Walking on the Fox glacier

Saturday and today was the day of our guided hike on the Fox Glacier.

It was a beautiful day, gin clear and cloud free, which is not that common in these parts.

We mustered at the glacier guides HQ on the main drag, having stocked up with supplies first (meat pies and Kit Kats).

We boarded an ancient bus and were ferried to the helipad. Here we were all weighed and grouped into batches 6 people of appropriate mass and lead out to our Helicopter.

Once we had squeezed 6 people (plus pilot) into the machine, we took off in a slick and drama-free fashion…

Morna is getting pretty cool about all this dare-devil stuff…

The trip up to the glacier took only 6 minutes and we soon set down on a small patch of flat ice that the guides had carved out with ice axes.

We were all provided with cramp-ons and we set out following the guide in single file.

Progress on the ice is very slow, as the surface is a jumble of ice the is in constant slow-motion. The guides have to pick a route that avoids hazards such as crevasses and thin or unstable ice. In many places, the guides have to cut step in near vertical slopes…

The glacier I’d huge. It is about 13km long and the ice is 100m thick…

After wandering around on the glacier for a couple of hours, it was time to go back to sea level. We returned to the landing point and the guides called-in the chopper. As Morna observed, “a bit like M*A*S*H”.

Six minutes after boarding the chopper, we were back on the helipad at sea-level.