Te Moeka O Tuawe

They say that the definition of a cultured person is one who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. Better men than me can no doubt consider Fox Glacier without thinking of mints.

According to Maori legend, many years ago, their lived an ice princess named Hine Hukatere high on the slopes of the Southern Alps. A young warrier, Tuawe by name, had fallen in love with her and regularly climbed the mountains to visit. One day, he lost his footing and fell to his death. This explains the Maori name for Fox which I’ve used as the title for this post – the bed of Tuawe. The princess, Hine, was so upset at his death that she cried for a million years – her tears forming great drops of ice which filled two valleys – one becoming the Franz Josef Glacier and the other the Fox Glacier.

And so it is that, high up on the slopes of Mount Tasman (the second highest in NZ) a snow field of some 25 square kilometres feeds Fox Glacier at a rate of about 1 metre per day. When climatic conditions are such that more than 1m melts in a day, the glacier retreats up its valley. Conversely, when less than 1m melts in a day, the glacier grows again, towards the sea. Today, the glacier is about 13km long and is reached along a narrow, winding road from the main SH6 just south of the town of Fox Glacier.

We left the action yesterday at Lake Ianthe DOC campsite. You have to admit – there are worse views than this one to eat your breakfast in front of:

This morning, my plan had been to get to Franz Josef Glacier in time for a combination helicopter ride and glacier hike. Unfortunately, the weather put paid to that plan and, instead, I headed a little further south to Fox.

Here there is no helicopter, but the Fox Glacier is accessible to walkers, albeit that there is a need for a qualified guide. After being kitted out with the required footwear and, where necessary, gloves and jackets, we set off in a bus to the car park from where we had about an hour’s walk to reach the ice itself.

If you look at the valley wall to the right of the ice, you can see a sharp, horizontal divide between vegetation and bare rock. That is the line left by the most recent extension of the glacier – called a trim line – in 2008. Below the line, the vegetation was all scraped away by the ice.


Here is a closer look at the left (northernmost) side of the terminal wall: 

You can see where chunks of ice have fallen from the roof of the “cave” at the end of the glacier into a heap at the base. From time to time, tourists who ignore the warning signs are caught under tons of ice as one of these falls occurs without warning. It’s an unfair contest, really – several tons of ice versus soft, squashy human being. The result is usually a foregone conclusion. Newspaper reports of past incidents were included on the warning signs.


The glacier itself is not all that exciting, really. It has its required quota of crevasses and sink holes: 

That's me standing in front of a sink hole – that little row of rocks to the right of me in the picture leads to a sharp, and very deep, drop. We were not encouraged to go any closer than I am in the picture.


We were only on the ice for about 45 minutes to an hour – stopping short of the ice falls at the top of this picture:

Which also shows, in the foreground, some splendid examples of the schist of which the whole area is composed. This metamorphic rock contains layers of mica and quartz, with other minerals present in varying quantities. Sometimes one of those layers contains gold, but there wasn’t time to check all the rocks.

The layers were laid down over the centuries when what is now New Zealand was at the bottom of the ocean. The effect of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates moving relative to each other forced what had once been sea-bed up to form the Southern Alps, with the rest of New Zealand as a by-product.


Looking back down the valley, you can see where the side walls have been scoured smooth by the ice – the further you go, though, the more the vegetation has fought back.

In places, though, the far wall of the valley was almost polished in appearance. This particular rock towered over the car park and had the appearance of polished black glass. Our guide told us that he’d love to try to climb it, but that it was almost impossible to get a proper grip on it.

As a pedagogical point, our guide was Brazilian and, as well as English, also spook Spanish. This was handy as, whether by coincidence or design, we had a large number of Spanish speakers in our group – from Mexico as well as Spain itself. I can tell you, for example, that the Spanish for “crampons” is “crampones”. It’s hard to imagine a situation where that sort of information wouldn’t be useful.