You wait ages for a glacier and then two come along together. Glacier country, on the route to Queensland down the western side of the South Island, gives you two easy reachable glaciers within 22km of each other. These are the Franz Josef Glacier and the Fox Glacier.
The Franz Josef Glacier is about 5km from the township of Franz Josef which has largely grown to service tourism of the glaciers and the surrounding area. There is ample free parking and then a 45 minute walk to the closest viewing point which is at 750m. This does vary with local conditions, the walk to view the glacier involves crossing two streams as you walk through a largely dry river bed. If these streams are carrying a large volume of water they obviously can not be crossed safely.
The glacier is approximately 12km in length and the snowfield that feeds it covers 29 square kilometres and gets 16m of snow per year. The glacier flows at a rate of 1.5m per day. Thats a fast moving river of ice! Â In actual fact the glacier itself has been in retreat since 2008 and this has been at a relatively fast rate and is attributed to global warming.
The melt water from the glacier produces a cloudy, fast flowing river which has a grey blue appearance due to the mineral mica suspended in the water.
Nearby Fox Glacier is similar in length and is fed by four glaciers in the high Southern Alps. Like Franz Josef it is currently in retreat. It is unusual because it is one of very few glaciers that terminate in temperate rainforest. When we visited the path leading to a close up view of the terminal face of the glacier was closed to clear a landslip so the only option was view from a gap in the rainforest.
Fox is regarded by some as being the the more appealing of the two glaciers and this might be because Fox appears to attract less tourists. As the walkway was closed I don’t think we could get close enough to judge