The Wild, Wild West

We had a beautiful long weekend off. Thank God for the Kiwi holiday system. We got the most awesome treat for Easter. The Kiwis consider Good Friday a national holiday. Everything is closed and we were off of work. Monday is also a national holiday only because Easter is Sunday and so the next day is Monday therefore, should be a holiday....Confused? I was but who gives a damn!!! We were off!!! And the biggest icing on the awesome holiday cake? Tuesday is "Southland Anniversary Day", basically, the day our region celebrates their founding so that is a day off too!!! So we found out that we had Friday-Tuesday off for an epically long weekend!

What Shall We Do?!

We decided to see some mountains. Bruce has this thing about glaciers and mountains. In fact, it was his idea for us to take a 3 hour drive and 4 hour hike to see the Rob Roy Glacier outside of Wanaka (See our other blog entry for that drama filled weekend). Bruce is a scientific mind, he loves to marvel and wonder about geologic formations, tectonic plate movements, etc. I just like it cause its pretty.

Anyway, we decided to load up our little tiny car and drive from our home in Invercargill up to Aoraki/Mount Cook. Aoraki is the Maori word for New Zealand's tallest mountain peak. It is a staggering 12, 316 feet tall and is the tallest mountain of in the Southern Alps. It is famous for so many reasons, mostly because it was the training ground for one of New Zealand's most famous men, Sir Edmund Hillary. In case you didn't know, he was the first man to climb the summit of Mount Everest. It seems that having something like Aoraki in your backyard allows you to have an unfair advantage.

What Aoraki looks like on a clear day

(courtesy of Wikipedia :)

We started our drive to Aoraki and we were blessed with some of the most beautiful autumn weather. It was clear, crisp and spectacularly sunny. We did notice as we got into the Mount Cook National Park that there were some serious gray clouds looming. I was so excited because we immediately started to see the landscape change from rolling pastures to huge, imposing looking mountains. I even thought I saw the peak of Mount Cook!

Clouds near our destination..uh oh

Grey clouds near Aoraki

We stayed in the cute little village of Mount Cook and when I mean village, it was a village. The "normal" year round population is about 100 people but can swell to 300 during the peak season. I don't think I've ever seen anything so remote. The next closest town was a little place called Twizel but they didn't even have a hospital.

Bruce, trying in vain to see Aoraki/Mount Cook

Mount Cook village

Our entire plan was to get to Mount Cook, take some awesome pictures of the peak and maybe go see the glaciers but the weather had something else planned. Upon arrival the gray clouds got grayer and the rain started. It wasn't even a proper rain, it was more like a sideways pounding that made you not want to go outside. We tried, in vain to do a day hike but the howling wind and zero visibility turned us back after 15 minutes. We were left to tough it out in our cozy hotel room.
On our second day, the weather cleared just enough to allow us the opportunity to go to see the Tasman Glacier. The Tasman glacier is the longest glacier at just over 17 miles and covers over 40 square miles. It is amazing to see. The amazing thing about the glacier is you can see how it moved. There are huge large scrapes along the valley floor where the thing just moved through over 18,000 years ago. Even cooler is the little and not so little rocks that it deposited along the way. I always wondered how giant boulders would just appear in fields, now I know that most of them in this part of New Zealand were probably deposited there by a giant glacier as it moved through.

Getting ready to go on Tasman Lake

You can see the walls of the valley that have been "carved" away by the moving glacier

We decided to take a tour of Tasman Lake, a glacier lake that is "new" by lake standards. Basically, this lake is formed by the melting ice from the glacier. A true testament to how warm the earth is getting, there was no lake in 1973 because the glacier wasn't melting that much. By 2008, the lake was 4 miles long, 1 mile wide and almost 800 feet deep!!!!! I have never been a geology nut but I have to admit, this stuff was cool.
The lake looked really gross. It looked like skim milk but I was told that it had its color thanks to the "powder" particles that had been suspended in the ice. The lake didn't look that big or deep but it had some big ol chunks of ice floating in it. If you remember Geology 101, the part of the iceberg we see is just the tip. It is only about 10% of the entire piece of ice so you can imagine, underneath could be giant chunks, the size of buildings.

Big Ol Icebergs...only 10% is showing..

Imagine what lies beneath!

These pieces of ice floating around are new to the water. On February 22, Christchurch had a giant earthquake (you may have heard) which caused about 30, 000,000 tons of ice to drop off from the glacier and dump into the lake. As you can imagine, there were some serious tidal waves caused in the lake.
On the day we went, we weren't expecting anything crazy to happen...but it did.
We were about 100 yards away from a big iceberg in a little boat when all of a sudden, we heard a huge "CRACK" followed by "BOOM". I screamed (my speciality) and we saw a huge chunk of iceberg just drop off into the lake. It created a big wave and our little boat started swaying. After the waves died down, we motored over to the site of the crash and saw tons and tons of ice cubes littering the water. It was so cool (literally).

The boom...a giant piece had just fallen off

The aftermath...looks like tons of ice cubes

Tasting the best ice on earth...18,000 years old!!!

It feels colder than regular ice!!!

The "broken" iceberg...The dark blue is ice that has not been exposed to air or water, yet. It will eventually turn white

Clear, clean ice

Beautiful blue ice

After spending two days hoping to catch a glimpse of Aoraki, we left, slightly bummed that we still hadn't seen the peak of New Zealand's tallest mountain. Oh well, we were off to the Wild, Wet Westcoast of New Zealand. Since we were on a glacier hunt, our next stop was Franz Joseph Glacier on the west coast.
Franz Joseph has to be the weirdest glacier I've ever seen. Mostly because of where it is. I associate glaciers with cold, alpine and ice. Franz Joseph and the Fox Glacier actually come down, through rain forests to about 300 feet. Franz Joseph is so low that you can actually walk up to it (theoretically, but i wouldn't advise it...two tourists died last month from looking too close). On our way to the glacier, we are driving and the area gets more and more lush looking. In fact, after a while, it looked down right tropical! We saw waterfalls coming off of every mountain and there was a thick carpet of mist around the tops. I expected to see monkeys and parrots but its not that kind of rain forest and was definitely NOT that warm.

On the road again, heading west

I've never seen water so blue..this is lake Hawea..a glacier lake

Bruce, marvelling at the wild Tasman Sea

This is not Brazil...its the wet rainforests of the West Coast

Waterfalls near the glacier

Arriving at the Franz Joseph Glacier, we had to walk through a rain forest to get to the base of the glacier. When we arrived, we were met with stunning views of the glacier. It is hard to believe that the glacier is nestled in between lush, green covered mountains! I'm surprised it hasn't melted away yet!

In front of Franz Joseph Glacier

Bruce going for a water refill from a waterfall

That wasn't a good way to get water

The rest of our long weekend was spent marveling at the beautiful autumn colors. We were blessed with some clear, crisp days that made the yellow and orange leaves pop with color.

Finally, a view of Aoraki!!!

Autumn colors while driving

Even though it was a LONG drive (took over 20 hours of driving in a car the size of a shoebox) we had a great weekend.

If you'd like to check out all of the pics from our Glacier weekend, click here