One thing about New Zealand weather is it's changeable nature. The various mountain ranges cause a vast difference in weather patterns within a few kilometres. These two photos below are a good example. The first is taken near the base of Franz Josef, looking west as the river winds its way out to the Tasman Sea. You couldn't ask for prettier blue skies.
I don't much like that there are a bunch of tourists in my photo (just as I'm in theirs!), but they do give a sense of scale; showing the size of this flat, broad valley that is typical of one formed by a glacier. Valleys caused by rivers are V-shaped.
Here we have one last look back at the glacier before taking the trail back to the carpark. There was a bit of a storm brewing over the mountains, giving us the push needed to get back on our journey south. The stream in the foreground is from the waterfall you can see on the left of the photo above. Notice that it's your standard, clear water and not the milky colour of the glacial river shown above.
Franz Josef used to fill the valley as far as the scrub line in this photo. As you can see, it's receded quite considerably. But before you go all 'global warming!' on me, the glacier has gone through several periods of growing and receding over the past 260-odd years.
In 1750 it filled the valley well beyond where the river disappears around the corner in the top photo and over the next 150 years, it slowly shrank back to the scrub line. From around 1910-1990 Franz Josef experienced a roughly 20 year cycle of advance and retreat. In 2000 it advanced significantly, to about as far as you can see in the top photo.
I remember a time when you could put a stick in the ground at the base of the glacier at the start of the day and by night the stick would be swallowed up in ice. Franz Josef may be a shadow of his former glory, but he's well capable of marching his way back down the mountain. He's done it before.
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