Peaks and Places | Travel and Adventure Blog

As we continued down the West Coast, the next stops on our list were the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. Franz Josef is the first glacier and town that we came upon, and we spent two days in the area. The Franz Josef Glacier is about 7000 years old and is 5.5 miles (12 km) long. This glacier is still moving, and currently moves around 50cm a day, both advancing and retreating. The only way to currently make contact with the glacier is via helicopter tours, and while that was not on the itinerary this time around, I think it is something both Eric and I are interested in doing before our time in New Zealand is over.

The Franz Josef Walk to Glacier Viewpoint hike used to take you to the bottom of the glacier, but the Waiho River has since shifted and cur off access up the valley, so the hike now takes you to a view point along a boardwalk. It was still a very cool viewpoint of the glacier, and since it had been raining the few days leading up to our stay in Franz Josef, there were several small waterfalls along the mountain faces. It was at this view point that we made the decision to take a helicopter tour in the future, as well as do a longer hike to get to a better view point of the glacier.

The next little hike we did was the hike to Sentinel Rock. Sentinel Rock was a short and steady climb up to a lookout over the glacier, valley, and the Waiho River below. It was a tough little incline, but gave us a great vantage point of the area. It looped around to Peter’s Pool, but would take us to a different car park, which we would then have to backtrack back up the road to make it back to the van. We decided to walk back to the van from this point, drive to the secondary car park, and walk to Peter’s Pool from there.

Peter’s Pool Walk was a short and easy walk, but it was one of the prettiest views that we have seen so far. This short walk took us to a perfectly still kettle lake, which reflected back to us a perfect reflection of the glacial valley. It was probably a twenty minute round trip, and just over a kilometer in length.

We then did a short hike to the Tartare Tunnels, which used to transport water to a gold mining operation, and then was later used for hydro power. We took our headlamps, or, torches as they call them here, so that we could explore the tunnels. It was a longer hike than we were originally anticipating to get to the tunnels, and once we reached the tunnel itself, it was very long. We walked through in ankle deep water, which of course, was freezing. Both of us remembered to wear our Chaco’s, so while our boots were saved from getting wet, our toes were freezing by the end! We were rewarded in the depths of the tunnel with some glow worm sightings. While the second tunnel was closed, it was cool to get to walk through the entirety of the first tunnel, and read about the history of the tunnels themselves.

We spent the night at the Otto/McDonalds Camping area for the second night. We have big plans for the morning (to be read in another blog post coming soon), and wanted to be close by our planned car park!