Fox Glacier

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Terminal face of Fox Glacier

Through an ice tunnel

Surprise!

Séracs

The forecast predicted cloud and rain, but Christina had the good sense to make us climb the glacier anyway.  After some morning uncertainty, her faith was rewarded by a blue sky over the glacier, the Southern Alps, and the imposing Mt. Tasman.  What a turn of good luck!

Fox Glacier and Franz Josef glacier are the two largest of several thousand New Zealand glaciers, and they are also two of the healthiest glaciers in the world.  Whereas rising temperatures have forced most glaciers to retreat, the same heat is pushing the warm ocean air between New Zealand and Australia toward New Zealand's west coast, where it hits the alps and falls as precipitation, feeding the two glaciers.  Fox Glacier's nevé, its snow accumulation area, is a whopping 36 square kms (larger than Christchurch), and is what feeds the glacier's movement.  The abundance of snow turns to ice and gravity pushes the iceflow down the mountain.  Because it also travels down a very narrow passageway, the ice-river moves many times faster than its glacier-friends around the world.  And the 13 km long glacier falls to just 250m above sea level, and actually ends in a rainforest.  Very New Zealand!

We climbed up the glacier, beginning at the terminal face, in a group of eight.  We were given mountaineering boots, crampons (spikes that tie to the bottom of our boots), and an alpenstock (walking stick with a pick at the end).  Our guide cut fresh tracks and ice steps with his pickaxe for us to climb up, and we walked up the face of the glacier for about four to five hours.

Near the terminal face, the ice flows more like wavy hair - it is easy to walk on and features mostly simple structures.  Here we crawled through ice tunnels, stared down ice pits that fade to black, and listened to the rushing of water many meters below our feet.  And as we climbed higher, and we got quite high in a no-nonsense group, the valley got steeper and we got closer to the nevé, which means the force of gravity acting upon the ice became stronger.  This crunches the ice together, shooting jagged pinnacles of ice up into the sky, called séracs.

We concluded our climb through an intensely narrow passageway, made navigable only because the ice was so slippery, reaching a particularly dense area of séracs.  It was the most beautiful and fascinating area, and made for the perfect finale to our adventure.