A helicopter glacier landing in New Zealand

The helicopter lifts from the valley floor at Franz Josef or Fox and within minutes the temperate rainforest below gives way to something that belongs to another climate entirely. The Southern Alps rise fast off the West Coast, and the glaciers pour down between them almost to the treeline, a geography compressed enough that you go from dripping ferns to blue ice in the time it takes to gain a little height. Then the machine settles onto the neve, the rotors wind down, and the doors open onto a silence that is total and faintly disorienting. Where the blades were there is now only the tick of cooling metal and, every so often, a distant crack as the ice shifts somewhere below you. Underfoot the snow is firm; around you the glacier is not the flat white you pictured but a broken country of seracs, meltwater runnels and crevasses shading from milk to deep cobalt where the ice is old and dense. This is access, purely and simply. No road reaches here, and the walk-up routes that once let people climb onto these glaciers from below have largely closed as the ice has retreated and grown unstable at its snout. The helicopter is now the honest way in, and for a short spell on the snow you stand somewhere almost no one on foot can reach, with the peaks of the Alps stacked white to every side and Aoraki Mount Cook not far off. It is entirely weather-dependent, and the West Coast makes weather with real enthusiasm. Landings scrub at short notice for cloud, wind or fresh snow, so build spare days into the itinerary and take the flight the moment it is offered rather than holding out for a better slot. Dress for winter even in high summer: it is warm and green in the valley and freezing on the ice a few minutes above it.