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Now here is a real rain forest! Looking into its depths, near Lake Matheson |
A short walk down the street from Te Weheka Inn was the rambling building of Fox Glacier Guiding, a company that runs trips on the big glacier that gives the town its name. They supply you with boots if necessary, crampons (they’re always necessary), outer pants and jackets if you need’em, and all you want for a great four-hour jaunt up to and onto the glacier. And they give you a stern talk about safety, as well. Our group of six, and a couple of dozen others, climbed into an incredibly rickety old bus, for the half-hour trip to the trail head for getting to the Fox Glacier.
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| 9:40am—big image, small | 9:43am—big image, small |
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| 9:44am—big image, small | 9:55am—big image, small |
We piled out of the bus, and divided into two groups; ours was to be led by a woman named Hilary, who seemed to be rather more businesslike and serious than the man who led the other group. In particular, I liked the way that she was very solicitous of Mark, with his mild vertigo, when we got to difficult passages on the way up—but more of that later on.
It wasn’t a matter of getting out of the bus and walking right onto the glacier, mind you. We would have quite a little climb and walk before we got onto the ice. The upper left picture was taken from the parking lot just before we started our walk. It gives a good feel for the grayness and mistiness of the day, and the monumentality of the landscape, with moraines like what you see in the center of the shot , as well as huge tumbled rocks here and there.
As we started up the trail, we got more complete views of the glacier, as the upper right and lower left shots show; and as we got closer and closer, the thing ahead looked more and more forbidding. In the lower right picture, you see the roughness of the terrain. Don’t forget that seventy and more years ago, where we were now walking was completely covered by ice: many of the stones we were walking on were deposited by the glacier not that long ago.
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As we walked, there was relatively little opportunity to take pictures. Generally speaking, it was a steady climb upwards, but with occasional peeks out to the landscape below. For the most part, the terrain was moderately demanding, but in places, there were signs telling us not to stop for the next however-many meters: too much risk of slipping terrain to risk more than the minimal amount of time in the vicinity.
And then there was the segment of the trail where the path was so narrow and the drop below so sheer that there was chain bolted into the rock for us to hold onto with both hands as we passed. Here, Hilary took our walking sticks, and told us to put away anything we had in hand so that we could pay exclusive attention to negotiating the path. And she was very careful to make sure that Mark was not in any trouble with vertigo.
But now to the pictures: That’s Hilary in the top picture in the left column, to the left, and the immense boulder in the upper picture in the right column is one of the “tumbled rocks” I mentioned before. Half an hour later, we could look down on the valley, as you see in the middle snap in the left column. And a while later than that, we could look directly across at the glacier, which we were actually walking on about half an hour after that, as you’ll see in the next bunch of pictures.
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By 11:15 in the morning or so, we had strapped on our crampons, and we were following Hilary onto the ice. This was definitely a guided trip: you didn’t go off on your own.
I should explain that since the glacier moves past the hikers’ jumping-off point at the rate of three to four meters per day, the guides have to hack out fresh trails every morning. These are plenty wide enough for people to walk on, with neatly carved-out steps to climb up or down on, as you see in the top picture in the left column (to the right of here).
The second shot in the left column shows nicely what the weather was on this day and in that place. Not cold at all, but very gray and overcast. I was very surprised at the color of the ice: not pure and white by any means, as you see. It's the pulverized stone from beneath the glacier, as well as the dust that blows down from the overhanging mountains. the two pictures at the bottom of this group show the loneliness of the experience: even when you’e with a group of people, the immensity of the ice takes over. In the upper picture in the right column, Jim and Pat were being photographed with their own camera by another member of our glacier-walking group, and I took advantage of the moment to take their picture at the same time.
When I saw people walking through a tunnel in the ice, I asked Mark, “Would you do that?” He said Sure, if the guide said it would be all right. But I don’t think that I would do it under any circumstances. The weather was not cold, the ice could be very spongy, and who knows how safe it really would be. (Big image, small.)
That picture is the last I took on the Fox Glacier. Time was just after noon. How much longer we stayed there I don’t recall; but before too long, we were on our way back. It was the same business with the occasional dangerous patches, and the long trail where we had to hold on to the chain with both hands. Mark said that this time, he wasn’t affected at all by vertigo. We got back to the parking lot and waited around a bit for the rattletrap bus, and returned to the town of Fox Glacier in good spirits. We had lunch back at the Inn, and napped a bit after, in preparation for the short ride to Lake Matheson, a pond really, in New England terminology, but a very lovely one, and Nicky told us that in clear weather there would be a straight-on view to Mount Cook and Mount Tasman. Cook is the highest point in New Zealand. But the weather was somewhat overcast, and the peaks were both shrouded in cloud.
On that walk, I had my camera with me—naturally—but I wish I had also brought my monopod. There were lots of good little things to get shots of that really needed the stability that the pod would have given me. In addition, my camers’s onboard flash decided (temporarily, as it turned out) that it didn’t want to work, so I couldn’t even use flash for these pictures.
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The things to see on this walk around Lake Matheson were spectacular in their variety. Very lovely reflecting views when we looked directly across the lake, like shot #8, and perhaps even more interesting when you took in some of the riot of vegetation, like #6. The Blechnum fern in #5 is excelled by Mark’s picture for our Christmas card, but it’s still a slick shot. I especially like the pictures at the extreme right, #3, 4, 9, and 10—the last of these is one of the nicest pictures I took all week, I think. The one clear Kidney Fern in #11 is getting ready to produce spores, or whatever theyy’re called when you’re dealing with ferns; this is one of the many pictures that I wish were clearer. Same for the last one, #12: that’s Umbrella Moss, a lovely plant that I never did succeed in getting a good shot of.
A word about the venison: in New Zealand, there are of course no native deer (no mammals at all before the Maori came), but they farm North American elk (Cervus canadensis), and you see the beasts here and there in pens. Somehow, I don’t think that they could have done that with our Eastern White-tailed Deer: I would think they are too skittish for that. At any rate, you can find venison on almost every menu in New Zealand. I ate it frequently, but Mark, recalling his misadventure with venison in Ronda, stayed away from the meat throughout our stay here in New Zealand.
Just a short distance from the Lake walk was the Matheson Café, a very pleasant and unpretentious place with wonderful food. I had a mussel chowder, very nice, and a main course of venison chops—I would have described it as rib roast actually—and it was just perfectly cooked.
We finished off the meal with a nice dessert, and went back to Te Weheka Inn, turning in at about 9:30. A wonderful day!
Next day’s pictures, previous day’s pictures. Return to the central New Zealand page; to the central travel page; to my home page.
