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Fox Glacier Heli-hiking

foxheli.jpg
After a full day of ice hiking yesterday, it seemed only fair to take it easy for the Fox Glacier (no, not the mint variety). So, it was off to the helipad to get a lift halfway up the glacier to where the ice is smooth (helps the helicopter land!). The Fox Glacier is a couple of kilometres bigger than the Franz Josef, and flows between the peaks of Mount Tasman and Mount Cook, the two tallest New Zealand mountains, and starts from a neve that gets 45 metres of snow a year (yes, forty five!), and luckily for us, not a drop whilst we were there, the weather gods have been shining on us! Both the glaciers move at a couple of metres a day, not that you can really see it.

From where the helicopter landed we could see a huge ice fall, making the glacier really like a frozen river. The ice was even clearer and bluer than yesterday, and although solid it was so clear that it looked like thin ice on water and could break at any time. Jeff the guide meandered his way across the ice and found us caves to climb through and up, getting only slightly muddy in the process, as well as freezing ourselves onto the glacier. Before long it was time to climb back in the chopper, in what is the first time we've used helicopters as a means of getting somewhere instead of scenic flights, cool! Well, that's the last glacier blog for a while, I think wearing the same woolly socks for two days straight is pushing it!

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on April 13, 2008 12:05 PM.

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