WE climbed up a freshly carved staircase of ice to reach the top of the glacier. Wearing heavy boots with metal ice grips attached, we trudged our way up the steep face of one of New Zealand’s most famous glaciers.
The Franz Josef glacier is literally a huge pile of ice sandwiched in between two mountains in the middle of the rolling New Zealand countryside.
Hiking through Ireland’s bogs, hillsides and woodlands is one experience of a landscape-at least you are on solid ground. But hiking on a glacier is an entirely different kettle of fish. For starters, you are walking on a slippy, dangerous surface. You have to really concentrate in an attempt not to fall flat on your behind. And secondly, once you are on the ice the temperature plummets rapidly. You have to be prepared for the freezing cold.
Close up the ice is beautiful; you can see the crevasses, the natural whirls and the hollows in pure white and light blue.
Our guide Karl told us the glacier was 7,000 years old and is advancing at a rate of 70 centimetres a day.
“That does not seem like much, but in glacial terms it is pretty damn fast,” he said.
He said that the native New Zealanders, the Maori people, had a story about the glacier.
“According to legend a young man loved to climb in the mountains and one day persuaded his lover to climb with him. But tragedy struck and an avalanche swept him to his death,” said Karl.
The woman’s tears froze to form the glacier which in Maori is called Ka Roimata o Hinehukatere, or The Tears of the Avalanche Girl.
New Zealand is a fabulous activity destination and this hike is one of many activities available on the South Island of this out-of-the- way country on the other side of the globe. It is so far away, yet reasonably well trodden by Irish people.
The ice was slippy in parts. Every morning staff from the two tour companies who are licensed to bring tourists up the glacier, hack out ‘staircases’ into the ice in order to allow tourists to climb on it without having to use ropes.
It was a novel experience to climb up this ‘ice staircase’, and must be the sort of thing you can see at the Ice Hotel in Sweden.
During the walk Karl, at regular intervals, whipped out his icepick and hacked into the ice, carving out rough steps for us. It was done in a fashion similar to how an old-fashioned gentleman might lay his overcoat across a puddle for a lady.
And the higher you climbed, the better the view got. A vista of the glacial valley below gradually opened up. It was an overcast day. Everything-the sky, the ice, the mountains-all seemed to merge into greyness. It was like a ‘soft’ day in Ireland, complete with showers of drizzle. Below us the river Waiho, lined on both sides by silty gravel, was an unusual shade of grey due to the melted glacier water. However the peace was disturbed by the harsh sound of a helicopter at regular intervals. It was bringing tourists to the top of the glacier where apparently the most beautiful and whitest ice pinnacles are to be found. In the tourist brochure the photographs show ice which is so white it is blue. Most of the time we saw ice which was soiled, and certainly not the pristine blue colour that the brochures flagged. There were a lot of stones and scree on the ice and on the descent it had gotten dirtier as a result of the volume of tour groups traipsing upon it. The higher we got, the colder it got, and an icy wind began to blow. The other people in the group-a Dublin couple, a Dutch solo traveller and a few other Europeans-began to complain of the cold in their toes and fingers. “We have become one with the ice,” joked the Dutch man. The tour company had told me when I booked that the temperature on the glacier would only be one degree cooler than on level ground. How wrong they were! Suddenly the beauty of the glaciers turned to bleakness as the cold started to turn my toes numb. At one point on the descent, a sheer vertical face of ice lay before us, appearing impossible to get past. Out with the trusty ice pick and within 15 minutes Karl made a staircase for us all to descend complete with a rope attached to grab onto. He advised us to descend facing sideways. After a quarter of an hour waiting in the freezing cold we were all getting a bit grumpy and eager to get onto solid non ice ground and normal temperatures.
Our walk back to the village, or township as they call it in New Zealand, took us along the valley floor, where we saw a natural cave of ice cut into the base of the mountain. The Waiho River rushed past us and we walked through a temperate rainforest where leaves and vegetation were soggy with rain. There was no litter anywhere; it was pristine. The water in the streams we crossed over was as clear as glass; there was not a trace of murkiness or debri. This is one of the most amazing things about New Zealand-it really is clean and unpolluted. It is a nature’s paradise and for anyone who loves the outdoors it is a fabulous destination.
The Franz Josef glacier is 12 km long and ends 19 km from the Tasman Sea. It is unique in the fact that it descends from the Southern Alps to just 240 metres above sea level. The geologist and explorer Julius von Haast named the Franz Josef Glacier in 1863 after the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Having retreated several kilometres between the 1940s and 1980s, the glacier has been advancing since 1984. The flow rate is about 10 times that of typical glaciers.
A glacier hike would suit all outdoors types of people. It would particularly appeal to anyone keen to try out new terrain or anyone with a special interest in New Zealand’s geography and geology.
I took a tour with Franz Joseph Glacier Guides, based in the tiny hamlet of Franz Joseph. The company also offers full day tours for hardcore climbers and heli-hikes (a helicopter ride and walk). The tour cost me $85 and all gear was provided including boots, ice talons, rain jacket, woolly socks, hats and gloves.
For more information go online: www.franzjosef.com.
The Franz Josef glacier is literally a huge pile of ice sandwiched in between two mountains in the middle of the rolling New Zealand countryside.
Hiking through Ireland’s bogs, hillsides and woodlands is one experience of a landscape-at least you are on solid ground. But hiking on a glacier is an entirely different kettle of fish. For starters, you are walking on a slippy, dangerous surface. You have to really concentrate in an attempt not to fall flat on your behind. And secondly, once you are on the ice the temperature plummets rapidly. You have to be prepared for the freezing cold.
Close up the ice is beautiful; you can see the crevasses, the natural whirls and the hollows in pure white and light blue.
Our guide Karl told us the glacier was 7,000 years old and is advancing at a rate of 70 centimetres a day.
“That does not seem like much, but in glacial terms it is pretty damn fast,” he said.
He said that the native New Zealanders, the Maori people, had a story about the glacier.
“According to legend a young man loved to climb in the mountains and one day persuaded his lover to climb with him. But tragedy struck and an avalanche swept him to his death,” said Karl.
The woman’s tears froze to form the glacier which in Maori is called Ka Roimata o Hinehukatere, or The Tears of the Avalanche Girl.
New Zealand is a fabulous activity destination and this hike is one of many activities available on the South Island of this out-of-the- way country on the other side of the globe. It is so far away, yet reasonably well trodden by Irish people.
The ice was slippy in parts. Every morning staff from the two tour companies who are licensed to bring tourists up the glacier, hack out ‘staircases’ into the ice in order to allow tourists to climb on it without having to use ropes.
It was a novel experience to climb up this ‘ice staircase’, and must be the sort of thing you can see at the Ice Hotel in Sweden.
During the walk Karl, at regular intervals, whipped out his icepick and hacked into the ice, carving out rough steps for us. It was done in a fashion similar to how an old-fashioned gentleman might lay his overcoat across a puddle for a lady.
And the higher you climbed, the better the view got. A vista of the glacial valley below gradually opened up. It was an overcast day. Everything-the sky, the ice, the mountains-all seemed to merge into greyness. It was like a ‘soft’ day in Ireland, complete with showers of drizzle. Below us the river Waiho, lined on both sides by silty gravel, was an unusual shade of grey due to the melted glacier water. However the peace was disturbed by the harsh sound of a helicopter at regular intervals. It was bringing tourists to the top of the glacier where apparently the most beautiful and whitest ice pinnacles are to be found. In the tourist brochure the photographs show ice which is so white it is blue. Most of the time we saw ice which was soiled, and certainly not the pristine blue colour that the brochures flagged. There were a lot of stones and scree on the ice and on the descent it had gotten dirtier as a result of the volume of tour groups traipsing upon it. The higher we got, the colder it got, and an icy wind began to blow. The other people in the group-a Dublin couple, a Dutch solo traveller and a few other Europeans-began to complain of the cold in their toes and fingers. “We have become one with the ice,” joked the Dutch man. The tour company had told me when I booked that the temperature on the glacier would only be one degree cooler than on level ground. How wrong they were! Suddenly the beauty of the glaciers turned to bleakness as the cold started to turn my toes numb. At one point on the descent, a sheer vertical face of ice lay before us, appearing impossible to get past. Out with the trusty ice pick and within 15 minutes Karl made a staircase for us all to descend complete with a rope attached to grab onto. He advised us to descend facing sideways. After a quarter of an hour waiting in the freezing cold we were all getting a bit grumpy and eager to get onto solid non ice ground and normal temperatures.
Our walk back to the village, or township as they call it in New Zealand, took us along the valley floor, where we saw a natural cave of ice cut into the base of the mountain. The Waiho River rushed past us and we walked through a temperate rainforest where leaves and vegetation were soggy with rain. There was no litter anywhere; it was pristine. The water in the streams we crossed over was as clear as glass; there was not a trace of murkiness or debri. This is one of the most amazing things about New Zealand-it really is clean and unpolluted. It is a nature’s paradise and for anyone who loves the outdoors it is a fabulous destination.
The Franz Josef glacier is 12 km long and ends 19 km from the Tasman Sea. It is unique in the fact that it descends from the Southern Alps to just 240 metres above sea level. The geologist and explorer Julius von Haast named the Franz Josef Glacier in 1863 after the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Having retreated several kilometres between the 1940s and 1980s, the glacier has been advancing since 1984. The flow rate is about 10 times that of typical glaciers.
A glacier hike would suit all outdoors types of people. It would particularly appeal to anyone keen to try out new terrain or anyone with a special interest in New Zealand’s geography and geology.
I took a tour with Franz Joseph Glacier Guides, based in the tiny hamlet of Franz Joseph. The company also offers full day tours for hardcore climbers and heli-hikes (a helicopter ride and walk). The tour cost me $85 and all gear was provided including boots, ice talons, rain jacket, woolly socks, hats and gloves.
For more information go online: www.franzjosef.com.
