Franz Josef Glacier

The Franz Josef Glacier is one of the steepest and fastest-flowing valley glaciers in the world — at one point in its history it moved up to four metres a day. Today it has retreated significantly, with the terminal face several kilometres up the valley from where it stood in the 1980s, but it remains the most accessible glacier of its kind in the southern hemisphere.

You cannot walk on the ice unguided any more; the lower face is unstable and the Department of Conservation has closed direct access. The valley walk to the glacier viewpoint is still worth doing — about a 90-minute return on a flat track, with the river boulder-field giving a strong sense of the ice's recent reach.

For the actual ice, the heli-hikes are now the only option: a helicopter drops you on the upper glacier, you spend two to three hours on the ice with a guide, then fly back. It is not cheap (around NZ$650 in recent years) but the upper glacier is a landscape of blue crevasses and ice tunnels worth the spend. Operators run from the village.

things to do sight
A story
The glacier is named after Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria, by the German geologist Julius von Haast, who explored the West Coast in 1865. The Māori name, Kā Roimata o Hinehukatere — the tears of Hinehukatere — is older and more beautiful: a girl who lost her lover to an avalanche and whose grief froze into the river of ice.