Glaciers and a long, freezing cold tunnel

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Made it to the glacier! It was a rather cloudy day but we went to see the terminus. The glacier is actually growing, which is really interesting. The glaciers are very sensitive since they are maritime and they recede and grow accordingly. They had a lot of snowfall 5 years ago and as a result it is growing now. Couldn't get too close though because of rock and ice fall.

Since we didn't want to upset their rangers by going on the glacier we went to investigate an old tunnel that was built to divert water to an area they were panning for gold in. It was 200 meters long and had just enough water in that we had to take off our boots and barefoot it. Very cool. Glow worms made up their own constellations in the darkness. This was really an exercise in toughening Brian's feet. I think both our feet got so numb that by the end we could of run over glass.

The next day (13th in Kiwi time) we headed up Alex's Knob (around 1300 meters) to try and get a view of the glacier and Mt. Cook only to be shut down by the clouds. We reached the top but could only see grassy ground and white sky. Since our luck wasn't working out at the Franz Joseph glacier we thought we would try our luck at the Fox so we headed down to Gillespie's Beach to stay the night.

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