Hokitika to Fox Glacier

Lake Ianthe in Scenic Reserve

Our original plan had been to go walking around in the Hokitika area today but the forecast of rain tomorrow persuaded us to head off to Fox Glacier in time to catch a glacier walk there in the afternoon. Our journey south went through a succession of  ‘Scenic Reserves’, presumably a step down in status from National Parks.  In fact the scenery to be seen from the road was mainly forest rising on either side of us or fern covered cuttings.  We passed through Franz JosefTownship which serves the neighbouring, more famous and more touristy, Franz Josef Glacier, with echos of an Alpine tourist village without the skiing and snow, and arrived at the comparable Fox Glacier Township.

Looking back down the glacier valley - that's Mandy
on the right

We had booked ourselves on the afternoon ‘Foxtrot’, a  4-hour guided visit to the glacier.  The tour company kitted us out with boots, crampons for later use and more substantial jackets than our own.  A bus took us to the glacier car park from where our guide, Mandy, led us in a group of a dozen to the side of the glacier some 40 minutes away along a track up the debris filled valley floor.  Had we arrived half a century earlier then this entire part of the valley would have been filled with the glacier to a depth of a couple of hundred feet.  The first part of the track is open to the public but beyond the glacier terminus there is no public access; only guided tours are permitted onto the glacier.

Glacier terminus - click to enlarge and look for the tiny people
on the public viewing gallery, to the left of face of the terminus 

Fox glacier moves quickly (5 – 10 m per day in parts, less at the terminus).  The terminus ice is only some 80 years old.  We climbed up onto the ‘flat’ of the glacier via steps cut in the ice by the guide team and kept in shape by every guide.  Mandy carried an ice axe which she used to repair and cut new steps in the ice as we went. This week’s steps were different from last week’s because of the movement of the glacier.  The flat isn’t flat but eaten away by melt channels, holes, cracks and other features.  It’s covered with small, sharp stones, broken off the surrounding peaks.  Each stone has sunken a little into the top, absorbing more heat than the surrounding ice. 

Climbing up onto the glacier

Foxtrotters on the glacier plateau

On several occasions during our visit we heard and sometimes saw stones cascading down on the far side of the glacier as the ice moved.  This left us with the impression that, on the whole, the glacier was not a particularly safe place to be!  The guide’s instructions that we should follow where she walked in single file seemed sensible.  There were little pools of blue water all around.  We each had a walking pole and this could be poked into the holes.  Sometimes it went down only a little; in some holes it could be poked in down to the handle.   Mandy showed us one strip of water only a few feet away that a stone dropped in sank down out of sight.  It was a crevasse filled with water.  We hadn’t expected so much water to be flowing in various streamlets that seemed to appear and disappear almost at random.  We were visiting at the end of summer.  Our short crampons, effectively four spikes in front of each boot heel, were very effective in giving grip on the slightly soft ice.

Ice cave called a compression arch

Our ‘Foxtrot’ was limited to the lower part of the glacier but it lasted quite a while and we had many of the features there pointed out.  The tour was well organised and our guide was good.  We were the only native English speakers in our party so she seemed happy to answer all our questions since very few came from any of the others.   All told, a fascinating excursion but we haven’t any desire to become glaciologists.