Total Miles Traveled: 59,583
Another highlight on New Zealand’s South Island: its glaciers – Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier.
Since we had hiked on a glacier in Argentina (Perito Moreno), we were excited to do it again. This time, though, we decided to do a “Heli-Hike” tour of Fox Glacier, where you fly up to the middle of the glacier and hike around for a couple of hours.
It would be our first time in a chopper and it offered some fantastic views:
But next time we go in a helicopter, we’re going to take our motion sickness meds. Though it was only a few minutes, we were already starting to feel nauseous. A few more minutes in the chopper and we would have had, umm, issues.
Walking on a glacier is an awesome experience. We’d do it again in a heartbeat. It’s always changing because of the ice melting, cracking, moving down the mountain. And there are just really beautiful views:
The minerals in the water make the ice look super blue…
Here’s a really cool example of how a glacier is living and constantly changing. We could hear water running at the bottom of this crevasse so the guide started chopping off hunks of ice to toss in to see how long it took to hear a splash. Fun, right? I know. It WAS fun. And it took 4-5 seconds to hear the splash. So pretty deep. You wouldn’t want to go jump in for a swim.
So about an hour later in to the hike we came back upon the same crevasse… OK, so maybe we created this pool from our overzealous ice chunk throwing, but it was surprising how quickly the landscape had changed!
Here we are with a trusty ice axe:
An ice cave:
Another river:
After the hike, we went to check out Lake Matheson nearby. Nice easy hike and great restaurant called Matheson Cafe. It’s the only “nice” restaurant in Fox Glacier town and totally worth the splurge.
The million dollar view from Matheson Cafe:
And the sunset…
The next day we hiked up to Franz Josef Glacier. Pretty neat to see the terminal face, but you could probably skip it if you had hiked on Fox Glacier.
Here’s a giant cave at the base of the terminal face of the glacier. Chunks of ice flowed out from the cave which was pretty cool. We were told that a couple tourists died because they hopped the fence, went in the cave and were killed by falling ice. Not sure if it’s true, but not a smart move if it’s true…
Have a look at all of our photos from Fox Glacier below:
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