My first encounter with a glacier, in this case Franz Josef, named after the Austrian Emperor at the time it was first sighted by a European, summoned an emotion that I think has only just been recognised as one: awe. Despite its dirty terminal face, the sheer scale and presence of the “retreating” ice river created in me a desire to laugh, which I guess is how I express this particular emotion.
The following day (8th January 2009 – Happy New Year btw) we walked up to the terminal face of Fox Glacier and I broke the rules and jumped over bits of water here and there to get pictures that turned out disappointing because there was no sense of scale: tens of metres could have been a few feet because nothing in the picture put it into perspective. While there, I heard the glacier crack and thought I might get good pics of an ice fall in the rain but got wet waiting and left. Subsequently, we discovered that the part I was photographing collapsed and killed two guys about four hours later. Fox glacier: fatal.
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