Geotechnical Tramping

For the last week, we’ve been travelling down the west coast of the south island with Lynne and Dave. The weather was mostly cloudy and rainy, with temperature in the mid-teens.

We made it to glacier country and visited both of New Zealand’s famous glaciers, the Fox and Franz Josef. They are unique in that they are very low (altitude-wise) but are surrounded by a rainforest climate. Very odd indeed.

We hiked to the terminal face of Franz Josef Glacier, which is 7000 years old and 12 km long. It was pretty impressive, even though we were only able to get within 100 m of the terminal face – since the ice at the face randomly breaks off, they do not permit tourists up too close. Sadly, each year tourists do not respect the boundaries, and earlier this year two tourists were crushed by ice that fell on them while they were posing for a picture directly under the terminal face.

The following day we did an all-day guided glacier hike on the Fox Glacier, only 25 km down the road from Franz Josef. The Fox is 300 m deep and 13 km long. Since it’s so dangerous to approach the terminal face of the glacier, we hiked 800 steps up into the rainforest alongside the glacier to hike onto it higher up. The crampons on our boots helped steady us as Atli, our Icelandish guide, lead us on, over, and through the glacier, often pick-axing steps for us on steep surfaces. In total we spent four hours on the glacier and it only started to rain on our hike back to the bus.

To get off the west coast we had to drive over Haast Pass. To give you an idea how hilly and windy the roads are here, our 240 km drive from the glaciers over the pass took over 5 hours. Unfortunately our van completely broke down as we were driving up a giant hill, and New Zealand highways are always one lane each way with NO shoulder to speak of. As Lynne and Andrea slowed down and directed traffic around our van (which broke down on a blind corner), we waited for help. Did we mention it was pouring rain? Luckily a friendly tourist stopped to tow us up the steep hill very slowly to a pull-over, where we got a jump to our battery that lasted us until we got to our next town. One new battery and a new fuel filter later, and we’re good as gold! We are glad it didn’t cost very much to get her up and running again.

Once in Queenstown Craig and Dave did the Shotover JetBoat Ride, which took them within inches of the rocks as they rode down the river within canyons. The attached video was filmed by Andrea from the shore as they passed in front of her on their way 6 km downstream.

Now we are headed south to Invercargill, and our map is complete – we have completed our giant loop, and from now on will be travelling the path already taken. We hope to visit some old friends and get a bunch of hiking done before Christmas!