Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand
On Day 14 of our honeymoon in New Zealand, we woke up in Greymouth and snuck out of our hostel at 7am. We had a glacier tour to catch! Although the date was December 29th, we wanted to do something extra-special for Matt’s 26th birthday on December 30th, and so after a bit of research, we landed on the perfect thing: a “helicopter hike” on Franz Josef glacier, the fourth largest glacier in the world.
Franz Josef is an eight-mile-long glacier located in the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage Site in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. As you can probably guess, the glacier is named after the Austrian Emperor, Franz Josef I. Julius von Haast was the one of the original explorers to discover the glacier in the 1850s. The Maori name for Franz Josef is Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere, which means “the tears of Hine Hukatere” (more on that later).
Once we arrived in beautiful glacier country, only about two hours south of Greymouth, we stepped into the visitor center to await our 10:30am tour.
Before visiting the glacier, I had a bit of a misperception of what it would entail. For example, when you hear the word glacier, don’t you imagine something akin to an iceberg in Antarctica? (if not, then I am hopelessly alone). Originally, I had envisioned a massive, long, expansive sheet of white snow and ice, but Franz Josef doesn’t really look like that.
Franz Josef Glacier is a steadily moving sheet of compressed snow and ice situated within a valley between the mountains. Glaciers are in a constant state of advance and retreat, driven by how much snowfall they get and how quickly the ice melts. Since 2008, Franz Josef has been in a rapid state of retreat and has lost several meters of length, largely due to global warming. For decades, people used to hike up Franz Josef without use of an aircraft by simply scaling the terminal face, which is the end point of the glacier. In 2015, however, hikes up the terminal face were no longer allowed due to the dangerous icefall and hazardous conditions, and so now all tours must reach the glacier by helicopter.
Due to advance and retreat, the glacial landscape changes daily, so our visit to Franz Josef on December 29, 2017 would look vastly different than a visit even on December 30th of the same year.
Our visit began with an introduction to our lovely and hilarious Glacier Guide, Megan. As she was introducing herself and giving us a history of the glacier, we recognized her accent as American, and she told us that she hails from Oregon, but has worked on seven different glaciers throughout the world. (This made me feel quite safe).
The staff at the visitor center then spent quite a bit of time weighing us and asking us about any medical conditions we had, before making us sign a terrifying waiver releasing them of liability for literally every terrible thing that could happen to a person during a helicopter tour and an ice hike on a constantly flowing, living glacier. As a lawyer, I cringed while signing this sheet.
Megan then showed us how to gear up for the adventure. Franz Josef Glacier Guides provide all the equipment for glacier hiking, complete with appropriate waterproof over-trousers, a rain jacket, sturdy hiking boots and socks, crampons, a small shoulder bag, and hats and gloves. If you’ve never put on crampons, I’ll explain: it’s a device that attaches to boots to improve mobility on ice and snow.
They have rigid, sharp points on the bottoms, sides, and toes of the boot to make it quite easy to trek across ice. In fact, my crampons were almost too good—I kept tripping because they clung to the ice so well, and so if I didn’t raise my foot really high off the ice, they’d catch as I walked and set me off balance.
Once we were warm and bundled in our ice gear, Megan led us through a short bush walk out of the visitor center onto the helicopter pad. Our group consisted of ten people and Megan, and this was when I learned why they’d weighed us: there were two helicopters, and each could only hold a certain weight limit. I got a glimpse of the hi-tech computer they had employed to calculate which person should sit in which seat to properly balance the helicopter.
As we approached the helicopters and saw the pilots gearing them up, I felt a wash of nerves come over me. Tiny prop plans, swimming with wild dolphins, traveling 16 hours across the Pacific Ocean—all totally doable, no problem. Landing a helicopter on a field of ice that’s moving beneath our feet? A little scarier. But just as my nerves started to take control, Megan loaded us into the helicopter, and I didn’t have time to think about anything except how WINDY and LOUD those rotor blades were. I kept ducking as I approached the helicopter because I was inexplicably worried they’d chop my head off, even though they were super high above me.
Since I was the shortest person on our expedition with a whopping height of 5’2”, Megan stuck me in the front next to the door, which she told me not to pull on, because “it’s extremely fragile.” Yay!
Just seconds after they strapped me in, shoved some headphones over my ears, and slammed the door, the pilot took off. It was nothing like an airplane. From the second we pulled off the ground, we were roaring towards the glacier, which we could see in the distance. The flight only last about 10 minutes, but within the first minute, we’d gained so much ground and speed that we were zooming over treetops alongside the edge of the mountain. The girl sitting beside me pinched my arm and yelled, “it’s like in the movies!” She wasn’t wrong. To my right, we were just a few feet from the craggy, rocky sides of a huge mountain; to our left, a thick forest of trees blanketed the valley; directly in front of us lay the white, blue, shining glacier.
It was during the helicopter ride that I saw why the Maori call this place “the tears of Hine Hukatere.” On its way down the mountain, the glacier splits into two icy rivers, circumvents a rock face, and then re-converge at the edge of the mountain, like tears.
Our helicopter was approaching the glacier fast, and I started frantically looking for the helipad. Where we were going to land?? I don’t see a landing pad! We were only a few feet from the ground when I realized: oh, there isn’t one. We just plopped straight onto the ice, where another glacier guide wrangled me out of my seatbelt and helped me swing myself onto an ice bridge they had created.
Once everyone was unloaded, Megan helped us don our crampons, and then we scaled a rough set of ice stairs that she chopped out for us. At the top of the stairs, we paused and looked around as the helicopter took off. With the chopper’s farewell, the earth fell silent.
You know that silence you hear at the first snowfall? All is calm, all is bright? Never have words rung truer in my ears. The land lay blue and white before us, but not flat as I had imagined. This ice was chunky, rough, carved, zigging and zagging in massive crevasses, trenches, holes, splits, and pockets. The earth rose and fell around me in gleaming, icy heaps, as if giants had lumbered through this ground just minutes before we landed.
It is impossible to describe the magnitude of this place; my photos only seem to minimize the grandeur of the glacier. Megan took us on a three-hour hike across Franz Josef, helping us navigate crevasses and trenches that rose up on either side several meters high; she pointed out dangerous cracks in the ice where the glacier gave way to ominous black depths hundreds of meters deep; we jumped across ponding, slushy pools of water that Megan tested with her ice pick to see how deep they were (some were so deep that they seemed bottomless, so we inched our way around them instead of trying to jump over them).
The glacier, she explained, is constantly moving, so each day, the Glacier Guides have to carve, pick, and navigate new paths through the terrain. Megan was particularly skilled at carving paths. The first time she raised her ice pick in the air to chop some stairs, she yelled, “I know what you’re thinking! Damn girl, look at those muscles!!” I told her later that she was my favorite person I’d ever met.
Such a remarkable place gives her the flexibility to give her guests a unique experience every day, but like all types of freedom, it comes with certain dangers: Megan didn’t let any of us wander off her carefully crafted trail, because the ice is deceptive. Even though it looked safe to walk on, it could easily give way if we chose the wrong spot, and we’d plummet into the abyss.
On our first hour of hiking, I marveled at how warm I was, despite being surrounded by ice. Megan, who was in just a t-shirt, explained that in summertime, the glacier receives a warm breeze from the coast just 90km away, so it doesn’t really get that cold. I even had to shed a few layers along the way.
One of the most memorable experiences on our hike was when Megan found a glacial waterfall for us and encouraged us each to take a drink of the magical, pure water—the cleanest on earth. As Megan flicked water onto each of us like a Catholic priest blessing his church with holy water, Matt and I took a drink straight out of the earth and then I filled up my water bottle (although Megan told me that on her first month working there, she did the same thing, and then developed leg cramps because glacier water has none of the minerals in it that our tap water contains).
Our next adventure was exploring an ice cave, easily one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. This cave was home to some of the famous “blue ice” that people travel all around the world to see. Blue ice occurs when snow falls on a glacier and then gets compressed into the ice; air bubbles form during this process, enlarging the ice crystals in the glacier and making the ice appear blue. As Megan explained, large quantities of water appear blue because water absorbs that color less well than other colors.
The blue ice is slick—even our crampons wouldn’t latch onto this stuff, so scrambling around in the caves required Megan to hoist some ropes and anchors so we wouldn’t get hurt. I will say that I bummed up my knee pretty badly in one of the caves, and as I write this blog 6 days later, it still hurts a bit! Of course, I didn’t even notice until the next day when I was riding horses!
Megan took us as close as was safe to the top of the glacier, where there is a sheer, vertical mountain wall where snow catches, freezes into ice, and then crashes into chunks on the ground. As we explored, we frequently heard loud crashing noises behind us, and it was always exciting to see ice raining down in the background off the mountain wall.
As we trekked, Megan taught us how to walk efficiently with crampons, giving us tips and tricks, as well as testing our skills on steadily more difficult inclines, hills, slopes, and tiny passages. We crawled through spaces so thin that we had to turn sideways in order to fit; we walked down ice hills that were nearly vertical; and scrambled across blue ice.
It was one of the best days in the world. Our helicopter ride home was exhilaratingly bittersweet—I hated to leave a place that was so sublime, mysterious, ever-changing, and beautiful.
