Here is Franz Josef Glacier... we walked right up to the boundary ropes around the terminal face. It's dangerous to get too close to it as ice is falling off all the time.
It's quite a surreal sight. Glaciers are fed by mountain cachements of deep snow fields which aren't visible from around the terminal face. They seem unlikely because they are surrounded by warm rainforests and are not affected by the seasons - the retreat or advancement of a glacier is dependent on the snowfall 6 years past.
The rush of water is loud, and the water is grey with 'rock-flour' ground up by the moving ice.
The valleys are flat-bottomed or U-shaped from the glaciers, caused by the constant advance and retreat of the ice face acting like a bulldozer. They form roche moutons (rounded hill tops), and sculptural curves in the rock face.
Here we are admiring the valley of Franz-Josef Glacier.
The ice fans out into seracs and gradually tumbles into the water.
This is Fox glacier, the one we climbed:
And the river melting out of its mouth:
It's quite an alien landscape! The melt water river constantly ebbs, flows, floods and changes course over the flat bottomed valley.
After the famous 800 steps through the rainforest, we donned mittens, hats, crampons and picked up alpenstocks to tackle the ice. The advice is to walk wide and high through the ice.
The guides cut fresh steps into the ice everyday (and during the hike) as the glaciers are constantly moving. You can see on the picture below where the previous staircase has squashed at the bottom, so they start on a new one! Its tougher than it looks, as the ice is packed very hard and solid.
This is our guide, Melissa. She's handy with a pickaxe! Here she's showing us a moulin with great care. They are potentially very deep holes into the ice and not a good idea to fall into as it's near impossible to get back out.
We had great fun exploring the glacier, feeling very adventurous.
We went up as high as the icefall - a region akin to a waterfall in a river analogy - full of dangerous and impassable seracs but very beautiful:
The other group in this picture help to give an idea of scale:
Time to pose! xxx Char & Dave
3 comments:
oooo one of the places/things i want to do in nz still.
it looks very wild and just like all our OL geography school text books - U shaped valleys and rounded hills - surreal! So glad you liked your present!
Thanks again, Kathy and Ken! It was such an adventure
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