Thank God it’s Friday! The week’s been a frustrating one. Nothing seems to have gone right and many of the things I’d hoped to have achieved never came to fruition or are still works in progress. I’m hoping for a much better weekend and a more fruitful week next week. On the bright side, I’m still making progress with scanning old slides although that process has slowed down as a consequence of everything else. This brings me neatly on to the picture of the day, which I took on the 20th February 1999…

This is the magnificent Franz Josef glacier on the West Coast of the South island. The picture was taken from the helicopter that was taking Lynn and myself and a group of other people for a trip onto the middle slopes of the glacier as part of a heli-hiking experience – which was an amazing experience. Seeing a glacier’s magical enough, but having the chance to explore the surface of one is doubly so.

I returned with Dawn in 2019 and I was shocked by what I found (here’s a link to my blog written at the time) Due to global warming the Glacier had shrunk significantly, retreating further up the valley and down off some of the steep mountain sides. It’s a very visible testament to the damage human activity is doing to the planet. I sincerely hope we get our acts together in time to prevent the glacier disappearing completely.

I’ve a favour to ask…
If you enjoy reading this blog, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course (although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab!), but the revenue from them helps to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site – and right now (because of Covid), us freelances need all the help that we can get. Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website –  https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/

Thank you!