Glacier Hiking

Walking on a frozen river of ice is a totally cool experience.

You don't need to be an expert mountain climber to get up close and personal with a glacier, but it is a moving feeling you get when you approach the end of glacier, a wall of frozen snow and ice that has been moving slowly to this point for several hundred years.

Glaciers are formed high up in mountains where water, snow and other precipitation collect and mass together and where the temperature remains freezing all or the time. Over the course of centuries this ice collects and starts to move down the mountain like a very slow river, until eventually it reaches a point where the temperatures are above freezing for more of the year than they are below zero degrees. Here the Glacier melts.

Most of the time glaciers do start and remain high up in inaccessible mountain ranges where they remain, traversed only by experienced mountaineers.

There are glaciers that are more accessible. The Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers in South New Zealand are two such glaciers. Situated about 25km apart in the Westland National Park on the West side of the South Island these two glaciers have been slowly moving and melting (they get slightly smaller each year due to the warming global climate) but are both accessible to the public. Trips are run from the towns of Fox and Franz Joseph (where there is also a visitor center and hotels/restaurants).

Two main trips are available, a shorter half day excursion and a longer full day trip. The only specialist equipment needed are ice boots and these are included in the cost of the tour, as is transport to the base of the glacier. Helicopter trips are also available.

The glacier walk itself starts with a short trek along the valley where the glacier has previously receded, a pebble and rubble covered plain, much like an old river bed. The Franz Joseph Glacier has a bluish tint which is quite noticeable as you get closer. And then it is on with the ice boots and up onto the glacier, picking your way over fissures and cracks in the ice until you are standing completely on ice, formed hundreds of years ago.

No special skills are required and whilst there is some walking involved, the actual climbing is not much more strenuous than climbing a flight of stairs. The thrill comes from doing something so unexpected and so unique; how many people do you know who have walked on a glacier?