You can head to these magnificent monuments to nature’s power and beauty in high summer and feel winter closing in all around you.
These are eerie places, yet all the more arresting because of it. Often the only colour will be the brightly coloured ski jackets of a tour group – and that’s OK, this is ‘wonders of the world’ territory. And to view them becomes a pressing engagement: like glaciers everywhere, they’re in danger of melting, seemingly before our very eyes. Indeed, having advanced through the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, they then went into retreat again.
Somewhere in the region of 140 glaciers flow from the Southern Alps, but these two are the rock stars (sorry), great grey tongues of frozen ice and snow that have cascaded down the river valleys. Ironically, as glaciers go, their pace is actually fierce – about 10 times that of glaciers in the Swiss Alps, at anywhere between one to five metres a day. Nowhere else do glaciers come so close to the coast: few things are so visually captivating.
Which one to visit? The obvious answer is both. Franz probably pips in on the picturesque front, Fox you can get much closer to it. You can almost smell the ice.
That said, they need your utmost respect – people have died here, trying to get the ultimate selfie. Stay at Franz Josef village and if you’re feeling flush, opt for a heli tour and hover above them to get a real perspective, or land on the ice and be truly wowed.
Whatever way you view them, these are almost like prehistoric creatures, with full, slightly intimidating personalities. Just when you thought the West Coast had got as weird as it could, here be glaciers.
