it and you do not appear to be any where nearer the bottom of it.
Not that you are permitted right up to the bottom of it. Too many instances of people getting squashed by huge chunks of ice breaking off it mean that you are not allowed. I don't know how the glacier police stop you from doing so. The glacier is advancing at a rate of three metres a day, so how do you build a fence around it? That's right. Advancing. Three hundred years ago, the glacier took up the entire rock strewn landscape I was now wandering in. Even in 1950 it was much larger than today. But before you hippies start waving your fists and decrying the humanity of it all, the glacier's extension is related to El Nino and La Nina more than global warming, so it's currently getting bigger.
We didn't try to go any further, I didn't really believe that we could could just zip over to the glacier and zoom straight up to the top. O r could we? We returned to the town, had a coffee, got in a helicopter and found that we could. We were back over the car park in a matter of seconds, the milky river just a strip below us and the waterfalls still looking just as amazing falling away from us as they did falling towards us. Just as soon we were over the ice. It has a bluey colour, because it is compacted so hard that most of the oxygen is squeezed out. The cracks in it are definitely huge, but it is so hard to judge just how big as the surreality of the glacier surface is countered by the weirdness of floating above it. I am unable to estimate how high above the ice we are, so can't start to quantify the scale of the chasms below.
Soon we are up at the top of things. In the distance are the peaks of snow covered mountains. I am getting used to these, they are the literal icing on many of the views I have had around NZ. But now the snow and rock breaches the distant horizon and also forms the foreground.
A few stomach churning swoops over some terrifying cliffs and we approach a large flat white expanse. Several helicopters have already parked there and many dazed, awestruck punters are roaming around. We land and exit the chopper. The horizon is either craggy rocks poking out of the snow or snow slowly sloping away from us that reveals that we are higher than the clouds. The snow is unlike any I have seen, millimetre glass beads similar to the coarse sand on the wet beaches of the Abel Tasman. Not much time to take in the beauty of it all as Jay immediately starts plying me with snowballs.
ps. I'll get a slideshow of pics up soon, but its not finished yet.
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