Touch ground when it thunders

Glacier/Copeland Track

This is bound to be kind of a long one, fair warning.

Thursday I went for a walk on the Franz Joseph glacier with a guide and 9 other people. You show up at the office around 7:30am and they outfit you with big clunky uncomfortable boots, Talonz (like crampons without the spikes on the sides) and a goretex jacket, then you all pile in a bus with your daypacks and drive 10 minutes to the carpark at the glacier. The aproach is about 4km through a rainforest and then a long rocky glacial valley by a river. Our guide's name was Astrid and she had a much larger pack and a full size pick axe on her back, oh and shorts, all the guides wear shorts. I think it's a macho thing. Once at the glacier you take your talonz out of the bag and strap them on your feet, they give each person an ice axe and it's up the glacier you go behind your trusty guide. Your guide and various other people wearing the same Franz Joseph uniform who've beat us to the glacier begin and continue to hack away at the glacier with their Pick Axe's. They carve steps in the glacier, they fill in cravasses with huge chunks of ice. They whack themselves shelves to stand on as the whack away at the glacier. It was a day of destruction and water, lot's of water. Extrememly cold water. The glacier can grow at up to a meter a day, and shrink even faster, not as slow moving as I'd always thought. We climbed up to the top of the second ice fall, (I'm still kind of unsure of what exactly that means) through various tunnels and cravass like openings and ice stairs and had lunch in a spot where you could look up and see the remaining 6km of glacier, or down the valley clear to the ocean. Stunning spot. Most of the guides go surfing when they get done whacking away at the glacier with big pick axes all day. Hiking a glacier's kind of like a giant ice stairmaster from hell, I think I went to bed at 7 that night. I can't imagine doing it with a pick axe.

The next morning we all (Chris, Peter and Kristian) got up early and caught a bus to the beginning of the Copeland trail for the 17km trail to the Welcome Flat hut where we'd spend the night. Some advice for anyone thinking about doing this, or any other hike in NZ. Bring big burly boots, as if you bring "light weight hikers" like I did NZ will shred them in a matter of minutes. I have 9 tears in my boots, oh well, it didn't really matter that much as I'll explain later. Also WOOD THINGS ARE SLIPPERY! DO NOT STEP ON THEM! Oh and bring twice as much chocolate as you could possibly think you'd want, and almost no clothes. Xtra clothes I mean.

The Copeland track starts with a river and continues up through the rainforest into the mountains along the copeland river. What I mean by it starts with a river is that you have to walk through the river, and 25 or so creeks and rivers on up the track. Big boots or not your feet are going to get wet as the 1'st river is about thigh deep. Why didn't we just take our boots off you ask? Well we did, but it turns out not to matter as the track is really a giant mud puddle and your feet are soaked within minutes even if you carried them across the river. Anyway the track is gorgeous if a little wet and we spent the day climbing up I don't know how many 1,000 feet over wet rock and across those cool suspended one person at a time foot bridges and things like that. My pack was far too heavy, as always. One day I'll learn. Once up at the hut there were 30 other people who'd all just done the same thing sitting around drinking and cooking noodles and rice on campstoves in the kitchen. The kitchen is a bunch of steel counter tops and 2 sinks to wash up in and a couple of picknick tables, you bring your own stove. 100 yards from the hut are natural hot pools with amazing red and green mud in them. We spent a lot of time in the hot pools that night. The next day we took small packs the 7km up to the Douglas Rock hut and back to Welcome Flat over some very rugged terrain and more rivers, in the rain. The views from Douglas are fantastic, or so we've been told as it rained the whole time and we couldn't see 10 feet. Good fun though, lots of laughs about how wet and scrappy we were. The morning after we walked back out to the beginning of the track again, in the rain. Ponchos work great by the way, I recommend them to everyone. Through all this I'm happy to report that I've only bruised my right elbow and my left knee (refreshingly, something on the left is not working) is a little jinky. Besides that just your usual blisters and such. Oh and I was sick the whole time, some kind of coughing, sneezing, fever thing. So by the time we got down the bottom on the 3'rd day to meet our bus, after 60km in 4 days up and down over rugged stuff we were all a little tired and beat up. This is where the adventure begins.

We were supposed to meet the bus at 5ish at the bottom of the track on SH6, the road. But we left a little early and got there at 2, so 3 hours to fight the 1,987,843 sand flies and go crazy. A couple of people from the hut were heading in to town and offered us a ride which we happily took, we'd just call the bus company when we got there and arrange a meeting in town. This isn't as sketchy as it seems, there's only one road, and the bus runs one way down it, and the town was before the track on the one road, so no problem right? Well we got to towna nd called Stray, the bus company who told us no problem just wait at the Ivory Towers hostel and the driver will pick you up there at 4. So we had a beer and some fries and then went and waited in front of the hostel in the rain for an hour. He never came, we called and said "hey where's the bus?" They said "He was there looking for you, you weren't there." We said "We were standing in front of the sign, the bus is bright orange, he wasn't here." They said "He says he was there . . ." We had an argument and got stranded in Fox Glacier for the night. Fox is just south of Franz Joseph, lots of glaciers. The Danish boys really needed to get on this specific bus, so we wandered around town asking people if we could pay them to drive us to where the bus was supposed to be. This isn't as hard as it might seem as the Fox only has 2 streets and 4 bars. Byt he 3'rd bar we'd found two guys who'd not only do it, but do it for nothing, only in the morning. Sid the trucker and Peter the sheep shearer. We bought them a bunch of beer and all got up 5 hours later to get into the back of Peter's Kia for the ride to Haast, where the bus would be. Here, for your enjoyment is an actual piece of conversation between Peter and Sid:

P: Hey Sid that's the Fucking beach over there mate.
S: Aw yeah? Isn't the bech fucking great?
P: yeah, except for when it's fucking raining like this fucking week.
S: well fuck that then!
P: Aw fuck, hey Sid that's the fucking Jacob's River.
S: Right, isn't that that fucking aussie wine?
P: No, that's fucking Jacob's Creek.
S: Fuck yeah it is!

I could hardly contain myself by the end of the hour and a half. We caught the bus and figured out what had happened, I'll tell you all later as my times almost up. I know this feels a bit rushed, but I'm scared if it's too long it won't post, etc.

On the hour and a half drive from Fox to Haast, on the only road, we saw one other car.

posted by jts @ 1:05 PM