The Ice 2010-2011

Merry Christmas!

I hope that everyone has had a chance to enjoy the holidays with their loved ones. I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful Christmas with my family and friends. Now I am back in Boulder and ready to pack for another trip to Antarctica.

As you can see, the posts from my last trip can found below (after the New Zealand posts). This trip will include similar work on the automatic weather stations (AWS). I am very excited for our planned itinerary for this season. If all goes as planned, we should be spending a couple of weeks at a field camp located at the base of the Transantarctic Mountains and about a week on the icebreaker. Additionally, we are planning to install two new weather stations in the vicinity of the Sabrina AWS that Shelley and I installed in 2009.

This is a picture of the field camp with the Transantarctic Mountains in the background (Photo courtesy of a camp status report).

Arthur's Pass back to Christchurch

After the glacier hike, I took Arthur's Pass back to Christchurch. The pass has some great views and I could imagine some good skiing in the region during the winter.

Below is a picture of the bridge up Arthur's Pass. The little car was not very happy during this portion of the drive.

And that brings me to the conclusion of my trip. I hope that you enjoyed the pictures and stories.

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.