Fox Glacier, New Zealand

    We took a 10 hour bus ride from Nelson to Fox, New Zealand.  Nelson was another beautiful town and the hostel that we stayed at was awesome – free breakfast and free soup and bread at 6 PM.  Both of these meals were pretty spartan, but you wouldn’t think so with the gaggle of international riffraff coming out of the woodwork at quarter till 6.  I rented a bike for the day and got to grab some coffee at a café, read, and go check out the town book store (books are very expensive here, like everything else). 

    Fox, however, is a very small resource town on the west coast.  The resource here is the Fox Glacier, which is actually receding/depleting just as fast as most resources.  Dustin and I knew that if we wanted to walk on and explore the glacier, we could need to go with a guided tour, which is expensive.  We walked into Fox Glacier Guides with a full day tour in mind, and walked out with a full day ice climbing tour booked instead.  That was the best decision we’ve made this whole trip.

    Words cannot describe how massive and beautiful this glacier is; the pictures do nothing to capture the deep blue color, small streams that flow in and out of the surface, or juxtaposition of a rainforest in the background; even standing on the glacier, I couldn’t comprehend the raw power that is rolling down the mountain at 2 meters a day.  Really though.  To go ice climbing on it was amazing.  Dustin and I were paired up with an Israeli guy who just came off his 3 year military term as a medic, and a 55 year old Aussie who used to be a stud rock climber.  Our guide, Jono the Tasmanian alpine badass, first took us to a small ramp to teach us the skills we needed, then set ice screw anchors for us to climb a 45 foot wall.  After a few climbs and some lunch, Jono led us around the glacier, then scoped out this beauty:

    He turned to us, said, “alright then,” and started setting up some anchors.  One by one, Jono lowered the four of us into a 80 foot crevasse.  I tied into the rope, Jono said, “don’t untie this one, mate,” and down I went.  The plan was to hit the bottom and belay each other from there, but as I looked down, the “bottom” was what looked like an infinite crack that simply got too narrow for us to go.  I got down to a small (1 foot across) bridge between the two walls, put a foot into the wall and my back into the one behind me.  We were dying laughing, just thinking about where we were and what we were doing.  It had started raining right as we got into the crevasse, which pretty much meant that a waterfall was falling on us as we climbed up. 

    I’ve been ice climbing on a glacier in New Zealand.  Pop pop.  One of the coolest things I've ever done.