Fox Glacier was originally named Albert Glacier for its discoverer. When New Zealand became a sovereign nation (I’m not sure the exact date on which that happened) her first prime minister was William Fox. PM William decided to visit Albert Glacier, and when he did so he enjoyed its beauty and its grandeur so much that he decided to re-name it after himself. (Apparently prime ministers can rename national features of natural wonder at will.) As our guide told us this story—we were mostly foreigners, you know—we scoffed at the arrogance of such a thing. But our guide added then, “Well, the move was not without merit. You see, he did produce a beautiful watercolour painting of the glacier which now hangs in Such-and-such a museum in Wellington.”
Mental note: while in Europe, paint a watercolour of the Charles Bridge and tell them to rename it the Emrys Bridge. Or do I have to become the PM of the Czech Republic first?
A glacier sliding down into temperate rainforest is a thing to behold. Fox Glacier looks as if God stood at the top of this long green forested gorge and dumped a trillion-gallon bucket of crushed ice down into the valley. As we approached the glacier by hiking up the side of the valley through hot moist, ferny forest, we were confronted by this massive flow of white chunks that stands about four stories high and fills up the valley from side to side. The closer we get, however, the more we see the grey streaks of dust and stone that are a part of the glacier, built up over years of rockfall and dust landing on the ice then being covered by another winter’s snowfall. The pressure of gravity pulling the glacier down the gorge makes the whole mass buckle and crimp along the top surface forming long cracks, deep crevices, and spiky ridges. The top surface of the glacier is like a miniature alpine mountain range in itself.
I had expected the surface of the glacier to feel like snow. Instead, it felt like the surface of a half-melted, half-hardened snow cone (as you get at the carnival). And sharp! One little slip while trying to position a photo I was taking sliced up my knee. Definitely not powdery snow. Rivulets of clear water run down the glacier’s surface and collect in pools, some as big as a quarter and others like a bathtub. The silt settles to the bottom of the pools—or gets stuck on the surface of the ice—so the water is pure.
It’s blue. The whole glacier when struck by the sun has a luminous pale blue colour, as do the pools that collect on the glacier’s surface. When the ice cracks and streams erode a cavern in the ice, the walls glow with a light that resembles the sky. Truly awesome. God did a good job with glaciers.
Before we get on the surface of the glacier our guide gives us crampons to strap to our boots (given to us by the company—the wearing of someone else’s boots has a whole other story to it) and up we go on steps cut fresh every morning by the guide company. As he hops along ahead of us like a mountain goat in the Alps, we trudge along and try to get the hang of stepping down flat-footed. No heel-toe, heel-toe here. The crampon’s right in your instep, so you’ve got to set your foot down flat to get a grip. After a couple hundred metres we’ve got the feel of it and make good time.
It’s about 80 degrees out, but we’re standing on a phenomenal amount of ice. Still, we’re in shorts and t-shirts and wearing lots of sunscreen. It’s quite comfortable. I look back toward the valley and the coast and see that the air is making heat-ripples off the surface of the glacier. Who thought I’d ever see hot air rising from ice?
We peek down into long blue ice-caves. We gawk at mountains of ice thrusting above us into the blue sky. We marvel at huge boulders floating on top of white cresting waves of ice (didn’t they teach us in school that rocks don’t float?). We see a strip of red sand buried in the glacier from Australia, when a storm carried the silt across the Tasman Sea, dumped it on the west coast of New Zealand, then left it to be snowed on and frozen into the history of Fox Glacier. We look up the valley to the craggy blue-white teeth of the seracs, remnants of an ice fall, that tower over us in an attempt to bite the sky. We look over at the walls of the valley where the glacier has advanced in past years and scraped the rock clean of trees, ferns, and moss. We marvel at how hard our guide works to cut new steps into virgin ice with his ice pick, jumping like a goat and swinging like a lumberjack. We hold our breaths as we stagger down steps that would never pass OSHA codes in your house, and heave a sigh of relief when we’re all at the bottom. (Speaking of OSHA, I didn’t sign a wavier for this journey, either.)
Six hours after first donning our crampons the group descends the last set of ice-steps to the valley floor. The temperature jumps from 75 degrees to 85 in the sunny forest and we make the wearying hike back to the bus. When I get home I’m tired and hungry, but filled with memories of majestic sculptures broken and carved by weather and gravity: one of New Zealand’s great natural wonders. Well worth it.
~emrys
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