Fox Glacier Guides
Fifty years of guiding, people, ice and West Coast grit.
Fox Glacier Guides is one of those rare New Zealand tourism stories where the landscape, the people and the business are completely inseparable.
I first filmed with Fox Glacier Guides around 2016, capturing the day-to-day reality of operating on one of the most dynamic landscapes in the country. Years later, I returned for their 50th anniversary celebration to help tell a much bigger story — not just of a company, but of a community of guides, families, staff and characters who built a life around the glacier.
This page brings together three connected films: an early operational story, a history of guiding on the West Coast with Mike Browne, and a 10-minute anniversary piece created for the Fox Glacier Guides 50th celebration.
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A business made out of a glacier
Fox Glacier Guides began in 1974, when Mike Browne saw the potential for guided glacier walks at Fox. What started as a small, rough-and-ready guiding operation grew into a significant West Coast tourism business, shaped by the glacier’s constant movement, the challenges of access, and the people willing to do the hard physical work of keeping trips running.
The story is full of change. Walking access to the lower glacier was once central to the business. Guides cut tracks, managed moraine walls, dealt with rockfall, floods and river crossings, and did whatever was needed to get people safely onto the ice. But as the glacier changed, the operation had to change with it. After losing lower-glacier access, the business shifted fully into heli-hiking — a huge operational and cultural turning point.
For me, that is what made this project so interesting. It was not just a pretty mountain film. It was a story about adaptation, memory, risk, loyalty and the strange magic of building a life around a moving river of ice.
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The history behind the ice
Before the 50th anniversary film, I also filmed Mike Browne presenting a wider history of guiding on the West Coast and in the Southern Alps. That film reaches back into the early days of New Zealand mountain tourism — from early alpine guides and government hotels, through to the road, bridge and transport history that made tourism possible on the Coast.
It gave the anniversary film a much deeper context. Fox Glacier Guides was never just a standalone tourism product. It sat inside a much longer New Zealand guiding tradition — one connected to Mount Cook, the West Coast, the Graham brothers, glacier travel, alpine craft, and generations of guides learning their trade in difficult country.
That historical layer helped the final work feel less like a company milestone video, and more like a piece of living archive.
Project snapshot
Client: Fox Glacier Guides / Alpine Guides
Location: Fox Glacier, West Coast, New Zealand
Project type: Documentary / brand story / anniversary film / oral history
Deliverables: Three connected video pieces for web, archive and celebration use
Role: Writer · Director · Cinematographer · Editor
Themes: Tourism, guiding, legacy, West Coast history, operational resilience, people and place
The 50th anniversary film
For the 50th celebration, the brief was to honour the people who built the business, without turning it into a polished corporate promo.
The heart of the film came through Mike and Carrol Browne, Marius, Rob and the wider guiding community. Their interviews carried the humour, hardship and pride of the place: the early days, the growth years, the guide culture, the accidents and close calls, the operational battles, the shift to helicopters, Covid, and the simple fact that so many people found lifelong friendships through Fox Glacier Guides.
The finished 10-minute piece was designed for people who already had a connection to the business — former guides, staff, owners, families and the Fox community — while still making sense to anyone interested in New Zealand tourism, guiding and West Coast history.
My role
Writer · Director · Cinematographer · Editor
Across these films I handled the filming, interviews, story structure and edit. The work involved shaping a large amount of oral history and operational detail into films that felt clear, human and emotionally true.
The aim was to preserve the voices of the people who were there, while giving the story enough structure for an audience to follow.
What the project needed
This project needed more than scenic footage.
It needed patience, listening, trust, and a documentary approach that respected the people in the story. The strongest material was not always the cleanest soundbite. Sometimes it was a laugh, an aside, an old memory, or someone quietly explaining how much the place had meant to them.
The challenge was to hold all of that without over-polishing it.
Why it matters
Fox Glacier Guides is a story about a business, but it is also a story about place.
It is about what happens when people commit themselves to a landscape that is beautiful, dangerous and constantly changing. It is about guides learning from other guides. It is about a small West Coast community adapting again and again. And it is about the value of recording these stories while the people who lived them can still tell them in their own words.
That is the kind of work I care about most: films that become useful now, but more valuable with time.