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A 20-hour visit to Aoraki-Mt Cook National Park during Easter 2008

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Author Topic: A 20-hour visit to Aoraki-Mt Cook National Park during Easter 2008  (Read 8670 times)
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #75 on: February 09, 2009, 04:25:44 pm »

After about fifteen minutes on the ice, we climbed aboard the skiplane and took-off, then flew across the adjacent ridge into the upper Douglas Valley, and there it was — the hidden side of Mount Sefton and the awesome Douglas Glacier. This glacier has a huge névé on the southern flanks of the Sierra Range and the western face of Mount Sefton, and an icefall that consists of a massive vertical cliff varying between 3,000 and 3,500 feet high along its three-kilometre length, over which thousands of tonnes of ice at a time avalanches, to explode into the valley down below, then reforms as a glacier and continues to flow down the valley for another three kilometres before melting into a terminal lake. The continual ice avalanches also set off massive rock avalanches from the other mountain faces around the head of the valley, and all of this rock is carried away by the lower section of the glacier. The ice you can see on the névé in the photographs of the Douglas Glacier is more than 100 metres thick.



Flying past Blizzard Peak (with the Horace-Walker Glacier just out of sight to the left of the picture); with the Douglas Glacier névé and Mount Sefton (partially obscured by the skiplane wing) coming into view in the centre of the photograph at 11:13am on Easter Monday, 24th March 2008.

Flying past Blizzard Peak (with the Horace-Walker Glacier just out of sight to the left of the picture); with the Douglas Glacier névé and Mount Sefton
(partially obscured by the skiplane wing) coming into view in the centre of the photograph.
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