The Grand Traverse Flight Over The Southern Alps

A journey of glacial waters

A couple of minutes behind the larger aircraft, our little but surprisingly spacious plane takes off and glides over the blue waters of Lake Tekapo feeding into the power station, gaining height until we get the most magnificent view over Lake Tekapo itself. Leon gives commentary about the main sights throughout the flight, telling us about the Mount John Observatory that we were lucky enough to stargaze from just the other night. As we move up the lake, our eyes are met with the contrasting colours of the dark blue lake and green farmlands of the MacKenzie Basin. It is the fine rock flour produced by glacier grinding up rocks that feeds into the lake and gives it this unique blue colour. An example of this couldn’t be more evident when we reach the beginning of the lake where there is a dramatic change of dark blue turns an opaque turquoise where the rivers feed into the lake. Those rivers themselves can only be fully appreciated from this aerial view. Patterns are created in the flat valley where a whole network of rivers braid in and out of each other. We follow the 2km-wide Godley River into the heart of the Southern Alps.

From water to ice

At first, the peaks of the Southern Alps only have a dusting of snow and our first glimpse of glaciers leading into seemingly small terminal lakes. The more we fly, the more dramatic this alpine landscape becomes until we reach peaks permanently engulfed in snow – snow so compacted that we can see huge ice cliffs of the neve of much larger glaciers. At 16km long, the Murchison Glacier is the first of New Zealand’s giant glaciers that we see. It flows parallel to New Zealand’s largest glacier, the Tasman Glacier at 29km long. The glacier is so long and seemingly flat that it really does look like a river of ice.

Bluer than blue waters in Lake Tekapo

Crossing over to the wild side

Crossing The Divide, the line of mountains that splits the east of the South Island from the West Coast, marks the moment when we get an overload of stunning mountain features. Between taking photos and watching the captivating views with your own eyes, it’s so much to take in. Notably, the West Coast is much cloudier than the east showcasing that famous wet weather the West Coast is known to have. With that, we see the dark green rainforest at the bottom of the snowline along the West Coast. Framed by cloud but perfectly in view, we fly above the top of Franz Josef Glacier and the Fox Glacier – an extremely special moment considering these are glaciers most backpackers explore from a completely different perspective down on the West Coast, whether it’s hiking on a glacier or walking to their terminal face.

A bumpy ride

Despite the rugged snowy mountains that we can see layers and layers of in the distance rising every year, their ruggedness also shows how the elements weather them down. The elements is also something our pilot has to deal with as we have a few bumpy sections of the flight. When some sort of siren goes off in the plane, we have a moment when the camera and the views don’t matter anymore… We freeze for a second, until the Leon sorts out whatever that was and we can assume we are safe… Phew! Although we’ve done a fair few skydives in New Zealand, we don’t think we are ready to go it alone yet.