Franz Josef Frivolities

Now for some really exciting stories! I've gone through the bus ride to Franz Josef and all that fun stuff so I'll just jump right into Franz Josef.  There's two parts, first there's the town and then the national park area.  The town of Franz Josef is really non-existent; it's one of those places that really only exists because of the tourism industry.  There's several hostels, motels, and camping areas as well as tourist shops, and one tiny supermarket.  The rest of the shops there are for booking scenic flights over the glacier or guided hiking trips on the glacier.  Since I'm a little stingy, I wasn't going to fork out the cash for those hikes, I was also traveling by myself so I didn't really think it'd be too fun for just me to do.  There are, however, a ja-billion and one hikes around the glacier that you can do, so I picked out a couple that looked like they'd be up my alley and planned out my two days around those treks.

I got into Franz Josef around 4/4:30 in the evening, and since the trailheads don't start in town I decided, in preparation for my big hike the next day, I would just hike out to the trailhead.  There was a semi-marked path to the trailhead from the town, but mostly it was just walking along the road and the river to the carpark of the trailhead.  I did get slightly side-tracked along the way and wandered up a small path that was near the town.  It was raining just a little bit, so everything looked extra green along the path.  It was fun to test out my new keens in the puddles along the path. 
After that I made it out to the road and walked along the river.  It had this kind of milky tint to it that's actually due to the sediment that comes off of the glacier.  Apparently, this river can also surge very quickly depending on glacial melt off and rain in the area.  I could tell that that info was pretty accurate because of how high the river was in comparison to the next day when I walked past it.  That trek out to the trailhead took about an hour and a bit round trip.  It was roughly 45mins out and the same back.  You can get a shuttle ride out to the carpark, but they cost about $20, and I didn't feel like I needed to pay that if I could just walk it instead.

 One of the native tree species in New Zealand are ferns, so there were tons of giant fern trees everywhere along the path, and one of the leaves fell just perfectly in my way.

 I spent my two nights in Franz Josef at the Youth Hostel there, which was extremely nice. It was a quiet hostel, and seemed to clear out pretty early in the day because everyone goes out to the glacier.  I left the next morning to do an 8 hour hike up to the Alex Knob lookout point at about 7:45am.  I knew that I'd need the 45 minutes to get to the trailhead before my real hike would even start, and since it had rained the day before, I wore about 3 layers of clothing and had my backpack full of delicious snacking foods.  The morning started out clear, but slightly cool, so I got to see the glacier from a distance for the first time.

Once I got onto the trail there was a split in the path, one led up to the Alex Knob lookout, which I was intending to do, and then there was another path that said it was only a 20 minute divergence from there to a small lake.  This lake is called--and I kid you not--Lake Wombat.  Although the lake part is a little generous: it's tiny. I was a little disappointed with the view; it ended with just a little bench, and no other view points to check out.  I sat down and had a snack before I started my Alex Knob trek.

The Alex Knob trek is just about as ridiculous as the New Zealand tramping treks get.  Remember my earlier post about the Chasm Walk, and it's crazy obstacle course trek?  Well this trek was probably even crazier than that one.  Part of that insanity would be because you're essentially climbing up a small mountain, and the path is a steep incline just about the entire way.  It's hard to describe what type of track you're climbing without having been there.

I love the clouds here--that's just a white band of cloud there

Most of the time it's really tough because you just have to focus on the ground: there are tree roots and rocks everywhere and the path was a
little muddy from the rain yesterday.  The hardest part about the climb up was probably the random points where the path would literally just jump up a couple feet, sometimes it was only 1 or 2, and you could easily step up without any help.  Then there were the steps that were 3, 4, even one point that was almost 5 feet up (which is about my height--I had to legitimately climb up that one), for those ones you had to kind of find steps up, usually they came in the forms of little mud ledges or a rock that stuck out.  It's not a path for the faint of heart--or weak of heart for sure.  There were times where I just sat down for a breather, and had to will myself to get up and keep moving up.  The further I got up, the heavier my bag seemed to feel.  Most of that had to do with the 2L bottle of water in there, so by the time I had drank most of it on the way down, my pack was a lot lighter.

This is the Rata L

There were several viewpoints along the trail, but the trail wasn't specifically marked so you never knew when you were coming up on one until bam! There was a sign saying: "Christmas Lookout".  Unfortunately for me, even though I started out what I had though had been fairly early, the clouds started to roll in around 10-11 o'clock, so the views started to get obscured and everything got a little damp.

Check out the glacier!!

The hike moves through a lot of different vegetation, first it was a sort of temperate rainforest, to a kind of smaller forest, then all of a sudden the trees complete just drop away and it's only tussock, and alpine grasses.  I never really got used to the idea that I was hiking through what's called a rainforest to go and see a glacier, that seemed like such an oxymoron to me.

I kept diligently climbing up, I saw a couple people coming down the path on my way up, and got a little worried, they seemed to have the right idea and I seemed to be coming up the mountain a little late for a good view.  The further I got up, the cloudier it got until I could barely see any further than the trees right next to the path.  It was only about 11 too!  I was peeved, but kept going, and crossing my fingers that it would clear up.  The hike up was made a little better because I had my ipod with me, and like the geek I am, was listening to the LOTR trilogy on the way up.  It was a good choice because now that I was tramping through the country it was filmed in, I actually felt like I could connect with the descriptions of the forests and the travelers' endless trek myself.  Once I thought I was getting near the top, though, I turned my ipod off and just sucked in the scenery and the feeling of going up, and up, and up.  It was crazy because I was hiking up this mountain, and then the forest fell away and the cloud that had been kept slightly at bay because of the foliage cover, suddenly became so immediate and calming.  The bad thing, about the cloud was that it obscured the top of the mountain, so I couldn't tell how far off I was.  Up near the top there was this added deceptive marker (on the left).  When I saw the first one I got really excited that I had reached the top, and then I got to the marker...only to see another marker in the distance.  I was so gutted!  I kept going and saw another 3 or 4 of these markers before I finally got to the top.  Once I got to the top, my heart was pounding, I couldn't see anything and I was super hot from the climb.  And you couldn't hear anything.  The only thing I heard once I got to the top was my own heartbeat.  It was one of the coolest experiences, even if I couldn't seen anything.

 I was absolutely stoked to have reached the top, and even though there was no one up there, I did a timer shot just so I could get a picture of me next to my goal.  As you can see from the sign, I'm 1303 meters up, which is about 8/10ths of a mile up.  There wasn't much else to see up in the cloud, so I sat down and had a victory lunch.

It was a protein packed lunch: gorp, orange, peanut butter and banana sandwich, some lipton ice tea, and I had had a yogurt with granola as a snack earlier.  I had just sat down and started to munch on my well deserved lunch when it a) began to drizzle, and b) another person appeared over the ridge.  I was quite surprised but it was cool to meet another person up at the top.  I can't remember his name, but he was from Germany and we sat down and traded chocolate for gorp.  We both just kind of sat there and chatted for a little bit, and then another two people came up to the top.  They were two guys from Belgium and sat up on the top with us for another 10 minutes.  It was about 12:30 when I got up to the top, and I headed down about 1pm, after the German had left, and before the Belgium guys took off.  The trip back down was a little easier in some aspects, but harder in others.  It was faster going down some parts of the trail that didn't have a whole lot of big steps.  Everything was a lot slipperier because of the mist.  Going downhill the whole time made it hard not to run, so it got really tough on my knees, especially when you got to those steps I was talking about on the way up: the 2-3ft ones you ended up jumping down, and the 4-5ft ones were really hard to climb down.  I actually slipped a couple times coming down the peak.  The most frustrating part of the climb down, though, was that when I finally got back out onto the road you could just see the glacier from a clearing in the clouds.

look, I'm so artsy!

 Curse you bad weather!  Luckily for me, the YHA had a free sauna so when I got back (about 4:30 in the afternoon) I just sat in the sauna for an hour and massaged my knees andeet.  I literally passed out in my bed that night too, but not before planning out my next day of hiking adventures.  I decided to do a half day hike out to the base of the glacier, and a couple short lookout walks along the way.

It was a good thing that the hikes I chose for the next day were short, and mostly on flat ground, because my knees were like death from the previous day.

 It was well worth the hike out to the base of the glacier though.  It was a beautiful sunny morning and the glacier was in fine form!  There were a lot of people out on this easy walk, and I passed old, young, groups, families, single trekkers, it was a great sampling of trampers out to see the glacier.



People might get sick of me saying this but: there are no words to describe the majesty, beauty, and scale of these places.  Everything is huge, beautiful, and awe-inspiring. None of the pictures I take see to do any sort of justice to how incredibly vast this place is!  And the colors!  There were all sorts of verdant greens, and browns, and even the grey of the mountains are indescribable.

There's not a whole lot I can add to explain these pictures.  You walk through a small bit of forest from the car park, and then it just opens up to wide valley with high cliffs of green vegetation clinging onto grey rocks on either side.  Down the middle winds the river that later runs by the road.  There are great waterfalls that tumble down the walls of the valley and form little streams that spill their runoff into the river.  The sun was so bright as you walked along the valley that it sparkled off the water and caused the mountains surrounding you to cast huge shadows on the valley floor.  All the time you can see the glacier in the distance, and it feels so strange to be walking in this warm valley toward a cool chuck of ice in the distance.

















You keep getting closer, and closer, and it feels like you might get to go right up to it when you reach the cheeky little signs that tell you it's dangerous to go any closer.  They have newspaper clippings of people who've died up next to the signs to scare you, and then of course the big "but" that you can go on the glacier, but only with a guide (aka a "spend some of your great tourist dollars here!" pitch).

Why yes, I did make it to the glacier.

How I reacted when I saw the "stop" ranger cut out.

The nearest viewing point of the glacier is about 500m away from the edge, but it still feels close.  You get a good view of the ice receding up the mountain, and the river flowing from the bottom of the glacier.

 These few photos are a pretty good view, from a distance, of the glacier.  It's just....wow.  There's really not much I can explain about how epically amazing it is to see these places in person.  This picture on the right I took with the vivid color option on my camera, and it really is that kind of crazy green.  The one below was just a normal setting, but you can still see just how green and wild it all is.  I can't get over the beautiful settings New Zealand has!

Finally, this is one of my favorite pictures I've taken on my trip thus far.  On one of the paths to the glacier lookouts I hiked to on my second day, there was a kettle lake (a glacial lake left from melt-water in a hole the glacier scooped out as it receded).  It's slowly drying up, but it's a reflective pool that's been there since before the first Europeans found and documented the glacier.  There were some photos as part of a display next to the pond showing how it looked back in 1890s, and it looks like almost the view from the pond.  I just think this looks so majestic and beautiful that it almost looks fake.

Really, how much better does it get than this?  Well wait until you see the Milford Sound pictures.