Blue Lakes, Blue Ice, Grey Sky

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My luck couldn't last forever... but at least it lasted as long as it did. Saturday was forecast to rain and although the day started stunningly, I knew it wouldn't stay for long. This being said, it was not necessarily a bad day for a shower or two as I was heading north through the 2^nd of my alpine crossings, Haast Pass.

Leaving Wanaka, I woke past Lake Howea and back to the northern section of Lake Wanaka, before starting to climb once again. The clouds were already covering a lot of the tops of the mountains and it wasn't long until I joined them. The road weaves in and out of Mt Cook National Park, alternating between pasture lands and the temperate rainforest so synonymous with the west coast of New Zealand.

One thing I've had to come to terms with is the road signage over here.... let me explain.

In Australia, the only areas I've ever seen a "Road Open/Closed" sign are in the north where they get flooding from cyclones and in the Snowy Mountains where they are occasionally closed in Winter from heavy snow falls. In New Zealand, nearly every main road has these signs. It got me thinking... does it snow that much over here, even down on the plains? I've since worked out the reason behind it thanks to a little help from the road going through Haast Pass. New Zealand experiences so many tremors that the roads eventually disintegrate over time. The amount of road works constantly going on throughout the country should have been a good indication, but the penny finally dropped when seeing the sign 40km before the pass.

"Major Slip Yesterday. Proceed With Caution. Expect Delays"

You see, on the plains when they get a tremor, it cracks the road up a little each time..... in the mountains, when they get a tremor, a large amount of rock and vegetation slides down covering (if not taking with it) the road. This had happened just yesterday!! And from what I was to discover, major is a nice way of saying catastrophic!!

On the climb towards the pass, there are a number of small stop-offs, ranging from rivers and rainforest, to raging cascades or free-falling waterfalls. As I got higher my hopes that altitude would help the constant gnawing on me were dashed at each stop by the sudden emergence of the dreaded Dracula once again.At one such stop, I read a quote from one of the foremen that worked on the building of the pass. He mentioned...

The sandfly was invented to stop the workers being lazy during the day as nothing motivates movement quite like it. Then the night crew became tardy so the mosquito was invented.

Just as I reached the highest point in the road, the workmen appeared. I can only imagine what they must have encountered when first seeing the slip as 24 hours later and they had managed to compact it enough to allow one lane of traffic through at a time. Of course this lane was on the uphill side and I have no idea how they were going to manage to get a second lane when there was nothing but air there. Harrowing stuff... but on the bright side, people that tried to cross the day before were told to take the long way round.... 12 hours and 1000km around.

Coming back out onto the west coast was a shock after the rugged terrain of the last 5 days. The smell of salt back in the air and the crash of waves coming in through the window spurred me past the historic town of Haast and up the coast. Before long the road starts to once again undulate as the Southern Alps move closer to the sea and then out of nowhere a sign appears... You Are Now Entering Glacier Country.

Fox Glacier is a short 4km drive from the highway to the parking area. Along the entrance drive a some sobering reminders of what is happening throughout the world to these beautiful wonders. About 2km along the first sign reads, In 1750 the glacier ended here. another 1500m and the next reads, In 1930 the glacier ended here. Reaching the carpark you realise that in the last 80 years the glacier has retreated nearly 2km.... the same distance that it retreated in the previous 180 years.

Heading up the walk trail takes you past huge scree piles from where the valley walls are collapsing because the weight isn't being held up by ice anymore. Finally catching sight of the base of the glacier, the last 100m is a near vertical (at least it felt like it) climb to the viewpoint to see the main body. An effort well worth the expenditure. Whereas the base is grey, discoloured ice that is slowly breaking away (moving at about 50-60cm a day), the body is a shining white mass stretching up the valley to the neve (the head - the area that the glacier draws it's ice from) which moves between 5 and 6 metres a day. As the ice at the neve gets compacted and squeezed into the valley, the ice turns from white on the surface to blue underneath creating an appearance of a bottomless expanse as the light is refracted over and over again. Hard to see while buried in clouds but hopefully tomorrow brings better examples.

The final leg of the journey for the day is to the base of the most famous of New Zealand's glaciers, Franz Joseph, where I pulled in and started planning for the next day.

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