Fox Glacier and the Beach

After spending the morning at Franz Josef Glacier on Day 5, we headed about 25km south back to Fox Glacier for the afternoon. But before doing the glacier itself, we headed to a great picnic spot south of the town of Fox on an unsealed road for lunch. It was beautifully sunny and warm there, in the picture with the picnic field in the foreground and the cloud-enshrouded Fox glacier in the background.

What's hard to overstate about the West Coast experience is how close the mountains and glaciers are to the shoreline. No more than 10 miles away from the frozen ice of Fox Glacier is Gillespies Beach (apparently no apostrophe needed), further on down the unsealed road. We cooked ourselves in warm sunlight, right under the hole in the ozone layer, dipped ourselves the very blue Tasman Sea, and then headed back up to the glacier later in the afternoon, all of which is pictured here.

Back at the glacier, we got another rainstorm, which we waited out for about 2 hours before the short hike up to the ice (though as the pictures show, it was still cloudy). Again, you can walk right up to the glacier's terminus unguided, and the cool thing about this one is the gaping mouth of the huge river it spawns. That river, the proximity to the coast, and the blazing NZ sun notwithstanding, the glacier can still grow because of the huge amount of precipitation delivered by the volatile coastal weather.

At the end of the day, it was off to Lake Matheson for sunset views of Aoraki, a restaurant-cooked meal on a dusky porch, and then back to Franz Josef for the Subaru Disaster.