Glacier Heli-Hike

                We arrived in Franz Josef on the eve of the supposed storm of the century and secured our tickets for the 12pm helicopter ride and glacier hike the next day. In fact, we were in the last group to be admitted to the glacier and then the heli-hike operation would be shut down for the next three days due to the expected snow storm. This was my first helicopter ride and was told that our trip might be cut short if the storm came in sooner than expected and they needed to evacuate the glacier – gulp!  

                The Franz Josef Glacier Guides company provided us with all of the necessary gear like crampons, hiking poles, boots, and snowsuits; so all we needed to bring was a swimsuit to enjoy the thermal pools after the hike, a bonus included in the purchase of your ticket to the glacier. Once we were in our gear we made our way to the heli-port which was a cleared section of the rain forest with rocky piles that constituted landing pads. Our seats were predetermined based on our weights and we piled into our helicopter accordingly as soon as it let out its cargo of hikers returning from the glacier. We put on our earphones and seatbelts and were ready to take off.

                The actual flight was not very long, less than 10 minutes from the heli-port to the glacier but what a flight it was! Flying over the opaque, opal-blue river made from glacier run off, being fed by fresh waterfalls cascading in long white strings down the sides of the mountain was a sight to behold. Then the glacier came into view, an immense expanse of icy-blue and white crinkles and cracks. This alternating pattern of massive chasms and towering shards of ice form as the ice moves over the underlying rock causing the glacier’s surface to fracture.

                Once on the glacier, we began our hike by first learning how to put on our crampons. We each had a bag slung across our shoulders that contained the metal spikes we needed to affix to our boots in order to walk on ice without slipping (well, slipping too much, it still happens, and frequently – according to our guide about 70% of the injuries they get there are from people tripping on their crampons and falling.) After properly applying crampons, we each got a hiking pole and set out to explore and learn more about the glacier.

                The Franz Josef glacier (F.J.G.) is unique in that the ice here is not very old. Some glaciers that have very shallow inclines can have ice that is thousands, or even millions of years old. The F.J.G. has a steep incline which makes it one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world; its ice is a mere infant at just 50 years old! As new snow is deposited at a glacier’s summit, the old snow is compacted by the weight of the new and turns into ice. The mountain’s incline allows this ice to slide further down the hill to lower elevation where eventually it melts as glacier runoff. This means that any snow that fell during this coming storm would find its way down the slope to the very edge of the glacier when I turned approximately 85 years old.

                Fortunately, as we explored this frosty terrain the storm did not launch an assault on us and we remained on F.J.G. hiking for a little over 3 hours. We climbed up sheer surfaces using steps cut from the ice with pickaxes, side-stepped through narrow canyons with transparent blue walls, and gingerly crossed crevasses holding our breath until safely on the opposite side. At one point, our guide had us all squeeze through a fissure so narrow that by the time I went through, 7^th out of 8 in our group, rivulets of water were running down the smooth blue walls from so many warm bodies pressed against it, exhaling steaming breath as they wriggled through the passage as quickly as they could for fear of getting stuck there.

                Eventually out time, we piled back into the helicopter and made our way back down the mountain. Once we had landed safely we expected the heavens to open and release the promised storm. However, the storm did not arrive; well, not that day at least. (It arrived the next day and we got snowed in with our RV and no snowchains – despite paying extra to have them included in the vehicle! But that’s another story for another blog entry.) Instead, we got to see THE CLEAREST view of the heavens we had EVER seen! Even though we were in town with lights all around us, that night the Milkyway was visible stretching overhead from one horizon to the other. We had seen the Mikyway before when we were in the desert in Namibia and had not a single light around to spoil our night vision. This was different; there were thousands of stars here that I had never had the privilege of viewing before! We were at a higher elevation now, above the pollution and fine dust particles from desert sand storms; we were witnessing what humans had seen for thousands of years before the industrial revolution. We were grateful; not only had the absence of the storm made our hike on the glacier possible, its absence granted us the beautiful gift of glimpsing the night sky as it was meant to be seen.