Rainy Day at Fox Glacier

Fox Glacier is one of the two small communities build around glaciers on the otherwise very unpopulated West Coast of New Zealand. This area is largely rain forest, with glaciers coming down from the mountains, because the area receives 4 to 5m of rain a year, rain that develops on the east coast of Australia, travels across the Tasman, and then dumps itself on the land before the Southern Alps.

We picked Fox Glacier, as opposed to Franz Josef, which is slightly north of Fox, because we heard that it was much more of a little alpine village than Franz, and also slightly smaller and hence less touristy, although you aren't going to get away from that much, since the towns are solely there for tourist purposes.

Fox is very tiny, consisting pretty much of one main street, one general store, a few motels, a hostel, and the Alpine Guides. It's a cute little town, but people generally only spend 2 nights there so they can do the glacier hike and then leave.

Quick Tips:

Definitely, definitely book in early to any accommodation that you plan to stay in. Because the town is so small, everything books up very quickly. You'll want to book your trip in and trip out on separate days to when you are doing the hike, just to give yourself maximum flexibility for which hike you want to do--a 6-hour hike won't give you much time for transportation on either end on the same day. Plus, Fox is a long way from anywhere.

Don't totally set your hopes on hiking on the glacier. If you want to make sure you get on the glacier, you might want to book a bit of leeway into your trip--we ended up not hiking on the actual glacier because it was raining on the day, and we couldn't stay any longer because there were no vacancies in the Ivory Towers. Even if you don't get to hike on the glacier, Alpine Guides still offers the Terminal Walk in all weather.

You'll want to make sure that you have everything you need when you get to Fox. There is one general store and one small restaurant to the town, and they are both ridiculously overpriced, so you'll want to stock up in Greymouth or wherever else you are arriving from at the grocery store so you can cook at your accommodation.

Best Way To Get Around:

You can easily walk across Fox in maybe 5 minutes, it's that small. If you would like to make your own way to the glacier or to Lake Matheson, you can rent a bicycle and its a bit of a bike, but manageable.

To get into Fox from either the north or the south, bus lines are your best bet if you don't have your own car. We took Intercity from Greymouth and to Queenstown without any problem, and Atomic Shuttles also runs through Fox.

There was not much choice for accommodation at all in Fox Glacier, which is not surprising, given the size of the town and the fact that the town is solely based around the Alpine Guides glacier hikes. Therefore, I cannot say it enough--if you want to stay in Fox at all, you need to book early. The hostel goes especially fast, being the cheapest place to stay in town.

We weren't sure how this hostel would turn out, since they kind of have a captive market and could really be low quality and still get huge business. Luckily, this wasn't the case at all. They were very efficient at getting us checked in, even though it seemed everyone arrived at the hostel at once on the Intercity bus.

Our rooms were very nice, four bedrooms with a big window and plenty of space for all of our junk. They were much more colorful than any of the previous rooms we had had in other hostels; the walls were bright yellow and the bedspreads were purple with lots of different colors. There are many different sections of the hostel, and our section had three or four rooms, a bathroom, and a central meeting room. The central room was a nice place to hang out with other people who were stuck inside because of the rain, and we enjoyed watching Lord of the Rings and pointing out how many of the places we had seen so far.

The kitchen area was huge, probably due to the fact that many more people were cooking because of the lack of options in Fox itself. It had everything we needed and plenty of room to cook, eat, and lounge about. Just off the kitchen was a room with payphones and a couple internet terminals.

The beds here were around $24NZ, so slightly more expensive than other hostels. I don't remember if they have BBH discount, because we weren't members, but they have a very good website at http://www.ivorytowerslodge.co.nz .

This cafe was one of the, that we counted, two places that serve food in Fox. We ended up here for a good portion of our day because our glacier hike was cancelled. We went into the cafe, conveniently just across the street from the Alpine Guides, just to grab a cappuccino to ward of the tiredness/keep the chill out of our bones from the constant rain.

It ended up that we didn't just grab the cappuccino, but we had coffee and stayed for the majority of the morning. The cafe has a nice atmosphere around it, since it's one of the few congregating places in Fox, and it was very bustling the morning we were there because there were plenty of stuck hikers. Not only did we have a great conversation with our roommate, a British backpacker, but we ended up having a decent conversation with what seemed to be half the restaurant about what else but what the Americans thought about their country's policies.

It was really one of the first times since we left our friends in Wellington that we had a really good chance to sit and talk with other people, including locals, and we really quite enjoyed that. Plus, the coffee was good and it was a nice place other than the hostel to while away the morning while we were waiting for our terminal walk in the afternoon. I didn't have much of the food, other than a taste of the croissants, but I did enjoy the coffee, which is good, it being a cafe!

We ended up doing the terminal walk, which takes you to the face of the glacier but not actually onto the glacier itself, because it was pouring rain,. This caused rockslides, so you couldn't actually get onto the glacier without possibly being smashed by large rocks. We felt this was the slightly safer option... or really the only option, since they weren't offering anything else our day.

In regards to this, it rains a lot in Fox Glacier, so be prepared. They get something ridiculous like 4 to 5m of rain a year, which they blame all on Australia. It rains probably 300 days a year, so they are used to the whole "rain out because of rock slides" thing. From what I am aware, they don't cancel hikes all the time when it is raining, only when the current way onto the glacier is near the ground and below cliffs. They were very good about giving us the difference between our booked walk (all day on the glacier) and the terminal walk.

This walk took us through rain forest to get to the glacier, which would be surprising if you didn't already know how much it rained on the West Coast. We packed on layers and layers of clothing, including raincoats, but as soon as we made our way into the rain forest, we got very warm very quickly. So make sure you have layers and not just one thick coat. Other than the layers, they give you everything you need--the hiking boots, gloves, etc.

The guides were really quite good and definitely knew what they were doing and knew how to impart information to you, so we learned quite a lot.

The hike involved going up some pretty steep inclines and walking across rather narrow ledges, so it's not for the faint of heart. Oh, and I definitely recommend taking a fair bit of water, because you'll be savoring the few breaks the guides give you. It's worth it though, once you get to the actual glacier, which was really quite amazing. We couldn't get too close to it, for fear of the dirt cliffs breaking apart and us becoming part of the rock slides, but we took a fair amount of time there.

Then we walked down the cliffs we had just climbed up and ended up at the base of the glacier, where all the water rushes out. This part was really cool because we could walk up to the water and take out ice chunks, or we could just wait for the guide to wield his icepick and get us a huge chunk of ice of our own.

While it was disappointing that we couldn't do the actual glacier hike, this was a good consolation prize and I would recommend it for the people that don't feel they have the endurance or wish to climb the actual glacier, because it's a good workout and very worth it to see the glacier up close.

We decided that since we didn't get to do the full-day hike of Fox, and our Terminal Walk only lasted approximately 3 hours or so, that we needed to make the most of our day and get the exercise we would have gotten had we hiked on the glacier all day. So, we gave in to my friend's begging and rented three bikes from the hostel, at a pretty decent rate (I think we got them for $7 once we got our deposits back?). Then, we took off down Cook Flat Rd, which is just past the Alpine Guides building and to the left, when coming from Ivory Towers.

We definitely did not realize how far 12km on a bike was (the return journey being sadly, slightly uphill) at the outset. If you have a rental car, it might come in very handy here. Two of our friends from the hostel actually walked it, which took them a good portion of the afternoon.

When we finally finished the first 6km and made it to the lake, we had to walk through forest for another 30 to 45 minutes until we got to the actual viewing point. This viewing point is where all the postcards that you see all around New Zealand have been taken from--when you look across the water, you are supposed to see Mount Cook and Mount Tasman towering, and their reflections in the water. We saw... none of that. My best advice for this is: if it's been raining all day and its kind of foggy up in the mountains, don't go to Lake Matheson. Apparently it's beautiful otherwise, and a very cheap and scenic trip, but we just saw a lake and a few hills with fog in between them. It was still a nice trip, but we didn't quite get the reward we were looking for at the end of it (and then we had to bike 6k more uphill!).