The Virtual Reinhard
Created | Updated Apr 20, 2006
The Face Of The Glacier
A Letter from the Franz Josef Glacier Part Two
We crunched up the classic U-shaped valley, the footing strewn with the ground-up pebbles of millenia of ice erosion. Slowly we approached the enormous tongue of glacier towered above us, filling the valley from side to side, and high above we could see tiny ant figures perched on the face, chopping away with large axes. These people, we were told, had already been chipping for hours in the steady rain, making our path up to the surface. Every morning they make a stairway, and every night the glacier fills it in again.
If you look very carefully at the picture of the face of the glacier (say about an inch from the bottom and an inch from the right), you can just about see one of these workers wearing a red jacket.
Our group paused to put on our 'ice talons', a kind of tourist crampon with a hinged centre that allows the leather boot of the wearer to flex more comfortably than with the professional climbing kind. Unfortunately, not just any leather boot will do; we had each been provided with a somewhat derelict pair of paratrooper boots, with gaping holes and ungainly repairs sewn up with string.
As somebody who had previous ice experience, I volunteered to be tail-end-Charlie for our group and we set off up the icy stairway. We soon realised that the state of the boots was irrelevent; the talons were great.
Up The Icy Staircases
Halfway up, we were introduced to our ice axes and then, as the rain stopped and the sun came out, we set off to explore our ice wonderland. The going wasn't especially hard for us, but the guides were certainly working up a sweat.They carried large double-ended picks with which they were continually swinging and chipping, grooming each ice-cut step to a standard that would - just - allow ten sets of ice talons to pass before it was completely destroyed.
Behind me, bringing up the rear, the leader of the next group began the same laborious process for the ten people behind him. In this manner, all the groups slowly worked their way up the face of the glacier.
Once at the top of the initial ice cliff, the groups split up, each guide picking (and chipping) a different path onto the glacier proper. There certainly were a lot of routes to choose from. The surface of the glacier was crisscrossed with crevasses, sculpted ice peaks, ice walls, and ice caverns with, here and there, a plank bridge to provide access to the next segment.
It would have been very, very easy to get lost because, at eye level, you could only see a few metres before the next turn or junction; certainly the other groups quickly disappeared from view as we set off down our chosen cleft. The only sign of them was the distant chip-chip-chip of the ice axes and the occasional flurry of static from the guide's hand-held radios as they checked in with each other and tried to ensure that groups did not meet in any narrow gully or halfway along some steep ice shelf.
Up To The Next Level
At around lunchtime, we finished climbing to what seemed to be the summit, only to find ourselves on a pile of median moraine with views of the next few miles of glacier, an even more complex and tumbled labyrinth, dotted here and there with the occasional glimpse of one of the other parties as they wound their way in and out of the sculpted tunnels.
After lunch, there was time for a quick foray into the tumbled masses above us, then we got stuck in to the long trek back down. And a long trek it was. As the five day groups and the several half-day groups converged on the only ice stair at the tongue, the narrow crevasses got very congested. The guides continually radioed back and forth and, even though most of the time we couldn't see further than a few metres, it was clear that all the other groups were very close by. Occasionally two groups would meet and have to work out some kind of precedence.
Even though the stair-dressers had clearly been chipping all day, once we got there the ice was melting with a vengeance under the combined onslaught of a day's sunshine and a glacier-full of tourists. The stairway was a cascading waterfall.
Standing in running ice-water and waiting for Imogen to chop away yet another piece of rotten ice, cold seeping through our soaking woollen socks, we began to wish that the guides weren't taking quite such good care of us and would let us take our chances; anything to take a few warming steps. Of course, they were doing the right thing, especially once we started to see some of the frail people up for the evening stroll; some couldn't manage to step from one rock to another (we wondered how they would ever cope over the snow bridges) and one guy was clumping across the fractured ice in talons with a video camera glued to his eye; absolutely crazy, as we were all clinging with both hands and full concentration to any available handhold.
The View Down The Final Stairway
Safe and sound at the bottom, we removed our talons and headed for warmth and beer. Of all the 'adventure' trips that we have done in New Zealand, this is the one that really deserves the name.
We were climbing in quite dangerous terrain and the guides had to be - and were - very, very professional; no larking about here. Imogen told us that to have Franz Josef on her adventure-guiding CV was the most respected experience that she could have. We were not at all surprised.
Stark Contrasts
