Franz Josef Glacier

Few glaciers anywhere come down as far or as fast as Franz Josef. It begins in a snowfield of about twenty square kilometres, more than 2,500 metres up in the Southern Alps and over 300 metres deep, and in just eleven kilometres it drops to about 300 metres above sea level, into a valley lined with temperate rainforest. That is the strange picture it offers: blue-white ice between green walls of rainforest, its snout less than twenty kilometres from the Tasman Sea. The glacier is about twelve kilometres long and up to 300 metres thick, and the Waiho River pours grey with rock flour from its snout.

The reason is the sheer amount of snow and rain: up to fifteen metres of precipitation a year falls on the névé, and that fast supply of ice pushes the glacier far below the snowline. It also makes Franz Josef unusually quick to respond to climate. It advanced several times in the twentieth century, most strongly between 1983 and 1999, when it gained more than 1.4 km, but it had already lost about three kilometres between 1893 and 1983, and between 2008 and 2017 it pulled back another 1.5 km. Every few decades meltwater trapped in the ice breaks out in a sudden flood down the valley.

Ngāi Tahu tradition calls the glacier Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere, the tears of Hine Hukatere. In the story her lover Tuawe was killed by an avalanche on the mountain, and her tears were frozen by Rangi, the Sky Father, into a river of ice. Since the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act of 1998 the glacier officially bears both names. The European name was given in 1865 by the German geologist Julius von Haast, after the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I. The glacier lies in Westland Tai Poutini National Park, part of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Area of south-western New Zealand.

Getting there

The township of Franz Josef (Waiau) lies on State Highway 6, about 5 km from the glacier; a sealed road leads from the highway to the valley car park, and the valley walk ends at a lookout well short of the ice. The larger town listed nearby, Timaru, is 132.8 km away in a straight line but on the far side of the Alps. The nearest airport is Hokitika (HKK), 106.0 km up the coast. Walks on the ice itself are made with guides who fly in by helicopter from the township's heliport.