ow retreat of the glaciers over 13,000 years of climatic warming.
Luckily, it’s wondrous to look at: wave upon wave of solid walls of ice, like a giant translucent staircase, peppered with surreal canyons, crevasses, sinkholes and caverns, all forged from pure, pale-blue ice. The sky was blue, the ice was blue, the sunlight was sparkling on all the surfaces around me; my breath was curling on the still air and all was silent and high. Pure magic.
Well, it wasn’t pure magic to start with. It had been a major effort getting up here, so I was glad to be making the most of it with a full day of ice climbing, instead of poking around the grubby bits at the bottom on a half-day tour – which is the price you pay for having a lie-in.
My day began with a 6am wake-up in the cold and dark, followed by a drive through the rising dawn. We set off from Franz Josef village and headed along a winding mountain road, traversing dark green forest and steep gullies gushing with meltwater.
Both Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers are served by their own little villages, half an hour apart. They’re twin alpine resorts with pretty log chalets and quiet, sunlit streets, with Franz Josef being the larger of the two. We pulled into the car park at Fox village and met the rugged Kiwi who’d be responsible for our safety and wellbeing in the beautiful, inhospitable environment that we could see on the mountaintop.
My sleepiness started to wear off, and it was replaced with a buzzing anticipation when I was confronted with the sight of the outfit I’d be wearing up the mountain: a plastic helmet, ski boots with liners, waterproof chaps, an abseiling harness, waterproof jacket, two ice-picks, a day pack and a pair of crampons that looked like the footwear the Orcs of Mordor wore in The Lord of the Rings. As a girl devoted to her heels and little fluttery outfits, I hardly recognised myself.
So, thus attired in the world’s second-least attractive outfit after a hospital gown, I was driven out of the village and up the mountain to a car park carved out of rocky ground, far above the treeline. Then the real grunt-work began; a gruelling, steep hike up the side of the valley, scrambling over huge b
A clear, icy river ran out of a yawning blue tunnel at the foot of the glacier terminus. This is apparently the most dangerous place to be, because huge chunks of ice break off it all the time, as shown by the mini-icebergs rolling slowly in the shallow river. Despite the danger, foreign tourists are always climbing over the barrier, ignoring the very graphic signs about two-tonne icebergs falling on their heads. By way of a cautionary tale, Jason told us a few tragic stories about what had happened to various tourists who had got too close to the glacier terminus.
Keeping on the right side of the ropes, our icesavvy outing – consisting of me, fellow brave first-timer Terry and our guide, Jason – hauled ourselves up the rockfalls beside the glacier, giving us a view over its boulder-strewn surface. I was eager to touch the mountain of ice that rose only 20 metres to my right, and as soon as we were allowed to descend to its base, I took off my glove and reached out my hand to feel its rough, freezing flank.
We ascended the icy cliff from a safe point above the terminus, using steps that were still being cut in the ice by the unfortunate crew who have to cut the pathways up there every day or two because the ice shifts and changes all the time. oulders and loose scree to the head of the glacier. By the time we faced the enormous, grubby-looking wall of solid ice, I had no idea how I was going to summon the energy to do anything but collapse on it.
Crampons are awkward on dry land, but they’re simply brilliant on ice. It took me a while to trust my feet, but I soon found that I could walk down steep slopes of solid sheet ice, toes forward, without slipping at all. There isn’t much to climbing cliffs of solid ice. You wield an ice pick in each hand and a crampon on each toe, and thwack them into the vertical wall. You can hang from your picks by the loops over your wrists and step up from your crampons, the toes of which you’ve embedded firmly in the ice.
There are no major heights involved here – I climbed nothing much higher than my bedroom ceiling, and it’s not as strenuous as it sounds; in fact, it was surprisingly easy. The adrenaline’s there, though, in the sense of achievement, excitement, dazzling altitudes, weird icescapes, and the feeling that you’ve conquered the world and can do anything. I slipped while I was carrying out my first ascent but Jason was belaying me on the rope so I only fell about an inch. I didn’t slip at all after that.
Fox Glacier, on this particular day at least, falls in giant, uneven steps pierced by v-shaped gullies with little streams of meltwater. As the day wore on and the ice moved (with deep and alarming creaks, booms and crashes that bring your heart to your mouth), more and more sinkholes, crevasses, fissures and tunnels opened up in the blue ice. If we dropped anything, such as Terry’s camera remote control and my freshly-filled plastic bottle of meltwater, it would skid off towards the nearest hole or crevasse like water going down a plug.
We somehow managed to retrieve both of these items – the remote control hit a tiny bump and stopped just short of a crevasse, and my bottle floated in the clear blue water filling a sinkhole, so we just fished it out and topped it up. Still, I bet that a lot of dropped stuff gets swallowed up by the glacier, no doubt to be retrieved by puzzled archaeologists when it emerges from the terminus in centuries to come.
We climbed five ice-cliffs, some more difficult than others due to gradient, overhang and whether their surface had been softened by the sun, which makes it easier to find purchase in the ice. Eventually, after grunting like a pig, feeling exhausted, sweating, and shaking like a newborn deer, I whooped with exhilaration when my belly slithered over the top.
We ate our packed lunch sitting on a huge boulder high above the ice, and we had a good wander around the frozen landscape. We drank the coldest, cleanest water you could ever pull out of the planet, which trickled out of the 1,000-foot-thick ice where it had frozen decades ago. We found tiny secret valleys with little ice-caves and tunnels. We basked in glorious sunshine and watched the landscape change slowly all around us. And we managed not to fall down any crevasses or get squashed by falling ice.
Terra aqua
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| Collecting fresh melt-water. Photo: Terry Dixon. |
Glaciers get dirtier the lower down you go because they pick up soil and debris on their journey, so the half-day walkers below were only on the ice for an hour and saw mainly dirtier ice, while we were on the cleaner, bluer formations just below the icefalls.
The blueness is apparently caused by the refraction of light through the ice crystals, and this somehow makes the landscape more magical and otherworldly than if it had been the same colour as the ice in my freezer. The icefalls are the steep bit just below the snow basin, where pillars of blue ice resembling the Manhattan skyline crack and tumble and move things along at a rate of about three metres a day. Needless to say, that’s another dangerous place to be and paying customers don’t go there!
We were feeling jubilant, ruddy and sore-armed when we bumped into the half-day walkers on our way back down. They were still struggling with the ascent over the lower part of the glacier, while we’d already had an entire glorious day in a magical crystalline world of pure blue and white.
By the time we got back to the pub in Fox village to enjoy a well-earned cold beer on its sunlit verandah, I was feeling all-powerful, all-conquering and rather like the Queen of Narnia – only slightly less evil! Let the world freeze over, I thought. Let every valley be only rock and ice, and let every river become a glacier, because I want more of that!
Anna Scrivenger
Glacier Trivia
- Franz Josef Glacier was named by Austrian geologist Julius von Haast after the Austrian Emperor, while Fox Glacier was named after William Fox, who was New Zealand’s premier during the 1860s, which was when Haast explored and named both of these glaciers.
- It takes about seven years for ice to flow from the neve (source) of Fox Glacier to the terminal, while nearby Franz Josef takes about five years. The flow rate mainly depends on the steepness of the terrain the glacier has to cross. The ice here moves between two and six metres a day at its fastest point.
- Glaciers can advance or retreat, moving the terminal along the valley, in the space of a year, depending on how much snow falls at the neve and how fast the sun melts the ice. Between 1984 and 1989, Fox Glacier advanced about 500 metres downhill, while Franz Josef moved about 700 metres. However, both glaciers are currently retreating.
- Fox and Franz Josef originate more than 10,000 feet above sea level, but they’re almost within sight of the sea. The mountains on which they originate are moving upwards about a centimetre a year due to tectonic pressure.
Adventures on Ice
- Ice climbing days with Alpine Guides Fox Glacier run year round and cost NZ$195-$210 (£68-£74) per person, including instruction and safety gear, and about five hours on the ice.
- If ice climbing sounds too much like hard work, there are alternative ways to see Fox Glacier, with full-day guided walks onto the clean blue ice, or just to the terminal face to admire the soaring wall of ice. The higher up the glacier you go, the more clean and pure it gets, so a heli-hike – taking a helicopter ride to your start point – is the best way to get to the places most visitors can’t reach.
- And if you get a taste for the high life, the more adventurous among you can do a mountaineering course or overnight campouts on the snowfields on a heli-trek experience, with chopper transfers. www.foxguides.co.nz