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At 9am this morning it was time for me to check in for a full day glacier hike up the Franz Josef Glacier - most of the Kiwi Bus was on the hike we all signed in and collected attractive outfit number 4! Over trousers, a rain coat, walking boots with a sheepskin lining, itchy walking socks, a very attractive blue beany hat which "unfortuately" I didn't need to wear because I had my own awesome "snowday" hat!!!! and thick, un streatch woolie mittens! All topped off with a bum bag to hold a pair of cramp-ons. The Black Water Rafting wetsuit still wins the unattractive prize!
Appologies if there are billions of typo's in this entry I am using the worst keyboard in the world!!!!!!!!!!
Once we were all kitted out we jumped on a VERY cosy bus and went to the car park where the walk started from. The first 20 minutes or so of walking was through a forest over little streams and then we came out into the valley that is home to The Franz Josef glacier - a VERY impressive and almost unreal sight! The group leader asked us how far away we thought the Glacier was and how long it would take to walk to it. It only looked a couple of hundered metres away and we guessed at about 5-10 minutes. In reality it was 2.5km away and it would take us 45 minutes to get to the terminal face! These first 45 minutes of walking was through the valley over rocks and some small streams when we got to the base of the glacier we had to put on our cramp-ons and split into 4 equal groups 1.Fast 2.Medium/Fast 3.Medium/Slow 4. Slow. I went for group 2 because I didn't want to just race through the day and not have time to take photos and take in what was around me. Group two was mostly Kiwi Experience people apart from 3 out of the 11 who weren't and out guide was called Alex. Standing at the base of the Glacier it ws huge and a vey surreal sight - a huge chunk of ice filling a valley! The bottom part - the dirty ice was covered in rocks but the higher up I looked the cleaner and more blue the ice became. The first part of the hike was over the dirty ice which was covered in rocks - these kept getting wedged in my cramp-ons which was pretty annoying. The first bit was the hardest part of the day - up ALOT of man made steps which some of the guides had spent 2 hours cutting out this morning. By the time we got to the top everyone was already worn out - it was extra hard because we were walking over rocks in cramp-ons! Alex assured us that this was definately the hardest part over with! We were all wrapped up in out 5/6 layers + over trousers and coat with gloves and hats on all he was wearing was a thick pair of walking socks, a beany and a pair of shorts and a t-shirt! After a bit of wandering over dirty ice and rocks we finally got onto the clean ice, it was very wierd as we walked along over the ice up and down man made steps - some of which Alex was cutting out as we went along- and over and through crevases - it kind of felt like something from Narnia! We got to a couple of wooden boxes and Alex pulled out a pick-axe, we each got one and I am sure we were just given them to play with - none of us used them at any point during the day to help us - but there was pleanty of hacking at ice and carving pretty shapes in the glacier! The next part of the day got pretty intense - we learnt the "Franz Shuffle" which was a method of climbing down very steep parts of the glacier where the steps weren't wide enough to fit your foot on. It involved stepping down with your foot parallel to the step then bending your knee putting the other foot behind and stepping down to the next step. Time on the ice was flying by it was already 12.30 - Alex had said that we would be stopping for lunch at about 12 and at this point we were all getting pretty hungry and Alex said we would definately be stopping in the next 15 minutes - he wasn't wearing a watch! After another hour and alot of complaining we eventually stopped! Alex disapeared off with Borris (Actually a woman) to find some cool stuff for us to explore! And we all sat, very civilised, on the ice eating our lunch. This made my bum VERY cold and when I stood up I had one cold foot! It was time to exlore some cool ice caves that the guides had found - EVERY hike is different. They just wander around and se what they can find - the glacier changes every day. So we used the previously learnd Franz Shuffle down some practiacally vertical drops crawled through some holes about 5metres long which were only just big enough - i had to take off my back pack and push it ahead of me - and shimmy sideways through some tight crevases. The ice was SO blue because of how dense it was, all the air had been squeezed out making it that colour. It was time to start making out way back down to the valley 6 hours on the ice had gone so fast. I had a quiet evening and went to bed nice and early to recover from another fantastic day and another brilliant experience that I wont forget in a hurry!
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