there and then that we were definitely going to do one! We arrived in Fox Village at 11.10 am and were booked onto the 12 noon heli-hike!!! We had a brief flap about whether we had done the right thing, then a mild panic about what to wear, and what we needed to eat etc!!! We got ourselves sorted out and we were back at the shop at 11.50 ready for our briefing at 12 noon. We were kept waiting as the pilots were double checking the weather patterns for the day, as there was a dark cloud looming and they wanted to be sure that we would have good weather for the next 2 to 3 hours. It was a nail-biting time as we were so looking forward to the heli-hike and hadn’t really considered that it may not go ahead. I guess at times like that you only really consider the weather on the ground and not what its like on the glacier, or what it will be like in 2 hours time - well I did anyway! After around 10 minutes we were told that we could board the bus and the heli-hike would go ahead. I was shaking with

excitement, I had never even been in a helicopter before never mind been hiking on a glacier! It was around a 10 minute bus ride to the heliport and when we got there we needed to get fitted with our glacier boots, which were a type of hob nailed boot complete with crampons which we attached when we were on the glacier! The boots were awful, they were stiff as a board and not very comfy, but we weren’t allowed to wear our own so we guessed we could cope with them for a few hours. The next stage was that we were spilt into groups, we were in group 5 and we had 6 other people in our group, who all seemed nice enough and were all very giddy about things. You could only get 6 people in each helicopter so we had to wait for what seemed like an age before it was our turn in the helicopter. The helicopter ride was only going to be around 7 minutes and I was hoping for a front seat as they generally put small people at the front! Sometimes there are definite advantages to being small! Next it was our turn and we