New Zealand - Franz Joseph

Day 27 - Saturday, February 18

Left the Poo Pub and kept heading south along the coast towards the next stop - Franz Joseph, home to the Franz Joseph glacier, which is one of only a few spots where you can go hiking on a glacier.

Saturday we arrived early afternoon and had the day to just check out the town. Though they offer half-day glacier hikes, it really takes a full day to get up on the glacier, so the standard KEX stop in Franz Joseph is for two nights to allow everyone to do the full day hike.  I used the free time to relax, get some exercise, and sort through some photos.
 
Day 28 - Sunday, February 19

The weather forecast for Sunday was cloudy with showers, which would've put a bit of a damper on the glacier hike, but I figured it was only a matter of time before our luck with the weather ran out, especially since the west coast of the south island is mostly rain forest and gets a ton of rain annually due to the Southern Alps just to the east. Luckily, it was dry and pretty sunny in the morning and quite nice. Eventually some clouds settled in, and it actually started to rain right as we finished the hike, but the weather for the hike was definitely better than expected.

They separated us into groups such that the slow folks wouldn't be slowing down the fast folks, so I jumped into the front group to try to get as high up on the glacier as possible. I guess when I thought "glacier" - I was thinking a big sheet of blue ice, but as it turns out, this glacier, and apparently a lot of glaciers tend to have a lot of rocks and dirt and such, especially on the terminal/front face that it collects as it carves through the valley. Here's a picture of the glacier from the bottom. Note that what looks like rocks in various places is actually a large chunk of ice with a thin layer of rocks and such on the outside. 

From New Zealand - West Coast

I took way too many pictures while hiking around - feel free to check them out in the album. I guess I also thought of a glacier as being somewhat of a flat piece of ice, probably based on some picture in a grade-school science book. But at least in this case, there were lots of large cracks, tight crevices, large "pinnacles," a few caves, and generally terrain that was rather challenging to traverse. Our guide was constantly digging steps into walls of ice with a pickax and without our little spiky shoes called crampons we would've been totally unable to get anywhere. But it was a lot of fun, and quite different from anything I've ever done - a pretty cool experience. And now some pictures:

From New Zealand - West Coast

From New Zealand - West Coast

From New Zealand - West Coast

The price of the hike also included entry into the glacier hot pools, so after a good 8 hours on the ice we relaxed for a bit and then went out and enjoyed a few of the local bars.