What's Cooler Than Bein' Cool? ICE COLD!: Hiking On Fox Glacier

Posted by Emily

As Nicki said, our trip to the glacier was amazing. It's definitely an experience unlike any other I have ever had. I may be from Minnesota, but I have never hiked around on such a large chunk of ice. When I was little I had some sort of educational book series that had a section about exploring Antarctica. I don't remember too much about it but I do recall there being info about hiking through snow and ice and sometimes people falling through the ice/snow into crevasses. Now, I never had the fear that I would fall into a hole, but it did make me think of an Antarctica-like landscape. Mountains and mountains of ice. At times when I stopped to think about and look at what we were actually doing, it was pretty crazy and would have been very dangerous had we not been wearing our crampons (the metal spikes). At times we were walking over very narrow ice ledges and down steep stairs where one wrong step could have sent you falling onto the hard-as-concrete ice. However, the crampons dug into the ice and kept us safe so we could enjoy the hike without being scared the whole time.

Before heading to the tiny glacier town, we headed to another small town called Hokitika, known for it's jade because of the close proximity of a mine. We were hoping that the jade there would be cheaper because of its nearness to a mine, but no such luck. We had originally planned to go to the town because it is possible to do your own jade carvings there, but when we looked into it more, the price wasn't exactly right. I for one decided that I didn't want to spend 8 hours sanding down a carving that would might actually end up costing more than one I could buy in the store and possibly look worse. Nicki still kind of wanted to do it I think but we ended up not really having enough time anyway.

Although there wasn't too much to do in the town, there was a beautiful beach to walk on. We walked on it a bit the night we got there but then the sun went down and it got entirely too cold. We went back the next day when the sun was out and walked for quite a while. I liked this beach because it wasn't the generic pretty palm tree, perfect turquoise water type of beach. It was more rugged with lots of driftwood, sea-smoothed rocks and crashing waves. Sometimes I like this kind of beach more because it's more unique I guess. In a way, it has more personality that the post card perfect beaches.