Fox Glacier
The Helicopter ride
You cannot just hike up to these glaciers anymore. Due to Global Warming they are receding each year & their edges are unstable and unsafe. So the only way to get on to them in New Zealand’s Fiordland is to take a helicopter ride on to them.
(Update in 2025 – according to research, glaciers in NZ have shrunk by 29% in the last 10 years. A shocking indication of rapid environmental change & its impact on the local community.)
Sadly some months after our trip a helicopter doing the same trip that we took crashed & all on board perished.
Our previously booked excursion (swimming with Dolphins in Kiakoura) had been cancelled due to bad weather and as you can see in the photo on the right, there were threateningly low clouds just before we were due to take off. Apparently at this time of year (mid- March) over half the trips are cancelled. Luckily the weather forecast was good & indeed the weather did clear up later.
The Landing
The glacier is vast & it is difficult to appreciate the size from our photos, but it is 13 Kms long.
Me doing a bit of impromptu hacking.
No, our guide, Brad, was not playing at being Mickey Mouse, but just had big ear-protectors.
The steep valley sides account for the relatively rapid movement of the glacier. Very forbidding!
Glacial ice is a different colour from regular ice. It is so blue because the dense ice of the glacier absorbs every other colour of the spectrum except blue – so blue is what we see! (thanks to Alaska Satellite Facility)
There were some spectacular ice formations, including the ice-hole (photo below)
The photo on the right is looking up the glacier. The glacier falls some 2,600m. The whole glacier moves down at the rate of about 1 metre per week. It looks like a suddenly frozen sloping choppy sea.
Fox Glacier from Lake Matheson
