We need to be in Queenstown Sunday afternoon to get ready to leave for the Milford Track hike Monday morning. Because the drive from Hokitika to Queenstown is 9-10 hours, we decided to take it in a more leisurely two days by stopping in Haast, the last town accessible from the main highway on the west coast of the South Island. There is still a good deal of west coast south of Haast, but it is inaccessible by car.
The main attraction on the drive to Haast are two glaciers just in from the coast: the Franz Josef glacier and the Fox glacier. Because getting close to it requires a longer walk, the buses do not stop at the Franz Josef glacier so that’s where we decided to go.
These glaciers exist because when the moisture laden air coming off the Tasman Sea has to get over the high (10,000+ foot) mountains just in from the southwest coast, much of the moisture becomes rain, on the coast, or snow, higher in the mountains. The glaciers then push their way down off of the mountains into the tropical rain forest that is at sea level. Quite a combination!
The photo below shows the top of the Franz Josef glacier. 
The photo below shows the glacier’s leading edge as we walked up to it. The gravel in the foreground was dropped as the glacier has receded over the years – a century ago, the glacier filled this entire basin and extended out into the ocean.
The photo below shows what I actually found most interesting about seeing the head of the glacier up close. Here you can see the large hole out from which flows a river of water that runs under the glacier.
There were many other things that caught my eye as we walked to and from the glacier. Below are two photos of, what I thought was a beautiful waterfall coming down the side of the valley leading to the glacier. Since the stream that feeds these falls runs through a tropical rain forest, the water in these falls is not ice cold. So, on a warm day (but not this day), you can see people frolicking in the spray from these falls with the glacier in the background.
I found the people photographing the glacier, or themselves with the glacier as a backdrop almost as interesting as the glacier itself.
Continuing a theme that I started several days ago, below are two shots of lichen and other small plants that caught my eye.
Finally, I was struck by how the roots of the small tree shown below found, and then opened further, a crack in this large boulder and now draw sustenance and support from it.
Continuing south, the road snaked over a number of ridges. Between each pair of ridges was a flat, fertile river floodplain that invariably supported a few cattle and sheep stations. This church appears to be the center of one of these small communities.
Next to the church, I photographed the gorgeous red-orange flowers, shown in the photo below, which we had seen repeatedly along the highway.
The shot that I will leave you with is of a fence and field next to the church that caught my eye.
