Fox Glacier

Saturday, March 16 was not much of anything. We were on the bus almost all day, made a few stops, and arrived to the accommodation just before diner time. The hotel wasn’t bad. We had pretty big rooms, average Internet (for a price), and had to walk across a parking lot to go the bathrooms, but it could’ve been worse. I had cooking duty, so our group set out to prepare Mushroom Chicken Pasta for the whole group. It was quite the ordeal as we had only tiny pots and sub-par electric stoves. After about 2 hours, we finally completed the task and fed the whole group. That night, most of us chose to enjoy a night in which nothing was immediately due and went to bed fairly early.

The next morning, we had planned on waking up to watch the sunrise over Lake Matheson, which is a pretty famous sight in New Zealand, but the rain was bad, so we waited until later on to do our walk around the lake. It was still raining, but it had let up a little so we did the walk. It was beautiful, but I’m sure it would’ve been 10x better in pretty weather. We came back afterward, ate lunch, and got ready for our glacier hike.

The glacier was Fox Glacier and it’s famous because it is one of 2 glaciers left in New Zealand that went all the way out to sea. Though it is nothing like it once was, there is still a massive remnant of it. Seeing it from a distance is pretty amusing because it can be warm outside, yet there is just a massive block of ice out there. Anyway, we went to the outfitter and were given ski pants, a ski jacket, and another under layer. The hike out was fairly short, but it was raining really hard. My waterproof outer layer was letting a lot rain under it, so that was fun. When we got to the glacier, we put on crampons (big spikes that attach to your shoe) and headed onto the glacier. Every step taken required a big stomp so that you could have firm footing since we were walking on ice. I think I would have been fine going about 10 minutes and turning around, but we spent about an hour out there. For one thing it was pouring down rain, and the temperature was about 40 degree colder on the glacier. It makes sense, but it was weird to go from what is like late September for us to late January on ski slopes. We walked along a few tracks on the glacier, but my overall opinion was that once you’ve seen part of the glacier, you’ve seen the whole thing. Once we got off the glacier, it was nice to be warm again and we trudged back along the sketchy trail. Sketchy because the trail was susceptible to rock falls and avalanches. In fact, we could see them happening on the other side of the glacier river as we walked. Finally, we got back and the hot shower felt incredible. We then ate dinner, did a little work and got to bed. At the end of the day, walking on a glacier was a pretty cool and unique experience, but of all the things I’ve done, I don’t know that I would go on a glacier again.