Franz Josef Glacier

I had bad intel about Franz Josef Glacier.

There are two large glaciers within an hour of one another along New Zealand’s west coast – Franz Josef and Fox.  After missing out on walking on a glacier in Argentina back in 09, we were both interested in doing a glacier hike at one of these spots.  When I did my travel research, I read that you could walk on the glacier in both spots, but that Franz Josef was better for a smattering of small reasons.  Based on this, we took a longer bus trip, passing by the Fox Glacier in favor of visiting Franz Josef instead.

So imagine my frustration when the very nice visitor center lady informed us that you could not walk onto the glacier anymore because it had an unstable melt pattern that made it dangerous.  The only way to walk on the ice was to take the helicopter tour that dropped you off higher up the glacier – and came with a $329 per person price tag.  Ouch!

We didn’t have spare cash in our travel budge for the lovely helicopter drop off service.  Even if we did, the weekend was so cloudy and rainy that the helicopters couldn’t take off anyway.  (This unstable melt pattern had apparently happened in the last six months or so, and was killing the tourism industry in Franz Josef.)  A little disheartened that we now needed to backtrack, we booked a shuttle back to Fox and signed up for the half day hike on the next day.  In the meantime, we could at least walk up to the face of Franz Josef so we could catch a glimpse of the glacier we had gone out of our way to visit.

Odd as it seems, the walk to the glacier is mostly through rainforest.  (Also, I did not set up those rocks, I found them that way.  I don’t know why I feel the need to say that, but I do.)  The weather in this area of New Zealand forms glaciers because of the very high amount of rainfall and rather steep mountains.  That rainfall collects and freezes,creating the glacier.  The parts of the valley where the glacier has receded are full of rainforest.  All that rainfall also means – you guessed it – lots of waterfalls.

I think the waterfalls at Franz Josef were actually more spectacular than the glacier.  You can’t see much of the ice from the hike because it has receded so far into the mountains, and it is covered in rocks and dirt.  The thick layer of fog doesn’t help either.Hey, it’s us again!  (Are you starting to get an inaccurate idea of how big our heads are from all of these self portraits?  I promise we look like real people, we just use the wide angle lens to take these kind of images, which makes our heads look bigger.  We do not look like living bobble heads.)Satisfied that we’d seen the Franz Josef in its (partial) glory, we headed back to town.  The following day we headed to Fox Glacier to walk on the ice like the intrepid explorers that we are.

Or something like that.