Fox Glacier Hike

In Fox Glacier I signed up for a guided glacier hike. The Fox Glacier is rare because the glacier actually flows down through a rain forest. We hiked through the rain forest before reaching the glacier. The water there is so clean that we were able to drink from the water flowing over these rocks. It was so cold and fresh. Wonderful!

Once we cleared the rain forest, we had a spectacular view of the glacier. The Fox Glacier is among the 1% of the world's glacier that are growing in size. The Fox Glacier was shrinking from the 1930's until about the 1980's. During the 1980's, Australia started to experience a drought. This caused extremely dry air masses to move over the ocean between the two continents and pick up a lot of moisture before reaching New Zealand. Due to the mountains on the western portion of the island, this moist air causes additional precipitation to fall at the top of the glacier. This additional precipitation has caused the glacier to change from shrinking in size to growing in size. Our guide showed us the low point of the glacier back in the 1980's and the glacier has actually grown a significant amount since that time.

If you click on the picture below, you can see the guides working on cutting steps into the glacier for us to walk on. This gives a scale to show how large the glacier is.

Alright, alright...I'll admit that this was a mock picture. I didn't actually need the ice pick.


Here is a picture of my group hiking along the glacier.

Drive to Fox Glacier

I was very lucky with my time on the west coast. The west coast is known for being very rainy, but I had some beautiful weather. The drive to Fox Glacier was long, but the scenery made up for it.

Along the drive, I stopped at a beach to read for a bit. The view was gorgeous, the sand flies were not. I made it about a half an hour before I couldn't take the itching anymore.

I saw these piles of rocks all over the island. Someone must have taken quite a bit of time to pile them all up.

Otago Peninsula

From TeAnau I drove down around the south coast to the Otago Peninsula.
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This was an interesting little area of water. The sign next to it said, "No swimming. Crocodiles." I looked, but I did not see any crocodiles. I didn't go swimming either.

Along the drive I stopped at a petrified forest. The stumps and logs from the forest have been preserved by the salt water. Some of the stumps can been seen in the picture below.

This is an entire log that was preserved.

When I got to the Otago Peninsula, I went straight to "Penguin Place". This place is wonderful. I quickly made a reservation for the 7:15 tour and reserved a room in the cottage for about $10 US. To top it all off, the place had two springer spaniels that hung around outside. I couldn't have been happier.

The Penguin Place is located on the tip of the Peninsula. As the Peninsula became more populated by humans, the Penguin Place fenced off an area of the Peninsula to preserve it as a natural habitat for the yellow-eyed penguins. During the day, the penguins go out into the ocean to fish and then return at night to feed their young. Unlike the emperor penguins, the yellow-eyed penguins prefer their privacy. Therefore, each family has claimed its own portion of the land for its home. The Penguin Place provides a safe habitat for the penguins, but do not interfere with the penguins unless one is severely injured. The Place has a penguin hospital where the injured penguins are nursed back to health. The Place has dug numerous trenches throughout the landscape so that humans can walk through and observe the penguins without disturbing them.

This is a young penguin. This penguin has lost most of its baby feathers, but has not yet grown the yellow whiskers next to its eyes.

This is a baby penguin with all of its baby feathers.


The penguins have a pretty nice landscape.

You can see the trenches in this picture. The trenches allow the humans to get close to the penguins without impacting their behaviors.

This is a fur seal down on the beach.

We got to see a rare moment while a mother fed a baby penguin. It was quite amazing.

Penguins waddling around on the beach.


A perfect sunset to end the night.

Milford Sound

I woke up before sunrise the next morning to make it out to Milford Sound to meet my kayaking group. The drive out to the sound is another incredible one. I saw both the moon setting over the mountain and the sun rising behind the mountains.

The most interesting part of the drive was the "tunnel". My guide book had told me that I would drive through a tunnel on the way out to the Sound. I got to the tunnel around 6:30 am. There was traffic light at the entrance that was not turned on. The sign next to the light indicated that it only ran between 8:00 am and 9:00 pm. I was slightly puzzled because the tunnel was about 0.75 miles long and without the light, I had no idea if a car would be coming from the other direction. I stopped for a second and double checked that I was in the right spot and eventually moved forward very cautiously. Inside of the tunnel was very curious. The walls looked like someone had literally drilled a hole in the middle of the mountain. The road was unpaved and the walls were seeping water. I was quite happy when I made it to the other side without encountering any oncoming vehicles.

I met my kayaking group at the boat launch. Everyone seemed great and the guide was pretty funny. She even demonstrated how you should trap as many sand flies under the boat skirt before heading out. The sand flies are UNBELIEVABLE!! I had 30% deet bug spray on (yes, this is awesome for the body) and it did absolutely nothing. The Sound was so quiet and made for a great day of kayaking. Our guide told us that the Sound was incorrectly named because it is actually a fiord. Fiords are carved out by glaciers and looking at the rounded carved out valleys in the Milford Sound, there is no doubt that glaciers painted this landscape many years ago.

My kayaking partner was extremely nice and from Scandanvia. I asked her how long she was in the country for and she replied, "Oh, only for one month." I thought, "Well, I'm here for only one week." Americans need to take lessons from the rest of the world on how to take real vacations.

The Sound had numerous waterfalls. Due to the steep topography, the very shallow vegetation and the large amount of precipitation in the area, the Sound has frequent "travalanches". Yes, these are avalanches of trees! We could see the slide paths from the travalanches. The guide explained that after large rainstorms, an entire section of trees will fall directly into the water. The other interesting point about the large amounts of precipitation is that the Sound is made of salt water (the ocean) covered by a layer of freshwater. If there have been recent rainstorms, the freshwater layer can be up to 20 meters deep. This is quite an interesting place.

After we kayaked a bit, we came up to a family of fur seals. The baby was sitting up on the rock, while the parents were playing in the water. It was amazing how close we were able to get to the seals. If I had wanted to, I could have reached out with my paddle and touched the seals.

After the kayaking trip, the guide suggested that I check out the Key Summit hike. There was a lot of vegetation and moss in the forest at the beginning of the hike.

At the summit, it was a 360 degree panorama of mountains and glaciers. There was a lake and plenty of tundra at the top. It was interesting to see the different ecosystems. I would recommend this hike if anyone is ever in the area.

Driving route
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Drive to TeAnau

From Mt Cook National Park I drove down to TeAnau.

Here is the driving route.
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The drive was beautiful. From the pictures you can see that I found more turquoise lakes and rivers. The road was fairly narrow and windy through the gorge in the picture below. I had to make sure not to take in too much of the incredible scenery. Eventually the drive passed through beautiful vineyards, the infamous Queenstown and eventually ended in TeAnau. TeAnau is the great little town. I was able to get a campsite with running water and showers for about $5 US. It was perfect! I also found the Italian restaurant that John had recommened and had a much more filling meal than my hummus and vegetables from the night before. After dinner I got some ice cream and went to sleep a very happy girl.

My first road block of the day was for a sheep crossing. The second road of the day was for rock blasting. The road was closed for about 25 minutes for the rock blasting. I wasn't too concerned given the great view that we had while we waited, shown below.

Mt Cook/Aoraki National Park

I made it to Mt Cook National Park around 9:00 pm. Luckily, I had almost another hour of daylight to find my way around, put up my tent and eat dinner before it would get dark. The mountains were incredible with ominous storm clouds rolling in. The picture above shows the transition from blue sky to the storm clouds over the mountain glaciers.

I enjoyed the pink gravity wave clouds in the opposite direction as I ate my dinner. I had stopped at a grocery store before leaving Christchurch and I finally had an endless supply of fresh fruit and vegetables, cheese, crackers and hummus. After my delicious dinner, I crawled into my tent for the night. It wasn't long before the winds started to pick up. As the winds started to get stronger, I started to think back to all of the other tents at the campsite. As I was walking in, I realized that many people had positioned their tents almost inside of the bushes along the mountains. In about an hour, I realized why. The winds were so strong (Chinook winds) that my tent, metal poles and all, was collapsing in on top of me. At first I was worried about being blown away, then I realized that I weighed enough to prevent that from happening. Next I worried about suffocating, but with a quick push of my hand I realized that was not a problem either. So I rolled over in my sleeping bag and tried to dream up different ways of telling Tom that I had broken our tent.

At about 4:00 am the winds finally ceased and I was able to fall asleep. I woke up about 5:30 am to the sound of rain pounding on the walls of my tent. My initial reaction was to pull up the sleeping bag and go back to sleep. After about 20 minutes of arguing with myself about wimping out on a little rain I pulled myself out of the tent, found my raincoat and packed the wet tent into the car. I found my backpack, some breakfast and a towel to wrap my camera in and headed out on the Hooker Valley trail. (Sorry that the pictures are all washed out - I had forgotten to change my settings from Antarctica and I wasn't downloading my pictures to my computer along the way, so I didn't realize it).

The Hooker Valley trail follows the valley up to the end of the Hooker glacier and usually to an amazing view of Mt Cook. Unfortunately for me, with the rain and cloud cover the views were very limited.

I saw these duck-like birds on the trail. My guess is that there must have been a nest nearby, because they were not happy with me. I could definitely hear the birds squawking, before I could see them.

There were two sets of suspension bridges on the trail. Suspension bridges are very popular for both foot and vehicle bridges in New Zealand. I usually love bridges. I am not sure if it was the persistent downpour, the rushing glacier water or the warning sign, but I was a little hesitant to cross this bridge by myself (I had not seen anyone else on the trail).

Similar to the discussion that I had with myself in the tent, it only took a little convincing and I was across the bridge.

About an hour into the hike, I realized that the rain and clouds were not going to lift. Therefore, I enjoyed the creek and lakes that I was hiking by and eventually turned around. I headed into the visitor's center to dry off and get a cup of coffee. The visitor's center has a great display on the history of mountaineering. The majority of the Mt Cook National Park cannot be accessed without technical mountaineering skills. The Mt Cook National Park is about 175,000 acres, but only has about a handful of walking/hiking trails.

Before heading out for Te Anau, I hiked the Tasman Glacier trail. This is a fun little hike that ends at the base of the Tasman Glacier. The end of the Tasman Glacier can be seen in the photo above. The majority of the glacier base is covered in dirt. At the base, there is a little lake with icebergs floating in the center.

Here is my driving route:

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