Melting moments
Time to see wondrous West Coast glaciers is slipping away
When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I rattled through the standard options. A teacher, I said. A vet. My dad wanted me to be a doctor. Finally, at about 16, I settled on a journalist, and that’s the one that stuck.
All of them are great careers. But a couple of decades on, I I am still finding out about all the incredible jobs I could have aspired to then, if only I had known they even existed.
If only I’d known, as a 10-year-old, that you could become a glacier expert and spend your summer flying around New Zealand hanging out of a helicopter with Niwa, measuring and documenting the snowline on some of our most famous but precarious natural forms.
Scientists such as Lauren Vargo dedicate their careers watching the glaciers’ ice closely, monitoring each year to see whether more is being added as snow than is being melted away by our warming climate or, too often, vice versa, contributing to the glaciers’ dramatic retreat. Glaciologists’ work is crucial to understanding what’s happening, and what, if anything, we can do about it.
Lauren also works with a scheme that helps give young girls and women experience of careers in science and the outdoors. Research shows many girls are interested at an early age, but drift away as they grow older. Maybe, like me, they just didn’t know that adventuring on the ice was actually something you could do to make a living.
Imagine if someone had told a younger me that you could train to become a glacier guide, learning a craft that has been cultivated in New Zealand for a century, forging safe routes through a unique landscape. As well as the excitement of hacking ice steps and exploring ice caves daily, some of the skills and expertise learnt on our glaciers have been exported around the globe. The job might even take you on to the vast ice of Scott Base in Antarctica. Ten-year-old me would have been very impressed.
New Zealand’s glaciers, specifically Franz Josef and Fox on the West Coast, are some of the most accessible in the world, plunging through rainforest almost to sea level. They have traditionally attracted thousands of overseas tourists but, as I found when I visited Franz Josef to go heli-hiking, many locals – me included – had never been further than the car parks.
We know New Zealand is full of incredible places and experiences – that’s what draws those tourists – but we can take it for granted. It might be too late for me to make a career out of exploring the ice, but I reckon it’s at least worth a visit to see it up close.
Read about my glacial adventure on pages 30-31.
I’m sliding through a narrow blue gap between two towering ice walls, with barely enough room to place my feet. Ahead, our guide is chopping steps, so we can clamber out of the crevasse back into the sunshine, ice flying into the air as the pick smashes down.
Behind, a small stream of meltwater gushes through a smoothed-out chute, before diving below the surface.
I’m heli hiking on Franz Josef Glacier, and we have the place almost to ourselves.
When a helicopter passes overhead, taking another group on a scenic flight further up the valley, everyone stops to stare.
That noise would have been constant this time last year, as thousands of mainly overseas visitors were ferried from base to ice and back again.
The whole town would have been booked out with visitors, the car park down in the valley straining with bright rented campervans and tour buses.
On New Year’s Day last year, a record 7137 people visited the valley, according to Department of Conservation track counter data.
But now, with the borders closed by Covid-19, the car park is close to empty, the crowds are gone, and the constant hum of rotor blades has fallen mostly silent.
It’s tough for the many businesses that rely on tourism. Headlines have been full of bad news for the town: the huge drops in bookings, the sometimes ghost town feel and the loss of of jobs.
Jon Tyler of Franz Josef Glacier Guides, who is showing us around on our two-hour tour, is the first to admit it’s been tough. But, he points out, that perhaps makes it the best time in recent history for Kiwis to explore this fast-retreating natural wonder on our doorstep.
For many, that might be for the first time. One of the few tourists I do meet – who is heli hiking with his family – tells me he’s lived in Christchurch for more than a decade but had never been to the West Coast until this year.
‘‘What’s amazing at the moment is that we’ve got the glacier all to ourselves,’’ Tyler says. ‘‘So what we’re able to do is go to all these different areas and have a look at all these different features.’’
It’s a short but stunning flight from the The Helicopter Line’s home base to the ice. Before we had set off, Franz Josef Glacier Guides kitted out our group with crampons and other hiking gear.
When we land, it’s been several days since anyone has set foot on the ice of Ka¯ Roimata o Hine Hukatere. A storm that’s just blown through has completely resculpted the surface. The glacier is always changing, and no two trips are the same.
But the guides are experts at what they do. They know the ice well, and they have no trouble finding us safe routes into the most interesting features.
Up close, a surface that looked smooth from the valley is cracked and crevassed, shining blue where it has ripped itself apart as it flows steeply downhill.
While there’s been a glacier here for centuries, the ice itself is quite young, and moves quickly (in glacial terms) at around 50 centimetres a day, and up to two metres a day in steeper areas. Sometimes the guides even find iPhones melting out of its crevasses.
All that movement means caves have sprung open that are big enough to scramble through. Seracs – huge pillars of ice – stand to attention to our left, below steep, carved rock walls.
The surface of the glacier melts by about 5cm10cm each day, helping create these features and destroying them. Everywhere, there are trickles and streams of water, and the sound of hidden pools in hollows below our feet.
It’s dynamic and fascinating, but it is also a visible reminder of just how fragile this landscape is, and how little time we might have left to enjoy it.
‘‘It’s changing really rapidly,’’ says Lauren Vargo, a research fellow at the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University in Wellington, who has joined our tour.
Scientists and visitors alike can see changes in the glacier year to year, she says.
‘‘There aren’t many other parts of earth science where you can see these changes so quickly.’’
The pace of that change is advancing. Guides have been working on the Franz Josef Glacier for at least a century, but only a few decades ago there was no need for a helicopter trip.
Tourists could stride out from the car park directly on to the ice. Even until 2012, you could walk up from the valley, but access was stopped after the face of the glacier became too unstable.
‘‘People come with old pictures from the 1960s, when you used to be able to drive along to the glacier front,’’ Tyler says.
Now, shots from the same spot would catch only a glimpse of the glacier, a wedge of white, hundreds of metres in the distance.
The West Coast glaciers, Franz Josef and Fox nearby, respond quite quickly to temperature fluctuations and to climate change.
Remarkably, from the mid-1980s to the mid2000s, they were actually growing, thanks to localised conditions.
But that’s gone into reverse, and the ice is retreating up the valley astonishingly fast.
The tongue has retreated by hundreds of metres in the past decade, and Franz Josef is now the shortest it has been in recorded history.
Even if we drastically reduce emissions now, the impact of climate change means we may still be destined to lose 40 per cent of the ice we see today by 2100.
This place might not be around forever, and seeing it up close really brings that home.
The last stop on our tour is a spectacular waterfall, thundering down the valley wall and sending a misty cloud of spray over the ice.
We hear the Makaawhio iwi legend of
Ka¯ Roimata-a-Hine Hukatere – how
Hine Hukatere’s tears cascaded down the valley and froze solid when she lost her love.
Then, it’s back to the helicopter and the base, where the Glacier Hot Pools is a tempting option to warm up from the chill.
Heli hiking is suitable for anyone with a moderate level of fitness, but you must be at least 8 years old.
You do need to be able to walk for two hours, and it’s probably best not to be too claustrophobic, although exploring some features is optional.
All the gear, such as boots, waterproof jackets, crampons and even a warm hat, is provided.
For the more adventurous, Franz Josef Glacier Guides also offers a Heli Ice Climb tour.
This full-day experience offers expert tuition to take those with a head for heights from a novice to a climber able to scale the smooth walls with the aid of ice axes. Again, all climbing and safety gear is included.