25|01|19, Franz Josef Glacier

Hi folks,

today we had the "Franz Josef Glacier" on our program. We would have liked to start our hike earlier, but our hiking day didn't start until 8:30 am, as we had to go to the information center first and find out if we could go hiking at all. Due to the bad weather in the last few days, the trails were closed until today, but we were lucky and were able to hike the trails again. Our track today was called "Alex Knob Track" and it was about 17km long, taking about 8 hours to complete.

We started the trail with great enthusiasm, but soon realized that the elevation gain of 1200m during the hike was not easy for us. To be clear, it was really tough!😅

At about 800m elevation, we were greatly disappointed because we were standing in the clouds and couldn't see anything anymore. No more view of the glacier or anything beyond 20m away. Well, we decided to turn around and go back to the car without having seen the glacier properly. However, the forest we hiked through was very beautiful, as it was a rainforest as you imagine it, with moss everywhere, tree ferns at every corner, and more...

To be honest, I was a little disappointed on the way down, so we decided to do the incredibly crowded hiking trail through the valley of the glacier right afterwards. Compared to our previous trail, this one was ridiculously easy, but much more spectacular, as we could continuously observe the glacier. In the end, we were able to walk all the way to the base of the glacier and had a very beautiful scenery in front of us. What was really interesting and at the same time shocking was the signage on the hiking trail, as it showed us how far the glacier used to extend. Compared to its current state, we can already speak of about 1km of glacier ice that has melted by now. Completely exhausted and with another great experience in mind, we went to grab something to eat! We went to a brewery where we spontaneously decided to have burgers, which was a damn good decision after about 18km of hiking, mainly uphill. Afterwards, we went to the campsite and quickly went to bed.

Tomorrow we will drive to the "Fox Glacier", another glacier nearby, but this time we will only take the easier hiking trail, as we both are already really tired.

Greetings from Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand!🇳🇿

Yours, Tim!😊