the Autrian emperor, had a long white beard. Or so we are told, posibly facetiously, by our glacier guide to explain why explorer Haast named this long, tumbling grey-white river of ice in his honor.

The Franz Josef glacier (pronounced "glass-see-er" here, as in Britain, rather than "Glay-shur" as in the US) is one of the world's most accessible glaciers for climbers, tumbling steeply down about a kilometer in height over a 4-5 kilometer distance, if I remember correctly, which I may not, since it is therefore very steep and I had a blister. Basically, it falls faster than most glaciers, so even if it also melts faster, it achieves a lower altitude before the melting really starts to take over the game. Plus the amount of rainfall that New Zealand's "alps" scrape out of the warm, wet air off the Tasman Sea means that there's a tremendous amount of fresh snow added to the top "neve's" each year.

To get onto it, you pay your money and join a guided group, taking your choice of a variety of durations, helicopter-assist or not, and technical levels. I went with a moderate, full-day hike. Which was great, especially the first half. We met up at 7:30, were hiking up the terminal moraaine by 8:15, and I had my first blister burst by 8:45. (Everyone had to get a pair of official boots, which fit the official "talons" or crampons as we would call them, so inevitably they didn't fit as well as my carefully-selected hiking boots from home.)
I stopped to apply band-aids, nylon liners under my socks, and therefore missed some of the descriptive lecture which was delivered upon sight of the glacier by one of our guides, summarized above.

The Glacier is Big, Cold, and Popular might be a quicker way to sum it up.

So we carried on. Lovely views of waterfalls, rock-falls, the river of cracking ice beneath us and around us, and the distant serpentine twists of teh torrent of ash-grey water that pours out from beneath it, througyh the field of tumbled rocks carried down over time by both ice and water.

Blue caves -- a few small ones; blue crevasses; blue jackets on fellow walkers, bright red on our guide; fun.

Big steps cut and re-cut each day in the ice, bridges, ropes.

Heavy metal-shod feet, tired knees; pay no attention, aside from stepping carefully as any wise person would do, because there is nothing for it but to get down what we have got up.

So now I'm taking an extra day or two in Franz Josef, the little town at the glacier's feet, to rest those feet and knees, and paint what is remembered before it is forgotten.