Franz For The Memories

Cold. So cold. It had been another starry/clear night that night and the morning was much the same. Clear, sunny, but flipping freezing. I just couldn’t drag myself out of bed that morning. But a tactical move to put the heater on before removing myself from my sleeping bag soon warmed things up. It had been a peaceful nights sleep too; no waking up in the night thinking “we can’t stay here!” or “where the hell am I?!”. Just a sense of “to trek, or not to trek”.

You see, I had been exploring the idea of going on a glacier hike at either the Franz Josef or Fox glacier as they were within our sights on the map. It seemed pretty expensive to do but I had been advised that it was well worth it. Some of them had you leaving at 8am, so that wasn’t one that I was looking at. But I couldn’t decide so I thought we should get to Franz Josef, see if we can get up to it and then make a decision on Fox and see what happens. But before we got there we were going to try and find some gold!

There was a little gold-mining town called Ross not far from Hokitika, and we would be passing through it anyway. We scheduled a stop and went for a wander round, trying to “pan” for gold with a stone or by kicking rocks about in the vain hope there would be a huge nugget underneath. There wasn’t. Of course there wasn’t. These hills had been long-mined out by now. But it did give us some pretty impressive views of the nearby mountains, topped with snow. We knew we were getting close to Glacier Country.

There ain't no gold in these here mountains

Along the way we stopped off for lunch in a lay-by just off the main road. No sooner had we sat down to eat than we heard incessant parping of a car horn as a vehicle sped past us. We both rushed to the window to see………an identical Happy Campers Toyota Hi-Ace beetling by. James had only remarked the other day that is was weird we hadn’t seen any other Happy Camper vehicles, and as if by some twist of Fate we got one the very next day.

We drove into Franz Josef village a little after 2pm thinking that we would definitely be able to have a bash at climbing to the glacier before it got dark. The woman in the visitor centre said that we wouldn’t be able to get onto the ice as it was too dangerous with ice breaking apart and rocks falling, but knowing us we just smiled and said that’s ok, all the while thinking “we’ll see about that”. The walk up to the glacier took us through the u-shaped (thanks Mr Pugh) valley that had rushing streams of glacier run-off. Rocky as heck, but some beautiful sights all around us. When we finally got to the glacier edge we realised that we could go no further as there was a small fence to stop anyone with exactly our idea in mind. To be fair we COULD have got further up, but we felt we SHOULDN’T go any further. Instead we got chatting to an American couple from Utah and told them all about our trip to the USA and especially Salt Lake City. They, naturally, asked us about the Olympics and how we had got the time off work to do our trip. I thought after the Olympics had finished we wouldn’t have to hear about it, but everyone still goes nuts over it. They said they were doing the Fox Glacier Walk the next day so I said that, weather depending, I might see them there as I was still undecided about it. If it’s a nice day I will probably do it, if not……well I don’t know what will happen. 

One hell of a big glacier mint!