Fox Glacier

Fox Glacier (Māori: Te Moeka o Tuawe; officially Fox Glacier / Te Moeka o Tuawe) is an 11.7-kilometre-long (7.3 mi) (2022) temperate maritime glacier located in Westland Tai Poutini National Park on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island. Like nearby Franz Josef Glacier, Fox Glacier is one of the most accessible glaciers in the world, with a terminal face as low as 300 m above sea level, close to the village of Fox Glacier. It is a major tourist attraction and about 1000 people daily visit it during high tourist season.

The glacier is known by local Māori as Te Moeka o Tuawe ('The bed of Tuawe'). According to oral tradition, Hine Hukatere loved climbing in the mountains and persuaded her lover Tuawe to climb with her. Tuawe was a less experienced climber than Hine Hukatere but loved to accompany her, until an avalanche swept him from the peaks to his death. Hine Hukatere was broken-hearted and her many, many tears flowed down the mountain. Rangi the Sky Father took pity on her and froze them to form the glacier now known as Franz Josef; the glacier now known as Fox marks Tuawe's resting place.

In 1857 local Māori led Pākehā Leonard Harper and Edwin Fox to both glaciers, the first Europeans to see them. In 1865, German geologist Julius von Haast was the first to explore and survey the glaciers at the head of this valley, and named them Victoria and Albert, after the queen and her consort. The Victoria Glacier kept its name, but the lower part of the Albert Glacier was renamed in 1872 after a visit by then Premier of New Zealand Sir William Fox.

Explorer Charlie Douglas had already visited the glacier himself in the 1860s, looking for a cow. "In those ancient days I did not pay much attention to the glaciers," he later wrote.

With the passage of the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998, the glacier's name changed once again to Fox Glacier / Te Moeka o Tuawe.

Fed by four alpine glaciers, Fox Glacier descends 2,600 m (8,500 ft) on its 13 km journey from the Southern Alps towards the coast, finishing near rainforest 300 metres (980 ft) above sea level. After retreating for most of the previous 100 years, it advanced between 1985 and 2009. In 2006, the average rate of advance was about a metre a week. In January 2009, the terminal face of the glacier was still advancing and its vertical or overhanging faces regularly collapsed. Since then there has been a significant retreat, with the 2009 high level clearly visible as vegetation line on the southern slope above what is left of the lower glacier today.

The outflow of the glacier forms the Fox River. During the last ice age, its ice reached beyond the present coastline, and the glacier left behind many moraines during its retreat. Lake Matheson formed as a kettle lake within one of these.

In an 1890s report on "Tourist Attractions in the Okarito District", Charlie Douglas listed several sights in the Fox Glacier area, including the view from Malcolm's Knob at the mouth of the Cook River. "If the road was cleared up through to Cook's [Flat] it would be an easy day's stage through to the Fox Glacier; one day would do that place, thence down to Malcolms Knob and Gillespies," he wrote. He also noted the road between the farming settlement of Weheka at Fox Glacier and Waiho to the north (now Franz Josef) was very poor. "…when I came through that way, I left the track and took to the bush as being far better walking." By 1903 it had been improved and Dr Ebenezer Teichelmann described it as a good horse track.