Combination of Unique Features.

Debouching out of one of the two greatest snowfields in the Southern Alps—the Fox flows out of the other, which adjoins—the Franz Josef descends over 8,000 feet in the comparatively short distance of eight and a half miles to as low an altitude as 692 feet above sea level, and to within ten miles of the open sea, factors which make it easily accessible to all, and which are so unusual as to be non-existent outside the Arctic and Antarctic circles. Glaciers descending to such freakish levels may be found in the Polar regions, but not within such a short distance of the ever-open sea. The Franz Josef, again, is specially notable for another outstanding characteristic which they do not and cannot possess, and that is that, for a great part of its length, it plunges thousands of feet into the most luxuriant subtropical vegetation to be seen in any part of the world, into sylvan glories which only South Westland can show…. Walled in on both sides by towering and permanently snow-clad ranges that reach up into the sky, “The Franz,” as this superb creation is affectionately termed, has additional claims to renown. One of these is that, unlike the vast majority of other glaciers, it carries so little moraine (disfiguring mountain debris carried down by the ice), as to be almost free from it down the whole of its surface, white ice even being seen in its terminal face; another is that, owing to its precipitous descent, it is one of the most broken glaciers in existence, being punctuated down the whole of its trunk by yawning crevasses and enormous ice-falls in which giant pinnacles, 100 and 200 feet high, appear in the most jagged and fantastic shapes. It is this remarkable grouping of rare features, and with each of them in its most pronounced form, that makes the Franz Josef the marvellous thing of beauty it really is.