More than a hundred glaciers are found in Mount Cook and together they cover 40% of the park. Haupapa/Tasman Glacier is the longest and largest of them and clearly visible even from the highway.

You’ll get an even better view of the glacier from the Blue Lakes and Tasman Glacier walks, which can be done individually but as the Tasman Glacier Lake Track branches off the Blue Lakes Track and each offers a different perspective of Tasman Glacier and its terminal lake – from a viewpoint on the moraine wall and from the lakeshore – it’s easy to combine them.

Glaciers are impressive in what they represent and the force with which these gigantic masses of eternal ice carve their eternal path into rock. But pretty they’re usually not and in fact quite unsightly looking, like large piles of discarded debris, covered with rock material in their lower reaches. Tasman Glacier does too.

The icebergs floating in the terminal lake (that is sadly a very fitting description of the death of a glacier), however, were of startling blue candy colour and some had drifted close enough to the shore for us to touch. A very brief touch, lest we contribute to the rapid melting of Tasman Glacier. It receded astonishing 3.7km from 2000 to 2008.