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Published: April 11th 2006
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In the helicopter up to Fox Glacier
WOW! Look closely and you can see the tears in my eyes! Now that I am working in one of a handful of hotels in the township, I will be staying in Fox Glacier until the end of the busy tourist season, about the second week of May. The town is so small with the number of permanent village residents at 255, and basically just caters for the tourists that are travelling through, and they often don't stay longer than one night. Therefore the job in the hotel is co-share which means I am working full-time hours, on average forty hours a week, serving in the restaurant, making beds and housekeeping the fifty-one rooms. The accommodation provided at very cheap rent includes three meals a day e.g. cereal, fruit, full-english for breakfast, pasta with garlic bread for lunch and dinner of lamb shanks with mashed potatoes and veg with white chocolate and blueberry cheesecake.
It feels a bit like living in a Big Brother-style group house which is huge, has a great decking area, nice garden and large kitchen. In between working I spend time with my flatmates, playing cricket when the weather is fine or Yahtzee and listening to the guys playing their guitars when it's raining. In fact it rains
Heli-hike at Fox Glacier
Inside one of the ice-caves quite a lot : the annual rainfall is 2575mm and while we're talking about facts and figures, the average summer temperature is 19.5 C, the winter average is 12.5 C and the West Coast region averages 1845 hours of sunshine per year. It's lush.
One of the benefits of working for the hotel is that on a day off, when the helicopter trips up onto the glacier aren't fully booked, it is possible to join one of the groups for free. Sometimes it can take a lot of patience to wait until there's an available space, but I managed to be included with a dutch group on only my second attempt. The glacier 'heli-hike' is probably the most popular of all the excursions and a great way to appreciate the scale of the ice.
The glacier 'heli-hike' run by Alpine Guides and normally costing $265 combines the thrill of two helicopter flights with the excitement of walking on the Fox Glacier. The remote landing site on the ice is an exceptionally beautiful part of the glacier and wearing instep crampons we followed the steps cut by our guide Rodger, exploring the amazing constantly changing formations and ice caves.
Fox Glacier
Amazing view from the helicopter The ice of the valley was known to generations of Maori as Te Moeka O Tuawae which translates as Tuawae's bed. The name recalls in poetry the deeds of a legendary figure, Tuawae, but the story of how the glacier became Tuawae's bed is lost in the midst of history. There are actually over 60 glaciers in Westland National Park and the Fox, renamed in 1872 by PM Sir William Fox, and Franz Josef, about 25 minutes drive from here, are the largest and have a combined area of over 4,000 hectares. They are the most unusual in the world because they both descend from the Southern Alps into temperate rainforest.
The local D.O.C. office is a mine of information about the area and I spent a good couple of hours there one rainy afternoon. For those of you who are interested, a glacier is formed by the weight of fresh snow which falls on the neve surface (catchment area). The air from underlying areas is squeezed out to create firn (soft ice) and once most of the air is forced out, hard blue ice is formed. The neve is up to 300 metres deep. This huge mass of
Knights Point
The beautiful West Coast of the South Island ice and snow starts moving downwards under gravity, creating great pressures in the ice, especially where it flows over hard rocks. The ice splits forming cracks or crevasses and can be up to 100 metres deep. Further down the mountain the upper ice fall is a jumble of open crevasses and ice pinnacles or seracs, and the glacier moves down the valley as much as 5 metres a day. If the melt rate exceeds the rate of replacement of ice, the terminal face will retreat. Between 1965 and 1968 Fox Glacier advanced 180 metres but since then it has been in retreat.
Throughout the whole experience our guide filled us in with mind-boggling statistics and information and was highly professional. I found my confidence of walking on the ice increased rapidly and, although we spent over two hours exploring the glacier, I could have enjoyed longer.
Occasionally at work I get a bit distracted talking to the customers in the restaurant about how fantastic the helicopter flights were for me and recommending it, so it's definately a good way of promoting Alpine Guides!
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Amy
non-member comment
Oh my!
Oh my god, the glacier experience looks amazing. Thanks for the Birthday card, it was lovely to hear from you. Did you get my last message as I didn't see it up yet? I am on my Easter break at mo and will be going in for the final slog at college soon, shows in July. Love all the photos, particularly the whales and the ice caves. Have you come across the fences of shoes and bras yet? Miss you, lots of love Amy xx