Goodness Glaciers, Great Balls of Ice

In New Zealand, Kiwi’s pronounce glacier differently.

I say “Glay-sure,” with an sh sound in the middle. But Kiwi’s say “Glass-ee-er”.

I like it. It makes what is essentially a several-kilometer-long hunk of ice capable of re-shaping entire landmasses sound very delicate. Fragile.

Alas, glaciers are fragile in the sense that hot temperatures are their nemesis, but they are still here, still sculpting the earth, still claiming lives, still grinding into mountains and calving massive icebergs. They are still here, even though the earth has been warming for centuries.

On the Fox Glacier moraine walk, signs are posted amidst the tangled jungle saying that in 1750 AD, the glacier ended here. In 1300 AD, the glacier ended here. And so on and so forth, and what’s most incredible to me is that today, in 2023, the glacier is still here.

Yes, it’s shrinking, but it’s been shrinking for at least the past 11,000 years. What’s most impressive is that it is still here.

New Zealand has almost 3,000 total glaciers. Most of them are very small. For example, the Tasman Glacier, New Zealand’s largest, makes up about 1/3 of all glacial mass in the country. So there are a lot of tiny glaciers. But they’re still holding on like barnacles to the steep sides and slopes of the Southern Alps.

I saw the Tasman Glacier in Mount Cook, and was most impressed by the icebergs it calved into Tasman Lake. (Those pictures are in my Mount Cook post: Staying Low and Looking High: A Weekend at Mount Cook).

I left Mount Cook and it’s many glaciers, just to drive a while to more glaciers… Or, maybe the same glaciers?

Basically, I drove more than 300 miles to circle around to the West Coast and view the same mountains from the back side. (I ended up, after all that driving, only 19 miles as the crow flies from Mount Cook Village).

But the views and the vibes were totally different. From the Mount Cook Village side, you’re in high alpine country. The beach trees, the tussocks, the pale golden color. It’s chilly and the air is crisp and the mountains surround you like a private valley.

On the west coast, the forest is temperate rainforest, full of ferns and rata trees. Everything is green and lush, and the glacial backdrop, while present, feels removed.

Below, you can see Mount Cook (on the right) and Mount Tasman (on the left).

And the glaciers were totally different too. Fox Glacier, once reaching almost to the Tasman Sea, is special because it’s one of the easiest glaciers to visit. It used to be that you could walk onto the base of it, but now it’s retreated too far up the valley for that. Access is restricted to helicopter landings.

But you can see it, a splash of white among the fuzzy green forest.

After Fox Glacier, another half hour drive up the road, is Franz Josef Glacier. Again, this glacier is mind-boggling because it ends in sub-tropical forest. It’s hard to reconcile palm trees (nikaus) and glaciers in the same photo.

One day, I drove down to the ocean, which wasn’t that far away. In the distant past, the glaciers reached the ocean. It is difficult to imagine that once this whole area where today I walk and eat and sleep was once buried in a massive layer of ice.

While awed by the presence of the glacier and the impossibility of imaging all that ice (and all that ice moving and shaping the mountain side below it), I don’t find the glaciers themselves all that beautiful to look at. They’re dirty, covered in soil and rocks. Really, they look like a massive snow drift left behind by a snow-plow on the side of the road. And the river valleys beneath them are wide, littered with moraine rock, and filled with debris. The water looks dirty, and it spreads out wide, with no boundaries, among grey rock.

But I do enjoy how the trails to view the glaciers twist and turn, crossing wide chasms with narrow bridges, and perch precariously on the side of steep cliffs. The glacier has shaped the land so harshly, with so many threats still present, that is not a simple thing to walk up to view it. I love how, centuries ago, the glaciers scraped the mountains into steep and impassable rock faces.

I also love how the valley is perfectly flat and then the mountains rise directly from it, abrupt and steep and so deliberate in their presence. And these mountains soar high above the ocean, dressed to impress with snow-capped peaks and spring-melt waterfalls tumbling down the sheer rock cliffs.

I am always impressed by the power of nature, and glaciers–while unassuming–are one such miraculous sculptor and creator of our earth.