New Zealand, Fox & Franz Josef: Hiking up High on a Enormous Glacier

Our month-long road trip in New Zealand was over halfway complete by the time we made it to the west coast of the South Island. Our aim and first activity for the west coast included a visit to the towns of Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier, in that order, and to do some hiking on the ice. To get to Fox Glacier from Wanaka, we drove through a section of the vast Mount Aspiring National Park, and past the town of Haast, which was definitely true to its Austrian roots (the town was named after the Austrian explorer Julian Haast), and marked the start of our journey up the coast.

Not long after passing the small town of Haast, there was a viewpoint area overlooking the coastline. We pulled over and walked to the edge of a cliff to gain a terrific view of the Tasman Sea and rugged New Zealand coast. The sky was clear on the coast and we could see for miles. After we got back in our campervan, we found another place to pull over, so we could take a look at a long stretch of deserted beach. There, we saw a father drop off his young son, who had a quad bike, and we watched the kid speed down the beach, apparently going to collect some kind of sea creature with a bucket he was carrying.

Each group had their own guide who would use an ice axe to carve out steps in the ice

For dinner when we arrived at Fox Glacier village, we walked into Cook Saddle Cafe & Saloon, where we shared a really large cheeseburger and a huge plate of fries. The place wasn't due to close for a couple of hours after we arrived, so we decided to back up some photos and take advantage of one of the power sockets at the bottom of one of the restaurant's walls. The food was good and we left feeling very satisfied, ready to go to sleep for the evening, knowing that we had a big day in front of us of not doing much else apart from booking a heli-hike on Franz Josef Glacier.

You may be wondering what a heli-hike is. It's basically a combination attraction that includes a scenic helicopter flight over the glacier, and a 2-hour hike on the ice itself. Tickets were on the expensive side, but since we had previously passed up the Canyon Swing in Queenstown, and black-water rafting at the caves in Waitomo, we thought we would splurge on a last fun-filled activity in New Zealand. We paid $360 NZD each for the heli-hike, which was around £138, or $276 USD each, at the time. That obviously blew a few days' travel budget, but the experience was definitely worth the extra expense.

After eating dinner at Cook Saddle, we drove around the small village, looking for an inconspicuous place to park our campervan for the evening; we didn't want to book ourselves into a holiday park for the evening so we could save some money. We ended up driving to the car park at the Lake Matheson trailhead, and sleeping there for the night before waking up early the next morning. The idea of doing the 2-hour walk around Lake Matheson in the morning flew out the window; we decided to skip the walk because of the poor and cloudy weather that greeted us in the morning.

It was our first real bout with bad weather during our time in New Zealand, which wasn't bad since we were already three weeks into our month-long trip! The weather wasn't terrible, either; it was gray and gloomy, but there was no rain at the time. However, we couldn't see Mount Cook, which was supposed to be viewable from the lake, and the reflections on the lake of the mountain were supposed to be incredible. Instead of walking around the lake, we went inside Matheson Cafe next to the car park in order to have breakfast and some coffees. There, we decided to spend a few hours writing to see if the weather would clear up (it didn't).

When we left the cafe, we drove a couple of miles back into the village before continuing to the actual glacier, where we did a 30-minute hike in the drizzling rain to the terminal face; it had started gently raining as we left the village heading to the trailhead. When we made it to the village after leaving the Lake Matheson area, we parked our vehicle and walked around the place, looking into various shops and trying to figure out what we were going to do the next day at Franz Josef Glacier. An American or Canadian couple passed us in the street and asked for a lift to Fox Glacier, but we rejected them since (a) we weren't in our vehicle at the time, and (b) we weren't sure when we would be going to the glacier ourselves.

It turned out that the couple ended up walking all the way - in the rain - to the trailhead where the glacier's terminal face could be seen. We know this because we saw them walking along the side of the road as we made our way in our campervan (aka Bessie) to the trailhead several minutes later. They had apparently already walked a few miles from the village, but we couldn't stop at that point to offer them a lift, because we were on a narrow country road with nowhere to pull over in our vehicle, and some oncoming traffic and cars were behind us, too. We felt a little bad because it was raining and cold outside, but we kept on driving and tried to forget about the situation.

When we left the Fox Glacier terminal face area, we drove 15 miles through the mountains to Franz Josef Glacier village. Along the way, we were stuck behind a very slow driver and the drive took us almost an hour, which was exceedingly frustrating. The drive was beautiful, though, as the highway wound through the mountains, with steep peaks lined with thick, native New Zealand forests on either side of us, and occasional glimpses of the coastline. As soon as we arrived in town, we sought out the Top 10 Holiday Park there and booked ourselves into a campervan site for one night. Since we had our heli-hike booked for the following morning, we decided to take it easy for the rest of the day.

The village of Franz Josef Glacier was just as small as Fox Glacier, and we understood why the residents turned to glacier tourism many years ago, when gold ran out in the mines that had been created after the towns were initially established. With the decline in the gold mining industry there, people had to revert to another means of making a living, and tourism was like "striking gold" for them. Whilst Fox Glacier was named after the British explorer Sir William Fox, Franz Josef Glacier was discovered by the Austrian explorer Julius Haast, who named the glacier after the Austrian emperor at the time.

When we had hooked Bessie up to a power site, we decided to cook an early dinner. The menu that night included hummus with crackers, kumara (a type of sweet potato) soup and cream-style corn. We didn't have much food left and wanted to ensure we ate everything in Bessie's cupboards before buying additional food items, hence the unusual dinner. When we had finished eating, we sat in the reception area of the holiday park and used their wireless internet. The internet access was switched off promptly at 9:00pm, although we talked them into keeping it on until 9:05pm, miraculously. Once we could no longer connect, we returned to our trusty campervan and watched a silly comedy on DVD called "The Darwin Awards".

There were over 140 glaciers on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island and the two most accessible ones were Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier. The two glaciers attract more visitors every year than anything else on the west coast, since they are the two largest and most impressive of the glaciers, and the most accessible. On the glaciers, as snow builds up and compacts to clear blue ice, many different ice formations are created as the ice flows downhill. For those lucky enough to get close to the glaciers, pinnacles of ice (seracs) and mazes of crevasses can be seen, and a scalloped effect on the surface of the ice is visible. When our helicopter dropped us off on the upper half of the glacier for our hike, we were able to see these amazing natural occurrences from a prime vantage point!

Glaciers in New Zealand have generally been retreating over the past century, but they are now advancing, and nowhere else at their latitude have glaciers advanced so close to the sea. Between the years of 1985 and 1998, the glaciers started advancing and grew 1 kilometre, before receding again between the years of 1998 and 2003. Since then, both glaciers are advancing again and they remain unique, in that they are the only glaciers to have survived recent global warming in a rainforest environment. When we woke up in the morning, we were very eager to get ready for our heli-hike, so we quickly ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs and hash browns before doing our laundry, and then reading our books whilst waiting for the time to check in for our activity.

We hadn't planned on staying another night in the holiday park, so we checked out and drove to the car park next to the helicopter launch pads. There was a small office where we checked in, signed a disclaimer stating that we wouldn't sue them if we fell into a bottomless crevasse or killed ourselves, and received a safety demonstration for riding in a helicopter and walking on ice. All of the equipment we needed for the hike was handed out: leather boots, woollen socks, waterproof jackets and metal crampons, which were sharp spikes fitted onto the bottom of the boots they gave us.

In addition to those items, we were also offered warm mittens and hats, but we declined them because it wasn't very cold that morning at the helicopter launch pad site, and we were told that it would only be a couple of degrees (Celsius) cooler on the glacier. What they didn't warn us about, though, was the wind we would soon feel on the glacier, which ended up making the temperature feel more than a couple of degrees colder! As soon as we started hiking, though, we warmed up and the temperature ended up being quite comfortable.

There were eighteen of us in total and we were split into two groups. There were two guides and each group had their own guide who would use an ice axe to carve out steps in the ice, and who would search out suitable paths for us to follow. Our guide's name was Thomas; he was from the US and was an excellent guide for the afternoon, even if we did have to laugh at the extremely short shorts he was wearing, on the cold ice!

Our group had another leader, an older woman who was not comfortable walking on the ice, even with crampons on her boots. She was designated by Thomas as the "leader" so the rest of the group wouldn't outpace her. Being in her 50s, she was bound to walk a little bit slower than us, but it was obvious that she was quite frightened to walk on the ice, even though there wasn't really a chance of her slipping (she actually did fall flat on her face in a pool of ice water later in the hike). As a result of having her as our leader, we think we walked much less than people usually did on the hike, but she was nice and having a good time, so we can't blame her too much.

Throughout the hike, Thomas led us along ice valleys, over ridges and even through a couple of small caves. One was so small that we had to slide through on our stomachs to get through to the other side! Walking on the glacier was dangerous, with zones that we couldn't approach because of extremely deep crevasses that had formed; such areas were called black holes and he avoided them at all costs. Often, our group of nine hikers had to stay back whilst Thomas checked the ice in front of us; occasionally, we saw large chunks of ice falling down from the ridges directly in the path ahead of us. Since we were told that each piece of ice could weight up to and over 1 tonne, we gladly sat back and waited for him to tell us that the coast was clear.

Everywhere we looked during the hike, we saw ice. The glacier was much bigger than we thought, especially once we were walking on it. There were sections where the ice was towering above us, or spread out below us like a vast white plain. The awesomeness of the landscape was so incredible and we felt lucky to be hiking on it, as it was something that neither of us had ever experienced before. The scenic helicopter flights to the glacier and back to the village were also amazing; the views from the air took our breaths away. Our helicopter pilots made sure that we had the best views possible, and they took a few loops around the top of the glacier to give us the best possible viewing.

Once we had returned to Franz Josef Glacier village, we turned in our boots, crampons, jackets and woollen socks, and then headed back to our campervan to have lunch. We had built up quite an appetite from all of the walking and climbing, and we quickly made and ate sandwich wraps. With the hike being complete and the weather still being quite gray and cloudy, we felt that we had done everything in the village that we needed to, so we got back on the highway and headed to Greymouth, which was around 100 miles north.