The Road Goes Ever On: Don't Go Too Near the Glaciers

Friday, January 9, 2009

Don't Go Too Near the Glaciers

Beginning around Greymouth, on the coast, the land begins to change. Everything turns grey, the rock, the rivers, etc. The weather also turned grey. The sunny weather we have enjoyed, even in the rain forests, is over for a while. It is cloudy and raining intermittently. Looking at the map, we know that to our east are the Southern Alps, not particularly high mountains, but high enough to be intensely glaciated. The area around here receives about 5m of rain a year. Yes, 5 meters. Higher up, that means tons of snow, ice, glaciers, and glacial milk in the streams and rivers.

Before turning east into the mountains, however, the road continues further south to Hokitika (“Hoki”), a small but picturesque enclave of artisans and craftspersons. We spent a few hours looking at the shops, particularly the jade and wood shops. Jade is all over the west side of the island, and the Maori used it extensively for all kinds of practical and ceremonial purposes. Hoki also features the Hokitika Sock Machine Museum, where one may not only view sock manufacturing machines of the past but also purchase fine socks, many manufactured locally. See illustration for evidence I am not making this up. No one could make this up.

We proceeded on, now more easterly toward our goal for the day, the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, relatively massive glaciers coming down from Mt. Cook & friends. At their height, they came nearly to the sea, but, we are now (for the last 10,000 years or so) in an age of glacial retreat. We took in the visitor center at the Franz Josef, drove out to see it, but decided it would be better to do our daily walk at the Fox glacier, a few more km south. We also theorized it might not be raining at the Fox. We did indeed walk out to near the edge of the Fox. Just a second before the picture above was snapped, the glacier calved—a shocking roar and then a splash nearly as high at the glacier itself. We had seen calving before, at Glacier Bay in Alaska and also in the Alps, but never anything quite so large as this one. You can see some of the debris in the lower right of the photo. Half an hour later, as we walked closer to the farthest viewpoint on the trail, we heard that two persons had been killed in the incident we had earlier witnessed from far away. Park rescue and recovery staff began passing us en route to the scene. We learned later that two Australian men, in their 20s, had ventured well beyond the authorized viewpoint and were indeed killed. In the news coverage, a Park official noted that “people just love to touch the ice.” The last photo above is of some of the debris as it washed pass us in the river.

We drove on, further south, ever more grey, and camped at another holiday park, taking advantage of the kitchen and dining room facilities. Vicki fixed chicken cordon-bleu, and we spent much of the evening chatting with Kiwis from Palmerston North, en route to tramps in the south, as we are. Palmerston North is a sister city of our hometown, Missoula.