I’m in Franz Joseph at one of three tropical Glaciers on the Planet. The second one is called Fox Glacier and it is only about 30 miles up the road and the last one is in Argentina. This glacier is special because the bottom of it is only about 600 feet above sea level, it’s about 20 miles from the sea, and you can walk on it in shorts.

Getting to this Glacier requires walking through the jungle (seriously). It’s the weirdest feeling, but it’s truly special to run around on a glacier in shorts. But HOW you ask? The top of the mountain range (where the glacier starts) is the WETTEST place on earth! On a good year they get 40 METERS of Snow, not feet, METERS! The record is 80 METERS! That’s so much snow converting to ice that the ice river (glacier) remains there at the bottom (in the jungle). This is a topographer’s wet dream. This is such a unique place from a weather and topographical standpoint.

The guide service gave us boots and thick wool socks, but we didn’t need the extra optional gear that they offered were an over coat and thick pants. We had Crampons for the ice portion of the hike which is spikes that easily strap onto the bottom of the boots. The whole time I was completely comfortable.

As hard and tedious as mount doom was, Franz Joseph Glacier was easy. When you had the spikes in place, it was nearly impossible to lose your footing. The ice and the spikes were make for each other.

Our guide was a surly English man named Brent who didn’t take shit from no one J He was equipped with a full sized mining pick ax for clearing ice and maintaining paths. As he made his way up the glacier he would radio down to the rest of the guides, scolding them for their inadequate jobs of maintaining the paths. You could tell that he was the boss. This was his glacier and if anyone wanted to remain on it for any amount of time, one had better stick to the program.

I’ve taken some video of him clearing trails on the glacier but I didn’t talk because I don’t think that I was allowed to take the film in the first place while we were walking on the ice. He won’t ever find out though, but I apologies if the movie is boring because it lacks my beautiful voice.

Tomorrow I head to Queens Town, the “G-Spot” of New Zealand. Apparently it’s like a coke rush mixed with an extreme sport orgy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.