Franz Josef was wonderful. Two days later and my legs are still sore! Franz Josef is the second largest glacier in New Zealand and I did a day hike on it. We spent about 6 hours on the ice. Amazing! We were well out-fitted with good, appropriate gear, including crampons which made it great to walk on the ice. Each group had about 11 people in it with a guide who went ahead with a pick and hacked pathways and steps into the ice to create a trail.
Climbing up was challenging just because it was quite steep in parts and the ‘steps’ were often quite large. Very much worth it though.
We shuffled through narrow crevices and crawled through holes. The ice is wet, melting, pocketed, there are little streams and pools that gather and trickled down into caves under the ice to meet up with the river flowing down past the rainforest to the ocean. The blue ice and the patterns in it were so beautiful. And the ice against the gorgeous blue sky was spectacular. At the end of the day, already on the descent down we stopped at a large pool of water where a couple of the guides and three crazy young guys stripped down to underwear and boots and jumped into the very cold water.
Two of the crazy young guys as they stood shivering on the ice exclaimed. “We’re Canadian, this is nothing!” We were so exhausted. The hike back to the bus seemed to be much farther than in the morning. I picked up a take-away burger on the way home. New Zealand burgers have red beets on them and egg too. Very interesting.
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